A radio friend once told me that the best DJ sounds like he’s sitting in your car, talking to just you. Tim O’Reilly told me (25 years ago) that the best technical authors write as if they were teaching you to play a game, sitting next to you. Those styles are conveyed, with <emph>.

xkcd #317

If you’re wondering why the snowman looks a little bare, without pictures, sidebars, or other color commentary, it’s because yours truly was hit by a SQL injection attack sometime on Tuesday night. In this case, it was a thorough attack on every page, post and media library entry in the WordPress MySQL tables, a little bit of SQL that appended a piece of Javascript redirecting the browser to a site that I supposed tries to install malware, collect personal information and otherwise make reader’s lives less secure. I discovered this by accident while noticing that my browser was attempting to access a link that I never put into any posts; within an hour I had edited the index.html for my site, ensuring that all traffic would see an apology and not an attack vector.

Without laying public blame, I’m not sure if it came in through a backdoor in my service provider, or via the front door of my WordPress installation, and my (former) server provider refuses to share logs or other information that might exonerate my own site administration. This is the last straw with said provider; last summer it was performance issues (that were also blamed on me, not their shuffling of MySQL instances) and their continued promotion of add-on services. If I thought their basic services were well-run, I wouldn’t be so annoyed.

Upon discovery, I did what any reasonably panicked person would do: dumped the WordPress content in an extended XML file, wrote some scripts to edit out all of the bad stuff (and remove Google AdWords short codes that were in about 250 entries, since I no longer use AdWords on the site), set up a new hosting account with a new provider (BlueHost, at Brad’s suggestion), and re-loaded all 650+ pages and posts. The longest time pole in the tent was getting the DNS entries updated (since I did two updates, one when I took down the site and one when I moved it to a new provide, and had to wait for the first one to propagate).

There’s still a lot to do — I need to hand-edit the photos (since I didn’t download them first); sidebars, theme work, Google Analytics, and other decoration. At the same time, this forces me to work on a few things that I’ve had in notes but not in action plans – theme updates, cleaning up sidebars, adding in appropriate SEO hooks, and most of all, a conviction to stay up to date with WordPress updates.

Like Frosty, I’m back, need to put that magic hat back on my head, and ready to play again.

Our choice is seen at the very far right of the badge; it’s the long, low building that looks like it could host a lot of nerds. All of which is true. We are proud to be the 69th Regiment Armory sponsor, represented in all 130 feet of height (and the maximum width of any sponsor, which seemed fitting). What’s the connection? The Armory is where the MoCCA Festival happens in April 2011, where and when Amphibimen Comics will launch a plethora of (ok, like eight) products. And it’s a cool building, with regiment history going back to the Civil War.

See fellow WordPress fans on Sunday in NYC.

In terms of value, it is the flat-out best technical training, idea sharing and networking event you can attend. Anywhere, any time. $30 for the whole weekend, or something like $2.50 an hour. You will pay more to park, and have much less fun.

Due to scheduling conflicts, I’m speaking on Sunday afternoon, in a 30-minute slot between noon and 5pm. I’ll be delivering my “lightning round” preview in radio-single edit form, via video, on Saturday so you can get a better sense of the topic, if you’re a newbie. Better yet, just buy a ticket, come to Baruch College, and enjoy the company and brainpower of several hundred like-minded peers.

Professional WordPress co-author Brad Williams is organizing, and the speaker slate covers an incredible range of topics. It’s the best $20 you can spend — you’ll be getting a high-speed, in-depth technical potpourri for about $3 an hour, or less than you’d spend drinking Starbucks that whole time. Just remember that it’s in Philadelphia, so while there are no bad questions, there are answers that involve having a D-cell thrown at your head.

To make it easier for people to follow along (since some of the slides are critical for grokking the more subtle concepts like full inner joins), I’ve posted them to slideshare.net for easy downloading and sharing. Fair warning: I removed the jokes and the tweet-to-win book giveaway so that people at least feign attention for the first quarter hour.

There’s a layer of subtlety to Amanda’s argument. If your website substitutes for a print medium, and conveys your work the way newspapers, TV, or radio would if they weren’t so narrow in their spectrums, then advertising is the way you are monetizing your content. I have no problems with advertisements bordering my favorite online comics, because that’s how I say comics displayed in the newspaper when Calvin and Hobbes was the highlight of the daily yellow rag. But if your website exists to attract people to you, your brand, your thinking, your ideas, and possibly your employment, there’s no reason to run advertising on it.

Full disclosure: In approximately three years of using Google AdSense on this website, I’ve earned less than $30. I’ve never received a check from Google because I haven’t crossed the payment floor threshold. If 100 people buy copies of Professional WordPress, or (shock) a few dozen decide that Managing NFS & NIS needs a closer read, then I’d ahead of the all-time advertising game. The Snowman venture is about me, not replacing physical content delivery. To quote Cory Doctorow (again), it’s about conversation, not content. [That quote is also in the WordPress book, which you should really read if you're one of the hundred million or so people who have downloaded the WP code (hint hint). That's not an ad, because ads create demand for things you may or may not need. You need this book. It's a recommendation.]

So I’m going completely commercial free like the lateWAPP 103.5 FM. No more Google AdSense, no more cluttering posts with random links to weight loss programs and fire fighting equipment (the fact that Google’s ad placement engine decided those two themes best monetize my writing neatly sums up my view of the service).

I’ll be giving an updated version of Parsing Strange: From URL to SQL to HTML at WordCamp Boulder on Saturday July 10. If you’re local, spend the $45 to get thoroughly educated in the latest on the WordPress high-powered, exceptionally low-cost, fully extensible content management system. In Boston, we’d call it a wicked pissah.

I will pick on drunk/stoned people, English majors, and database query optimizers, but not in that order.

One word summary: Wow. I’ve been to the two WordCamps in New York as a part organizer and registration desk sitter, but not as a presenter or active attendee. Now that I’ve been on the stage, I’m hooked.

WordCamp today is what USENIX conferences were 20 years ago.

You have an incredible collection of users, practitioners, developers, and subject matter experts combined with a wildly diverse and interested community. Everybody has an interesting problem or approach or story, and yet nobody has a hierarchy in mind. People are just there to learn from each other and the speakers. It’s the flat-out best $30-40 you can spend to learn about content management. Among the many things that impress me about WordPress as a platform as well as a magnet for users is that you can solve the same problem any number of ways, at different levels of abstraction. On Saturday morning, a speaker showed how to change the default post display mode using query_posts(), and today I explained how to do the same thing by hand-editing the SQL generated by the WordPress query parser. If you are a theme developer and more concerned with design and user requirements, the more abstract, duplicate-query method works; if you’re a database savvy developer then you can dive into the query semantics. Both work, both are about the same net performance, and both approaches include a wider array of talent in community.

Favorite take-aways of the weekend: