Author: Olly

  • Finally settled on a new layout

    My rekindled love for blogging has also meant i’ve been spending time tinkering with my blog layout and the colour scheme trying to get it just how I want it.

    For the last few weeks I was rocking an awesome theme, to be fair it was the best one i’ve ever had, proper ticked all the boxes…. apart from the fact once I started delving in and altering a few things I realised the guy who made it was a moron and had obviously coded most of the template files with his knees.

    The structure of everything was a mess. I was very sad :'(

    So, I started the hunt for a new WordPress Theme (you’d have thought i’d have one of the ninjas at work make me one haha) and it reminded me about how hard it was to find simple blogging themes nowadays that focus on the written content rather than huge header images and image slideshows and junk.

    …Is that because no one writes old fashioned blogs any more?

    I get that a picture is worth a thousand words but I often visit blogs and they’re using premium themes that are built to focus on large imagery that accompany the published articles, and the authors simply use some crappy stock image because if they don’t they break the layout of the page.

    So is there really any point in having that as a main feature of the theme?

    We did some work for a lady recently who was a travel blogger, and because of what she blogged about she needed large images to be part of her articles else the images of the places she visited wouldn’t get across to her readers – however not everyone blogs about “visual” things so there really should be more choice of themes out there for the rest of us! 🙂

    Anyway, after 20 minutes or so I saw this theme, liked that it was fairly bare-bones and installed it. All credit to Per Sandström for making a great theme that is easily customisable and is made for bloggers!

    Hurray for simplicity!

  • SCAM – Data File Google Winning Batch: UK/111/GWIN/GUK

    Dave spotted this in our spam box from anagalski@iimcb.gov.pl with a reply to address as owenhookson09@gmail.com – as if “the CEO of Google” would have an email address like that!

    “You have Been Selected as a Winner for Using Google Services. Find attached E-mail with more details.
    Congratulations,

    Sincerely.
    Mr. Owen Hookson.
    CEO GOOGLE UK.”

    And its another attachment jobbo – look at this beaut;

    1

    2

    Here is the original file

    Its of course – a Scam – stay away folks and if you see anything like this in your inbox forward it me so I can have a giggle 🙂

  • Website owners beware – terrorist attacks on your websites too

    Its hard to ignore the current disputes between ISIS and the rest of the world. Every news program and social feed contains links to videos and articles about this horrible ordeal, and it looks like its now also spread to the digital world.

    I was messaged by a customer who said that their website had been hacked. When I visited the website I was greeted by the message;

    Hacked BY MuhmadEmad ./we are peshmarga

    MuhmadEmad seems to just be the persons name, but peshmarga (peshmerga) is a term used by Kurds to refer to “Armed Kurdish Fighters” which – as far as I can work out – should be people on our side, so im really confused as to why they would hack a little wordpress website that has nothing to do with this conflict.

    I’m still looking into exactly what happened but it seems to have been a Gravity Forms exploit of some description – some files within uploads/gravity_forms/tmp were VERY dodgy so they’ve been downloaded for closer inspection and removed from the site.

    Ive also updated all the plugins, themes and the wordpress core. Passwords for all wordpress user accounts, FTP and MySQL users changed too.

    If you’re having trouble with a hacked website then contact me through twitter or something and ill help as best I can.

  • Disturbing thoughts about 9/11

    Im sure by now we’ve all heard at least one conspiracy theory surrounding 9/11 and what actually happened on that day – even theories about why it actually happened – but until recently i’ve never really thought much into any of them as they are after all, just theories. However thanks to some research a couple of friends and I have been looking into I actually took a step back for once, and embraced one of those theories as truth – and I instantly felt sick to my stomach…

    Almost immediately after the event happened on September 11th 2001 people starting claiming it was a setup, or it was a controlled explosion etc and the general background story associated with all these theories was that it was linked to some kind of insurance claim or something – but it all sounded so ridiculous and personally I lost interest in them. I accepted that it was “terrorists” and they did it because they were crazy religion-orientated bastards.

    Zooming to the present day and as I mentioned earlier me and some friends have been obsessed by a number of theories that basically turn most of what we all know and believe on its head. Watch the Zeitgeist movie as that does a better job of explaining it all than I ever could.

    One of these theories suggests that 9/11 was simply an exercise to get the US people (and the rest of the world) to back a war in Afghanistan so that (in short) someone at the top of the ladder could get to the oil and other resources in Afghanistan and make a sh!t load of money.

    Again – watch the Zeitgeist movie first before you start calling me a complete nutjob.

    The reason this theory made me feel physically sick is the fact that this would mean the people that died in those planes, the buildings and then in the rescue attempts afterwards did not die as a result of a terrorist attack, they weren’t killed so someone could directly claim off their insurance (this would also be gross tbf) it meant that all those people were murdered by someone – probably arranged over email – who used their deaths as leverage in a business deal.

    The idea that it might not have been terrorists is actually more sickening than what we’ve been lead to believe is the truth.

    Whether it is true or not I guess we’ll never really know, and I don’t know if I believe it was all controlled explosions rather than planes being flown into the towers, but the actual reasons behind why it actually happened are something that has left me feeling intrigued and disturbed in equal measures.