Nancy Drew and the Mystery of the Featured Work

Ok, so there's not that much intrigue, but since we brought our site back online (quietly, oh so quietly) in the New Year, our portfolio has been "hidey", as we like to say.  I thought it would only take a week or so to get it back online, but then it was two and I was busy and now here we are in February... so I decided to wait until our anniversary which is coming up "right quick", as they say in Texas.

We recently ran some upgrades and a teeny, weensy bug was causing the "Featured Work" page to display nothing but a blank white page. I'm guessing it's been like that for a few days, so our apologies if you happen to land there and get bupkis. The quirk has been abolished and the page is serving up... well, not our portfolio yet, but a lovely splash page, which is better than blank in my book.

The moral of this story is to always check all the major pages of your site after an upgrade, kids. 

Moxie Girl Down!

Hello all! Just popping in to let anyone working with Joelle currently know that they will have to take a seat while we taxi the gate.  Poor Joelle has come down with some kind of nasty flu (we don’t want to say H1N1 because she has no clue if that’s it) but she’s riding the couch under Dr. Kathy’s orders until further notice.  She values your business and she hates being behind, but in this case her health is just not up to even sitting in an upright position.  So if you would be so kind as to exercise your patience and bear with her while she rests and gets well. She will undoubtedly be up and about in no time and will tend to your project or email as soon as she possibly can.

If you have an emergency you can contact me through the contact form and I will do what I can to help out.  Thanks everyone for your patience and understanding!  Send virtual chicken soup and wellness ju ju to Joelle…

Wassup Plugin for Wordpress Security Vulnerability

Due to a security vulnerability in a 3rd-party Wordpress plugin called Wassup, one of our clients had their site hacked and their RSS feeds inserted with warez links and spam-like info.  We recommend that if you are running the Wassup plugin, you deactivate in the plugin in the Wordpress control panel and find an alternate source of stats tracking.  We like Mint!

How to deactivate & remove your Wassup plugin:

1. Go to your Wordpress Dashboard.
2. Find “Plugins” on the left sidebar and drop the menu open by clicking the arrow on the right that will appear when you hover over it. (It menu may already be visible.)
3. Choose “Installed Plugins”.
4. From the list that loads on the right, find the Wassup plugin and click the “Deactivate” link on the right.
5. If you also have VSTATS plugin installed,we recommend deactivating that as well.
6. Once that’s done, log into your server using FTP (or if you manage your files via server control panel interface, that’s fine, too) and go to /public_html/wp-content/plugins/ and remove the entire /wassup folder, as well as the vstats.php file.

Now, just because you have this plugin, doesn’t mean your computer has been hacked, it just means it’s vulnerable to it.  So deactivating and removing the plugin should resolve the issue.  If you are one of our clients for whom we installed this plugin and for some reason, you feel your site has been hacked or otherwise compromised by Wassup (bear in mind we’ve only received one report), please contact us and we will do our best to assist*.  (More information)

Thank you!

* Please note that Moxie Design Studios™, it’s designers and/or contracted developers are not liable for damages caused by a third party plugin security vulnerability, nor the existence of the vulnerability itself. Plugins and software related to Wordpress are open source, as well as free, and there is an element of risk to any Internet-related endeavor.

Flickr Photo Weirdness

I’ve received a flood of emails this morning from clients concerned that their site is “broken” or “busted” or “hacked”.  None of the above, I’m happy to say, but there is definitely something afoot.

It seems Flickr updated the script they’ve written to display images on your website. They call it a badge.  In doing so, it appears they’ve added a 1 pixel by 1 pixel (or maybe even 0 x 0) geo-tracking something-or-other that is shoving people’s images all akimbo.  Unless it’s been there all along, but then it would have been wonky before, n’est-ce pas?

In a nutshell, I’m not sure how to resolve this yet, as the script is generated by Flickr, not our programming, but we’re looking into it and as soon as we find a solution, either with news from Flickr, a CSS trick or whatever, we’ll let you know.

Update:  The fix seems to be to apply the style to the link styling, not to the image styling.  You can read more about it here.

Welcome to Error Town, Population: Us

If you have tried to purchase one of our new Femmeplates™ blog design templates, but have received an error like this:

The recipient of this shopping cart link is not an approved shopping cart user. Please review your selection and try again.

... please drop us an email!  We’re not sure what’s causing this issue, but it only happens

sometimes

in Internet Explorer only.  Our research shows that we’re not alone in this issue and we’re doing whatever we can to fix it as a soon as possible. In the meantime, if you get any crankiness from IE, try using Firefox or just shoot us an email and we’ll send you payment link directly.

We’ll hopefully have these kinks worked out soon.  Thanks!