Tricia's Musings

Random Thoughts about life in general, living in the big city of Toronto



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Tricia’s Musings has a new look

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Well … what do you think of the new look of Tricia’s Musings?

I’ve been downloading and testing WP themes for months in order to find just the right one for this site. I finally decided on this theme about a week ago.

The only problem I’m having with it is that I can’t figure out how to put a header image in it without dropping the sub-navigation bar. I’m sure I’ll figure out how to put in a custom header eventually.

Please let me know if this theme doesn’t work well with you browser. I’ve tested it on the latest version of FireFox and Internet Explorer 7 and I’m pleased with how it’s performing.

I’m planning on organizing the sidebars a bit better and I’ll utilize some of the special options in this theme such as featured video and featured posts shortly. It’s really a great theme. It was a custom theme but the designer decided to offer it up for free at the end of April. I love it and I hope that you do too.

I was supposed to have a custom theme made for this site. I won it in November, but my latest emails to the designer have gone unanswered and I couldn’t wait any longer. I’m pretty disappointed with how things worked out. If she does ever get in touch with me perhaps I’ll use whatever theme she came up with on one of my other sites.





Need a better way of keeping track of site earnings

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You know I was just thinking about what a mess doing my taxes was this year. Last year wasn’t so bad because I’d worked at the hospital part of the year before and also earned money from my websites. Last year though, all my income was from my websites and calculating everything was a pain in the butt.

I think I’m going to look into getting some kind of financial reporting software so I can keep track of my daily, monthly and yearly earnings in one place. I do have Excel on my computer, but I’ve just never really liked using that program.

Speaking of earnings mine are down so far this year. Ever since we got our Puppy last November my earnings have been a lot less. I find the puppy very distracting. She’s getting better at entertaining herself, but it’s still difficult to work on my sites with a dog dropping toys in my lap constantly or whining for attention. As a result I’ve been trying to work on more passive income earnings for my websites.

How do you get work done on your sites when you have a lot of distractions around?

Free Music downloads with MP3Rocket

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I don’t listen to enough music these days. We used to have a stereo, but it was old and when we moved to this house several years ago we never set it up. Instead I’d use the radio tuner on our home theater system to listen to the radio or I’d listen to CDs, or music stored on my computer.

Unfortunately, about half a year ago, our home theater system started giving us an overload message whenever we turned it on. We haven’t fixed it or replaced it yet so that means no more radio or CD music through the surround sound system. I’ve noticed that I’ve slowly stopped listening to music over the last few months because of our home theater system being on the fritz.

So earlier today I went searching for music online and I found a site that offers unlimited free music downloads. It’s called MP3Rocket. They have free software that you can download. Within minutes I was able to begin searching for shared MP3 files.

rocket_logo.gif The MP3Rocket software works by connecting to the Gnutella network and it’s very user friendly. I won’t go into all the details of how it works here because there’s a software demo on the main page of the website that explains everything way better than I could in this post!

The only thing I noticed when I was finished installing the software was that it had added an Ask.com toolbar to my Firefox browser. I’d rather know about those things ahead of time and either opt in or opt out during the installation process. It wasn’t a problem though – some of you might actually appreciate the Ask.com toolbar. I’ve already got way too many add-ons for my browser so I simply went to my computers Control Panel, clicked on Add or Remove Programs and easily un-installed the Ask.com toolbar. Simple.

There’s a Pro version of the software too if you want to upgrade. There’s a lot of added features in the Pro version.

I already spent sometime using the software searching for MP3’s earlier today. Now I’m going to spend some more time this evening looking for my favorite bands.

Going over blogroll requests

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What a boring Saturday night. Sigh. To think I could have been at a party this evening if it weren’t for my father in law booking non-pet friendly hotel rooms for everyone! (see yesterdays post for more info if your confused).

I’m spending my time going through my huge list of blogroll requests! So many people have asked to join my Green Thumb Sunday Blogroll, I am Canadian Blogroll and of course the extremely popular Do follow blogroll that I’m buried in emails.

It wouldn’t be so tedious if it were a matter of simply adding a site to a list, but for most of the lists I’ve got to check out the site, see how old it is, how frequently people post and in the case of the do follow blogroll I have to make sure that their comment links actually follow. This all takes time.

Frankly … since I couldn’t be at the big party for my father in law tonight and since I’m kind of bored I’d rather be on a relaxing vacation at one of those Hilton Head rentals or some great place like that.

I hope you guys are having a much more exciting Saturday evening than I am.

Even my puppy is bored. I finally gave her a rawhide bone to keep her occupied for a while.

WordPress and PHP based sites have altered and extra files – check yours!

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If you use WordPress or any other website platform that used PHP you should take a look at your files to see if any changes have been made to them in the last month.

A month or so ago I noticed that three of my WP sites suddenly said that they were using version 2.5 … heck they really weren’t even using 2.3.3 yet! Remember I was behind in my updates. So I decided to use my FTP program in order to take a look at the files on my server and much to my amazement I found that a lot of files had the date 10/4/2008 as the last time they were modified. Oddly enough I noticed the change to wp 2.5 on a few of my sites prior to all the file changes on the 10th of April. I wrote a post about it (see link above) on the 8th of April.

In addition to file date changes I found extra files some with PHP extensions, others with pngg and jpgg extensions.

I also found that a line of code had been added to the top of many of my files. Just go to your WordPress theme editor and take a look at each file for the current theme you are using to see if there is code with MD5 and debugger in it at the top. If there is you can remove the code with ends at exit >.

I went to WordPress.org to see if I could find anything about sites getting hacked or attacked and the first time I searched wordpress.org and did a Google search I didn’t find much, but last weekend I found lots of info. You can learn more by reading this WordPress security issue discussion.

Apparently a number of sites have been hit. That’s why I’m urging you to take a good look at your files to see if code has been added or if new files created.

Like I said I discovered changes on my sites shortly after they were hit – maybe April 12th or so, but I didn’t realize how widespread the problem was until I started digging deeper and got more information. I’ve basically spent a good portion of the last two weeks going over EVERY file on my web hosting server – even the /TMP directory.

It took me so long because I’ve got a lot of sites.

I even went through my Joomla CMS sites directories as well as my HTML based websites directories and I found extra and altered files there too, so if you run a few different kinds of sites don’t forget to check everything.

I also changed the passwords on all my sites as well as my server password. Every password for each of my sites is different.

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