Windows

Are You Ready to Fall in Love?

Posted by on Nov 29, 2005 | 7 Comments

We love each other. No, I’m not talking about you and me (although I do care about you in a strictly platonic sort of way). It’s the love of my life, Ponzi – I love her. We met a little over two years ago on Match.com, and have been together ever since. Certainly, we’ve already experienced all sorts of extremes in our relationship – and I’ve only shared a few of them with everybody inside the Lockergnome universe. There was a time when I shared everything personal along with everything professional (some people miss those days). There was also a time when I gave you a weekly video of something lovingly wacky I may have done for a minute or two. I know that many of you are staring at your screens asking yourself why I’m prattling on about what this resource was like in the late ’90s. My oldest digital friends will remember, though – fondly. Most of us are on broadband now, making a video adventure all that much more interesting and exciting today. That’s what we’ve done for you. Kinda. It’s Ponzi and Pirillo – and all is fair in love and war.

What is love? Can it be crammed into thirty-second video nuggets, or is it greater than the Internet itself? You’ll learn more about the two of us than you ever wanted to know – raw life. Okay, so I take a little creative license here and there, but most of our mini-tales are based in truth! I should have recorded the time I listened to the audio book of “Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus.” That was one of the funniest non-fiction works I ever had the pleasure of audibly digesting. Probably wouldn’t have made for a compelling video, though. Not as eye-popping as, say, a video of me getting my facial hair waxed off. It’s our aim to get a couple of new bits there every week. Love is patient? Not with my upload speed. I’ve got about eight short love-filled videos from Hawaii coming soon, though. I know I should’ve held off my discussion of romance and soul mates and love for Valentine’s Day, but… I couldn’t wait. What’s love got to do with it? Everything.

[tags]soul mate,dating,love,romance,sweetheart,valentine,fiance,engagement[/tags]

  • Anonymous

    TimThumb is the worst piece of crap ever. If you are trying to use a CDN to cache images it won’t work with TimThumb because the script has to run anyways and it creates its own local image.

    Also, if you’re running a high traffic website, that plugin with be the downfall of it because it puts so much stress on the server. Best bet is just to use the build in thumbnail utility for WordPress.

  • http://blog.discoveringstyle.com BlueCockatoo

    I have recently got into writing plugins for my WordPress blog and am pretty impressed and pleased with the functionality available through their API. I can also see how it could be abused. It is a shame that we have to worry about it like that, especially because many people just don’t have the skills or patience to learn the skills they need to build their own plugins so have to rely on what’s offered that others have written.

    Honestly, you are lucky, Chris, that you and your staff can do what needs to be done with your WP installations, because most people just can’t… It’s easy to say “don’t use any plugins you didn’t write/inspect yourself”, but just not practical for the majority of bloggers who are non-technical. Not sure what a viable alternative is, though. :(

  • http://twitter.com/jeffnorris J Norris

    Don’t blame the plugins, or the platform. Blame the admin that trusts a plugin, a add-in , a script kitty and implements it on their blog. WordPress has a great community, and when a vulnerabilities is found they are quick the take action, this of course is when its in the ‘core’ code and not 3rd party add-ins.

    That being said the number of plug-in that phish, or are dangerous to run are few and far between. I have heard Chris say that his site is so shimmed together that it is kludge. This is do to have many developers piece things together, not document it, or make mistakes. Again not to blame the platform, but the developer and ultimately the user of the platform itself. If don’t like it, change it after all it is opensource.

  • Derek Harding

    “you can’t be hacked via a bot that just tries known exploits over and over if your site runs a non-standard version of the software”

    Sorry but this is simply not true. Unless your changes break specific functionality required by the exploit (not something that’s guaranteed) you will still be vulnerable.

    Ultimately this problem exists for any open, extensible system. The solutions are either
    a. Severely restrict the extensibility so nothing dangerous can be done or
    b. Validate every extension before it’s allowed to be used ala itunes store.

  • Anonymous

    So what do the small biz owners who are NOT nerds and/or have no time do? Where are the folks we can hire who can do a test on our sites and tell us what plug ins are “bad”

  • http://sunnyis.me/ Sunny Singh

    It really is the responsibility of the site owner/manager. Sure there are many faulty and insecure plugins out there, but you shouldn’t freely install every plugin that you find “cool” and expect everything to be okay. Take a look at the ratings, reviews, and ask yourself whether installing it is really needed. Most of the functionality of plugins I find people installing can be usually achieved with raw code, and it’s understandable that not everyone is a developer but it’s better to know what you’re doing before finding out that you’ve been hacked.

    It’s also usually never WordPress’s fault, the staff take security very seriously and work fast to fix bugs and holes and then release an update. It is up to you, however, to make sure that you are using the latest version of WordPress and installed plugins, and that you’ve done at least some maintenance checkups.

    Just a quick tip though, instead of installing a plugin see if you can edit the template files yourself to embed something like sharing buttons via a service like AddThis. A plugin automates the embedding of code within your site, but if you do it manually you will have more control and trust over what you have running.

  • http://twitter.com/UnchartedRadio Alistair Barnett

    TimThumb is not a WordPress Plugin, it’s a script. It’s not like anyone can just install and activate it like a normal plugin. Only someone who knows what they’re doing will be able to implement it, but of course someone could be using a theme that has built-in support for it. In either case, it’s simple enough to replace or fix the code when a vulnerability is known.

    Also, shouldn’t LockerGnome be using the latest version of WordPress? Yes, I realize that certain plugins (even though you hate them) may not be compatible and the UTF8 requirement is annoying, but you’re taking a huge risk by not having the latest security and bug fixes.