The Hairs

Sadly, this site was off the air for 20 hours due to a script kiddy with too much time on his/her hands. The attack was sourced from Turkey (good luck tracking that down..) and the schmuck deleted my whole web directory by exploiting a hole in a copy of Joomla! I had laying around. Needless to say, that’s gone.. and I brought this site up to the proper patch level as well.

The photos are down for the time being but the videos will work until then. There’s a lot of data to put back!

*** Updated - 8/25/2008 - 10:51 EDT - Pictures are up again. ***

General

I updated the blog software (Wordpress 2.3.3) running on this server since I was a few revs behind.. Naughty me! Unfortunately, the new version of the software was a bit more finicky with some of my posts. After manually editing ~ 20 posts to conform with standards compliance, the old theme for the site started to function as it was intended.

While investigating what went wrong, I reviewed some additional templates and found one called Ngatini I really liked. Needless to say, this theme is now installed. I believe the evolution of the site is a dramatic difference. I hope you like the site presentation as much as I do!

Photos

I updated the photo software (Gallery 2.2) and moved the photo site to http://photos.thehairs.net. You may note two photo links are available - an “embedded” and an “external” option. The embedded option will serve the photos inside the page itself. The external option will redirect you to the new photos page @ http://photos.thehairs.net.

Other Site Improvements

The comments section is working now. I turned it off due to concerns of spam. This concern has abated with the addition of some comment plugins. Feel free to comment on any post or ask a question directly on the blog.

Ongoing Improvements

I am going through all the posts and adding screen pops (Lightbox 2) for all the photos served within the articles. The screen pops will look similar to how photos are served for the links to people on this site’s “About” page. I hope to complete this during the weekend. It’s not a big difference but I’d like to finish this.

A plugin from Andy Moore’s Site was added to this blog for easy viewing on mobile phones. Some features may not work (like movies) but general updates should work great. An example of how this site looks on mobile phones (courtesy of a Mobi emulator):

(Click for a larger view)