Looming Above The Lighthouse
If you are wondering how the Tynemouth Lighthouse looks in the day apart from at sunrise, here is a view I took in the late afternoon prior to the sunrise shots I posted earlier, with an equally dramatic sky.
As an aside… here’s a rant on spam. I HATE and absolutely DETEST spamming. I am not sure what spammers see in spamming a photographic blog with gambling/drugs/sex links but while cross-posting some of these posts in my Facebook profile, I was constantly puzzled by a string of spam messages that showed up in the automatic previews generated by Facebook. It was only on inspecting the HTML source code that I noticed that my pages have been compromised with infiltrating spam! Mind you, these spam are not meant to end up being displayed on my pages. Rather, they are hidden and embedded and are meant to only show up when a user does a search for my blog with search engines like Google. Eventually, a site that is “spam-injected” ends up being delisted from Google which is not necessarily a good thing. A check on my dad’s photoblog confirmed my fears. It has been delisted from Google’s search pages due to massive spam injection.
More research on Google followed this discovery. To cut a long story short, the spammers have somehow found a way to modify the scripts and code on my server by exploiting a bug in WordPress. They were even able to delete plug-in directories and install a “super-user” with full privilleges on my dad’s photoblog! Upgrading to newer versions seems to protect against the hacks. Now, I must confess that I have NOT been upgrading my WordPress installations (on the few blogs that I host) in a while. Two reasons: 1) Upgrades take time and require some tedious backups to be made and 2) some of the plug-ins I have been using to enable photoblog functionality have not been updated to work with newer WordPress versions. Drastic action had to be taken and I found myself upgrading the WordPress installations on all six of the blogs that I help to maintain. A tedious job that took a while to troubleshoot, especially on the plug-ins front but I think I have managed to do a reasonable job in finally completing the migration. My photoblog may not look any different to you, but trust me, at least for now, the search engines will finally see my site’s true content without any more spam. Now to get Google to relist my sites properly…
If you are running blogs with WordPress, do heed this advice… upgrade early and upgrade often if you want to beat the spammers!