It’s been an exciting day for me in the world of web development (that being my world), so I thought I would share some of my experiences to those who are less tech savvy and code shy. My experience with PHP has been light, but after installing wordpress without a hitch and then looking into tweaking this theme I have chosen for this blog I found myself knee deep in Php scripts. The good news is, it’s not that daunting! I have the basics down with html and action script, so most of this comes naturally, and granted i’m not doing much but tweaking a few lines here or there with concerns to column widths and of course the occasional commenting out of features I don’t want, but all in all it’s been fairly easy to grasp the fundamentals of editing my blog and how it looks.

Glenn Song has always been good about the details, and he clued me into blog security just today. After doing a bit of research myself it seems like the best thing to do is to stay on top of your blog and keep your widgets up to date! That needs an automated process for sure, but of course, hackers will always be finding new ways to abuse nice blogs so who knows. I did run a few scripts here and there for checking the security of the word press setup and so far everything seems fairly straightforward and I don’t have any HUGE gaping security holes just yet. I went to this nice site here called blogsecurity.net and found a test you could do. It didn’t seem to work after following the initial instructions (install and activate widget) but it did work after dropping a simple .txt file into my wordpress directory with the only line it needs. After that, all was tested well and it came back with only 3 different concerns. I’ve patched most of the problems but the only thing that has me baffled is the version checker. It says that the Word Press version information from the about file is exposed and that could help hackers take advantage. Well SURE it could, but that would only apply to outdated information if you aren’t paying attention, right? And the whole point is to make sure you are using the latest version so that doesn’t happen, as I have already found out that using older versions of software can lead to bad things. Oh yeah, that’s another good story, one that involves work. Maybe I’ll post about that sometime….

I’ll sum up this post with two other things, I’m still looking for some good mobile plugins to install and use so mobile folks (including myself) can view and use the site…the other would be a widget or plugin that I could use to update this darn thing through email while on the go. I know word press is supposed to allow that by default but it ain’t workin’ and I’m not in the mood to fix it. Also, I installed the Xbox 360 gamer tag widget so I can brag about my gamer score…which still needs some work 😛