Laura J. Rinaldi

I tend to use premium themes, such as  Gensis or Thesis, so I haven’t run into the problem, mentioned in this article, which talks about free themes, but my gosh, it makes you realize that people are evil out there.  I have been extra wary after the whole thumb.php episode, so seeing that here are people who put bad code into free themes just to catch you, it makes me want to continue my plan of never using the “free themes” out there.

Definitely a ‘get what you pay for”, if you get a free theme, and it infects your website, or has link backs you don’t need, or any number of things that you wouldn’t have put there if you had had a say in the matter..

I had been reading a mumbling of trouble on the wordpress groups I belong to, so knew something was up, although I wasn’t sure what. One group mentioned thumb.php, and that it was a security risk, but I thought to myself, I haven’t installed that anywhere, so I guess I am safe.

Wrong. My favorite premium theme supplier had been using it, and I got an email, recently, telling me just that:

TimThumb (or thumb.php as you know it) – the open-source script we use in all of our themes to do dynamic image resizing – recently uncovered a critical security flaw in the script. This flaw is vulnerable to a potential hacker that could gain access to your server. This affects all of our existing themes and thus everyone that are currently using our themes.

Good thing, of course, is that they noticed, and have redone their themes.

And, even more wonderful, all you have to do is update their framework, and it looks for the thumb.php, and updates it to one that is not vulnerable.

So, I don’t have to dump the theme, or update the theme, just the framework. Thanks Woo.

Of course the bane of a designer working on the web is that we have to use the fonts that everyone has on their computer. Well, not quite. Recently, I started using Font Squirrel. First, because the designer I was working with insisted that I did, and then because the client I was working with wanted it.  Of course, she didn’t know that is what she was asking for. She just wanted the font to be closer to her logo, and so I went to Font Squirrel, and found something damn close, and she was happy.

Now, what is funny, is some WordPress themes claim they are special because they have this feature, but you don’t have to use anything special. You just have to include it in your css, and put the font package that font squirrel gives you in the same directory. Well, there is more to it than that, and perhaps, when I have time, I’ll do a step by step. But, right now, I have to go work on a site, with a different problem, that I need to solve.

Oh, boy, though I’m in the middle of a job, as I’ve been for quite some time. (Different jobs), I had to stop and share this wonderful plug in for WordPress.

It is called Jquery Collapse o-matic.

If you have too much stuff on your page, but want to include it, this is one way to go, and it works just fine, once you install the plug in, and use the short code.

Thank you Twin pictures. I didn’t have to go into any lengthy code, or get into the php. This is the kind of code I love.

Now, back to work.

Up until I installed Flipboard, I thought of the iPad, I got for my birthday, last month, was just a iTouch on steroids. Nice to have, but what was the point. Then, I was reading the Silicon Valley Business Journal and saw the headline touting how wonderful  Flipboard was. How it made the iPad as good as it was.  Plus it was free.

So, I downloaded it, and was totally blown away.

Before Flipboard, all the stuff I had seen was really just larger iPhone stuff, and I was unimpressed. But Flipboard takes everything you are interested in, and puts it all together, and easy to read. I love what they did with Facebook, for example. Instead of seeing the beginnings of links about articles, all the articles appear as though you are reading a magazine. Same thing with twitter. It makes going through sites so much easier, and even includes Huffington Post (which has also redesigned its reader for the iPad).

Now, it makes it all worth it.

I think I’ve written about this before, but it goes without saying it to often. Always check to see that your forms are working, each time you muck with them. EACH TIME. I say this because I just made a tiny tweak to a form for a client, just now, and thought, well, I had better test it just in case something changed, and sure enough, something had changed enough that it threw the form off. I am so glad I checked it.

Well, we learn by our mistakes, and my first mistake with a form for a website happened so long ago, I can’t even tell you, probably in the early days of my web design, I created a form for a client, and according to the client, it didn’t work. Oh, I had tested it, but I hadn’t done the final test, that is the test to see if the client is getting the emails. It is not enough that you are getting them, but that it works for them too.

And it didn’t. Weather it was user error or not, it didn’t matter. And they didn’t tell me for a year that they had not gotten any emails.

Needless to dsay, I did not keep that client.

So check, once, twice, and then check in with the client.

Then you can breath easily.

Sheesh. I got an email today, after a week of wondering what was up. It was quite to the point:

Thank you for your recent video purchase on the iTunes Store.

You may have experienced a grey or black screen while viewing your purchased
video(s). Apple regrets any inconvenience caused by this issue and has placed a
new copy of your video purchase(s) in your download queue, free of charge. To
begin downloading, click this link:

https://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZFinance.woa/wa/checkForPurchases

Alternately, you can open iTunes and choose Check for Available Downloads from
the Store menu.

Sincerely,

iTunes Store Customer Support

And normally, this wouldn’t have been a big issue. It sounds as though, fromt he email, that it was just a minor glitch, right? Well, it is an hour, at least, that I won’t get back, as well as a week of wondering if I could ever buy things from the Apple store again.

It started out last week. I buy the Daily Show for my iTouch, and I went to download it. It kept saying that it wasn’t authorized to play on my computer, and would not transfer to my iTouch.  i figured it was a one day thing, and tried again the next day. It still didn’t work. I could purchase apps, I could purchase tunes, but couldn’t download my videos. I finally bit the bullet and called tech support. It was the usual thing. Are you online? Have you changed anything? Can you restart your computer? And then they asked me to reinstall iTunes, which I did. All this took at least an hour or more. And when I had done it all, it still didn’t work.

I thought to give it a week, to see if anything changed, and it did, but during the week of not being able to watch The Daily Show, I seriously considered canceling my pass to download it.

If I had found a discussion on-line, of others having this problem, I might have felt better, or if the rep had said anything, but no one offered any information, and I know I wasn’t the only one going through this.

Of course, today, when I got the email, I looked again, and found I wasn’t the only one suffering, as reported in Electric Pig.  No one seems to be having the same problem, but it is all associated with the upgrade to 4.0.

One of the things I hear over and over again is to write what you are passionate about. This seems rather odd, on reflection. Isn’t the whole point of a blog to write about what people what to read about? It sounds so much like the saying “do what you love, the money will follow”.  Should we all be writing about what we want to, and somehow we will magically get readers to read us?

And yet, in studying successful blogs, I have found that most people started out writing for fun, for the fun of friends they knew, for the heck of it. They did not start out with a passion to rule the world of the web, just to have fun with what they did.

And I have been mulling this over for a while. This blog is for business, to talk about my business and things that relate to it, but fun? No, I can’t say this blog is fun. Passionate? I can’t say that I am passionate about writing this, though I do enjoy getting things off my chest from time to time.

So, I have started another blog, about something I am passionate about, which is cooking.  We shall see what happens with it. I have done no design, yet, to the look and feel, as I am concentrating on the content.

I was getting ready to write  a post about how clients don’t understand the difference between stock photography and the images that they find when they search on Google. Not that I thought it was going to be brilliant, but I hadn’t run into it before. Then I cam across Clients from Hell. My gosh, I am so glad I have good clients. Even the client that asked about using the Google images was asking because he didn’t know any better, and was ok once he was told about copyright.

If nothing else, reading some of these makes me realize just how pleasant and reasonable my clients really are.

I’m sure I don’t need to tell anyone, who has been tweaking themes in WordPress, the importance of saving the theme you are working with. Saving it on your desk top, save it in a separate folder, but do save it.  WordPress always suggests backing up your data, and perhaps that is important as well, but if you don’t have a recent copy of your design, before you start mucking with it, you will be sorry by the end of the day.

I have relearned this lesson several times, most recently on a WooTheme that I was mucking with. I did something that made it render wrong in Safari and Chrome, but not FireFox, and because I was testing in FireFox, I didn’t notice right away. The client brought it up, and I didn’t notice or understand what he was talking about until he mentioned which browser he was in. Fortunately, I had kept a copy of my earlier Theme, so I just reloaded it, and then copied my custom.css over again  It was so much easier than having to back track where I had gone wrong with the theme.