Happy New Year and a Site Redesign

By Jeff Ivany on January 1, 2009

Happy New Year!

I’m kicking off 2009 with the launch of a new site design for ivany.org.

Ivany site redesign based on the Leviathan theme - a child theme for the Hybrid theme framework.

Ivany site redesign based on the Leviathan theme - a child theme for the Hybrid theme framework.

The redesign is based on the Leviathan theme which is a child theme of the Hybrid Theme framework.  Justin Tadlock has created a fantastic framework for theme designers.

Unfortunately, I’m not a theme designer so I’m stuck with tweaking existing themes to do what I want. I’m not overly attached to the current colour scheme though so it may change from time to time. I found I was spending too much time on silly details so I never pulled the trigger and committed to the new theme framework and the options it opened up.

Now I have and hopefully, this will be the start of more interesting stuff here. No guarantees.  ;)

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Broken Link Cleanup

By Jeff Ivany on December 11, 2008

Today I finally got around to doing some needed cleanup on my blog.  The Google Webmaster tools have been complaining to me for a really long time about the number of broken links I had on my site.  As it turns out, I had about 5 times what Google said I had.  Ouch!

I discovered this by grabbing a plugin for Wordpress called (conveniently) Broken Link Checker. This nifty little plugin ran in the background and searched through my 6+ years worth of blog entries to find all of my links that no longer resolve to anything useful.

So I spent the better part of the day fixing broken links. The majority of my broken links came from linking to the various CBC websites for any of the news articles I posted about over the years.  It seems that CBC has moved a lot of their articles to new locations.  Some I could find but many (especially the ones not linked thorugh the main website) are no longer available.  Unfortunately that meant I had to delete the relevant links on the posts.

As for the Broken Link Checker plugin, it seems to run a lot.  I’ve been watching my logs all afternoon (yeah, me=geek) and it seems to run on almost every request coming to Wordpress.  That’s probably a little excessive.  The easy fix is to simply disable the plugin the majority of the time and only run it every few months.

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Noma LED Christmas Lights Sold Out!

By Jeff Ivany on December 10, 2008

This past weekend I went into the Canadian Tire here in Kemptville looking for two more sets of Noma LED Christmas lights. I was looking specifically for the 100 LED C6 sized multi-colour light sets. Unfortunately I was greeted by empty shelves where the lights would normally be.  Turns out they were completely sold out and had been for a few days.  I looked a little more and all that was left were the “white” LED strings, the silly large bulb (C9 size?) light sets and a handful of single colour sets.

I came home and did a inventory check through their website and discovered that even some of the bigger stores in Ottawa were also sold out of the multi-colour light sets.

We were in town on Monday so I took the opportunity to swing by one of the bigger stores that was supposed to have stock.  Yes, they did have about 5 boxes but they must have all been returns as the boxes were all beat to shit.  No way am I going to buy a set of LED lights that someone else has returned.  I’ve been lucky so far with my Noma LED lights and I’m not going to take a chance on ones that someone else got pissed off with.

Anyways, I was looking for more lights to “complete” my plans for this year on the house.  Looks like that will have to wait for next year now.

Amazing though, LED Christmas lights sold out by the first weekend in December.

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Upgraded!

By Jeff Ivany on December 5, 2008

Well, it was painful and took almost 2 days to get this far but I finally upgraded Wordpress on my site.  Getting cracked recently was definately the kick in the pants I needed to take the time to upgrade and re-work all of the stuff that got broken during the upgrade.

I’m living on the bleeding edge now and I like it!

There’s some stuff that’s still not quite working on the site but at the moment, I’m not too concerned.  Anything that isn’t working is going to be disappearing soon. I hope. Stay tuned and hopefully I’ll have everything back to where I want it before the end of the year.

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Cracked!

By Jeff Ivany on December 3, 2008

Well, I guess my time ran out.  My website was cracked at some point in the last couple months. Someone managed to figure out my password (which was a really crappy password) and started adding a whole lot of hidden spam to my posts.  Unfortunately I didn’t notice until Google sent me a message indicating that their search robot found spam on my site.

So this morning I’ve been cleaning, cleaning, cleaning and trying to determine what was touched.  I have a few ideas on how the person got access and they are all due to crappy passwords. Now is a good time to remind everyone to create strong passwords.  If you need some help, check out a site like Bad Neighborhood’s Mnemonic Strong Password Generator. You shouldn’t use your pets, kids, grandkids, or common words for a password.

Oh, and to anyone who had a login/password on ivany.org - sorry, they have all been deleted now.  I’m going to try to roll out a new website in the coming weeks so the timing of this isn’t so bad.  Pretty much everything is changing.

Update: Well, this sucks. At first I didn’t think I had been de-listed from Google but now it seems I have been. Crappy. Here’s hoping they get to my “reconsideration request” sometime soon.

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