Dreamwidth import complete

Spent the day moving posts from Dreamwidth to sci-fi-fox.com.

I’ve spent today going through my Dreamwidth blog and entering the entries over here. I’m sure there must be automated ways of doing so, but since I only had a couple of months worth and wanted to edit them correctly, it seemed best to do it manually.

There’s still some image links I want to switch around, but one thing at a time.

Categories a lot more filled-out now, and there’s a tag-cloud at the bottom of the page.

Will have a look through my Livejournal next and see if there are any choice posts I want to move across as well.

Twitter Updates for 19-06-2010

Twitter Updates for 19-06-2010

Family and email security

Tech support for family is tricky, especially when the damage is already done..

I’ve just spent three hours cleaning out my mothers computer. Hadn’t been virus or spyware checked in over two years. Fortunately she doesn’t browse much so she got away with some odd keylogger and AV-avoider. But that seems to have been enough for someone to get into her Yahoo Mail account, change the password and spam her contact list saying she’s in financial trouble in Kuala Lumpur (and to send her money there, of course) before deleting not just those sent items but everything else in the account.

So we finally figured out the password reset secret answers and got the passwords reset using KeePass this time. It will probably take mum some time to get used to it, but the other option is setting her up with webmail on my server instead where I can restore from backups, because there seemed to be no way to restore once the trash file has been emptied..

That said though, half an hour ago I found a link to the mailbox recovery form. It’s only a maybe, and only good for 24hours after deletion,  but it’s a better chance than none at all. And thanks to using KeePass and helping her pick the master password, I could get in to use the form while she’s asleep.

Maybe if we’re lucky, morning will come around and some of her mails will be restored to her.

Twitter Updates for 18-06-2010

Twitter Updates for 18-06-2010

WordPress plugin PHP annoyance

Looking for a little PHP guidance.

I’ll freely admit, I know little of XML, Javascript and PHP. It’s more than likely time I learnt them too.

There’s a small problem with one of the plugins I’ve tried to use. It’s the “Latest Youtube Videos” sidebar widget, for displaying a channels most recently uploaded videos. It seems like a handy one to have.

One small problem though is that it’s incompatible with the theme I’m using. The titles are all in a different style, and much larger than all other text. I looked in the code (shown here) and found some <h2> and <h4> tags hard-coded in, which I stripped out and it certainly improved the look.

The text still doesn’t match that of other sidebar widgets though. Now while the specifics escape me, it’s fairly obvious that the text it’s using isn’t being classified as the right sort of text to be displayed properly. I fudged around a bit, but only ended up making things worse. I’m fairly sure the $widget_area_title has to be classified as $title for it to be displayed like the other titles. Likewise the individual video titles would need to be classified as bulletpoints to get the nice little red dot beside each title.

So, pray tell if you please, what’s the instruction I’m missing?