Website Down for Visitor Safety

Website Offline after DoS Attack

My Drupal website, graphicline.co.za, remains offline today following yesterdays JavaScript injection / denial of service attack. I decided to take the site offline to ensure the safety of visitors while I check the site for any malware. My hosting service technicians are also examining the server for any possible faults or configuration problems. Other sites on sub-domains of graphicline.co.za were affected at times, and further disruptions of service are expected.

The DoS (denial of service) attack began in the early hours of January 24 2012 and continued for nearly 2 hours. During this time thousands of attempts were made to inject JavaScript redirect code into the website (there are too many related entries in the log to count). Although initial inspection showed no successful hack, I felt it prudent to take the site down until certain no malware or other bad stuff had been included.

Don’t Update to WordPress 3.5

WordPress 3.5 Causes Problems – Don’t Update

Be very careful before updating to WordPress 3.5, it may break vital systems. A number of plugins and themes are partly or totally incompatible with WordPress 3.5 at this time. If you have advanced features and commercial themes wait until you are certain these are fully WP3.5 compliant before upgrading, or you could lose these functions, and lose business as a result.

If you are starting a new blog or website WordPress 3.5 is fine… If your existing blog uses a default WordPress theme like TwentyEleven, TentyTwelve or TwentyTen, and only default or 3.5 proven plugins, then probably it’s OK to update. If you have extended functions on the front end, be wary, be very wary!

Custom Button for Twitter Share

Twitter Share Popup using Custom Button Image

Finally, I have a Tweet Button that opens a popup window and uses a custom button image that works. A long time in the making, the project got put on the back-burner several times over the past six months.

Yesterday I finally got round to updating my website to use several of the code snippets I published last year, (never got round to changing these either until now) so it seemed the right time to get down and make this custom button twitter share popup work.

Twitter Popup

Part of the reason it took so long was having to use JavaScript – and I am not at all fond of java… I had the popup working in several versions, one only included the page URL, another just opened a popup tweet box with nothing in it. Neither of these were what I wanted. Thanks to Twitters fairly new “Intents” API, the popup now adds the page title and the URL – much better.

These functions have long been available using Twitters own tweet buttons, but if they don’t fit into the space allocated, then a custom image is a better solution, except for the hassle to get it to work properly.