Monthly Archives: March 2011

The Story of a WordPress Hack

On the evening of March 27th, I discovered several WordPress websites I maintain were hacked. Most notably, southwestraleigh.com. My personal site, hibbets.net, was also compromised in the early hours of the morning.

As I started checking all the client websites I maintain for Red Waves, I found it was only WordPress sites that were compromised. It was easy to see, because the hacker took over the home page of the sites with a political message.

Continue reading

Why I liked POSSCON 2011

Why I liked POSSCONLast week I drove to Columbia, South Carolina to attend POSSCON—the Palmetto Open Source Software Conference. This was my first time attending and I wasn’t sure what to expect, but I left with a good impression. Red Hat sponsored the event and had a presence last year. I think it was a good event for open source in the SouthEast region of the US.

My co-worker, Ruth Suehle, and I were representing Red Hat and promoting opensource.com at POSSCON. Early last week, we caught up with Travis Kepley, a Solutions Architect at Red Hat, who attended POSSCON last year. He gave us an overview of his experience.

I arrived late Tuesday night after a 3 and 1/2 hour drive from Raleigh. I checked into the Hilton near the Columbia Metropolitan Convention Center and got ready for a busy three days. (Nice hotel and easy walk to the conference—big plus.) Continue reading

Project Tint and Blinds Complete

Blinds and tintI started a project last Fall to start upgrading the South facing part of the house. There were two parts that I wanted to help with energy efficiency for our home:

  1. Tint the windows
  2. Install new blinds

In between long runs for my marathon, I worked on the two windows downstairs. The first part was to tint the two sections of each window. The tint / window film I choose is supposed to help with the following: Continue reading

Shibby’s Samplings | March 21 edition

Here are some posts from other places that I write, including opensource.com and a new project I’ve started with Raleigh neighbors Anthony McLeod and Joe Boisvert: southwestraleigh.com. As I’ve told many people, I’ve scaled back on blogging to the Lineberry Alliance Blogs in favor of the new project.

See what else I’ve been saying around the web over the last few weeks. Continue reading

The pulse of the Drupal community after 10 years

drupal_10years_cake

Believe it or not, Drupal is turning 10 years old in 2011. Beyond providing a content management platform that powers millions of websites, Drupal has a thriving user community. And it’s not just coders. There are web designers who work on themes and deployment, content providers, admins, and everyday people who use Drupal for their job, organizations, or self-interests. Continue reading