Wednesday, July 17, 2013

Hackers promote (or provoke) changes

This site has basically looked the same for the past 6 years since back when I mentioned some minor cosmetic changes that included displaying the post categories as icons.

The theme I chose at that time has not been updated in years and apparently the script kiddies found an exploit and managed to screw up the look of the site. I fixed the look easily enough but decided I should go with a more modern theme that will actually be patched/updated as idle hands find their way into the software.

To replace it I chose the most current and most ubiquitous "twentytwelve" theme, created a child theme to protect my customizations, and then proceeded to make a few minor modifications mostly removing all of the unnecessary white space. It looked Ok but lacked that personal touch. It still looked like the default vanilla WP theme. I needed my icons back!

There are a few WP plug-ins that do something similar to what I manually coded but they are either not working or old enough that I have to figure they're adding yet another porthole that someone will try to reach through. So I re-wrote my version. It is now all just two lines of code (plus styling) but alas I had to update one of the vanilla theme files. This means that I'll be too lazy to re-apply my changes when the theme is updated and I'll eventually be hacked. However... if the theme lasts 6 years again I'll be overdue for a refresh anyway and I can live with that. Maybe I'll even get around to updating those icons that I promised I would change?

Nah. =]

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