Just added small tweaks to this site’s design. From now on, non-news posts (like this very post) will occupy a single, wider column. Same thing with Pages as well. These tweaks are made to give original articles more prominence within this design, and hopefully these can push me to write more of them in the future.
Come take a look if you’re reading from your trusty feed reader. Comments are open, your thoughts and feedbacks are greatly appreciated. Thanks!
Hey guys (and gals)!
I’ve been away for too long doing various other responsibilities and bam, what do I know, it’s been two months since I last updated this place. No good. So to bring everything back to our regular post activities again, I’ve redesigned this blog as a start. If you’re reading this from your favorite news reader, be sure to visit the blog and let me know what you think about this new look.
Design-wise, I’m using a minimalistic approach here after a much more image-heavy redesign of my other blog. I’m using the inline-block display on the CSS for the neat two columns look on the content area. This also means that it won’t look as intended on Internet Explorer 6 and 7, but I’ve long abandoned support for 6 on this blog and you deserve a better browser than IE7 anyway, so that’s that.
Content-wise, everything should stay the same. By default most of the posts will have the comments closed, with some exceptions (like this post). Also, if you still want to let me know about something, the contact form is the way to go.
Anyways, it’s nice to be back again. I hope you can all enjoy some more bite-sized WordPress news, like always, made just for you. Cheers.
If you’ve been playing with the Sandbox theme’s code, you will notice that within the theme’s sidebar files you get to see lists classed as “xoxo”. Even more curious, WordPress’s Template Tag wp_list_bookmarks also adds this class by default to its output.
So what is XOXO?
XOXO is a simple, open outline format written in standard XHTML and suitable for embedding in (X)HTML, Atom, RSS, and arbitrary XML. XOXO is one of several microformat open standards. (Source)
So basically it’s one of the microformats specifically used to display lists and outlines. The purpose of it, as is the purpose of microformats in general, is to be
a set of simple open data format standards that many are actively developing and implementing for more/better structured blogging and web microcontent publishing in general (About Microformats).
Now there you have it.
It’s a little feature, but I believe it to be a great usability practice: If you go to Manage > Post, and you click the “Write” navigation tab, it will open the Write Post area (obviously). However, if you are on the Manage > Page at the moment, the “Write” tab will take you to the Write Page area. Last one, if you are on Manage > Links, guess what the “Write” tab will take you to? Right, the Add Link area. This effect also happens when you go from Write to Manage area.
It’s small and barely noticeable, but I love the attention to details.
Basically, a script is added so that if a visitor comes from Google, she will then be redirected to another search engine. Here’s the exploit explained further. WordPress.org Support Forum moderator Moshu mentioned that:
If you read the posts above – it is always older versions and not 2.5.1. That’s the point. People don’t upgrade = get hacked.
Nevertheless, some users also insist that this also hits 2.5.1 blogs as well. An explanation could be that the exploit has been done prior to upgrade, so that even after upgrading to 2.5.1, the damage has been done. But then, forum user tijja reports that:
Nope…I can see from my traffic when I was hacked. It is pretty easy to see when I had a drop of over 1000 people a day and it was last week….long after my upgrade to 2.5.1.
This is getting pretty convoluted, and I expect an official blog post will surface in the next few days to clear this stuff.
Update: this blog post also gives an explanation and remedy.
Last Update: Donncha, explaining the whole thing.
Update 2: There is no zero day exploit.
Once upon a time, a good friend of mine designed an awesome, grunge-looking theme for her own blog. Now, she’s really productive and I know sooner or later she will change that theme with another one of her creation. Yet I loved the theme so much that I don’t want it to simply disappear once she’s done using it. And, being a WordPress geek, what better way for me to preserve it than by making it into a WP theme?
To keep a long story short, she eventually made another new design and generously allowed me to convert her old design and release it as a free, GPL-licensed WordPress theme.
So here it is, Our Rights WordPress theme. Here’s a demo version for you.
Download Our Rights WordPress Theme on WordPress Theme Directory.
If you have any questions, comments, or even improvements for this theme, please use the comment form below to let me know.
