This blog is now running WordPress 2.5. Haven’t played with it too much. First impression, the new look of the admin screen is pretty ugly to me.

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WordPress 2.3.3 has been released.

$ svn switch http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/tags/2.3.3
U    wp-includes/gettext.php
U    wp-includes/version.php
U    wp-includes/pluggable.php
C    xmlrpc.php
U    wp-admin/install-helper.php
Updated to revision 6736.

This release has security fixes so I suggest you do the same ASAP if you’re a WordPress user.

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For some time, I had built up to a PageRank of 6, according to http://www.pagerank.net/pagerank-checker/.

Then, I had someone deface my site with spam links hidden inside HTML comments and Google picked up on that and flatlisted me and my PageRank went to 0. I of course fixed the defacement and contacted Google to let them know, but my PageRank stayed at 0 for several months.

I just noticed that it has edged up to 3, so that’s good.

Hey buddy, can you spare a link?

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You had me at “security fixes”.

svn switch http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/tags/2.3.2

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Just upgraded to WordPress 2.3.1.

$ svn switch http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/tags/2.3.1
...
Updated to revision 6294.

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I just upgraded to WordPress 2.3. It actually was a bit of a pain in the butt.

I initially attempted to upgrade with:

svn switch http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/branches/2.3

This resulted in:

Fatal error: Call to undefined function: update_object_term_cache()
in /home/theurban/public_html/wp-includes/post.php on line 1772

I attempted to upgrade the database as well as resolve a few conflicts and delete files and check them out again with svn. None of that worked. I eventually decided to switch from using the 2.3 branch to using the 2.3 tag:

svn switch http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/tags/2.3

This got rid of the PHP error, but now the problem was that I had SQL errors about missing database tables. Apparently, the previous database upgrade failed but apparently still thought it was successful and updated db_version in the wp_options table to the latest version (6124), because trying to upgrade the database again resulted in it claiming that the database was already upgraded. Nice error checking.

I ended up peeking in the database upgrade code in wp-admin/includes/upgrade.php and finding a value that I could manually set db_version to in order to convince the upgrade code to do its thing again:

mysql> select * from wp_options where option_name = 'db_version';
+-----------+---------+-------------+--------------+----------+
| option_id | blog_id | option_name | option_value | autoload |
+-----------+---------+-------------+--------------+----------+
|       131 |       0 | db_version  | 6124         | yes      |
+-----------+---------+-------------+--------------+----------+
mysql> update wp_options set option_value = 5538 where

option_name = 'db_version';

This seemed to do the trick and get rid of the SQL errors.

Between this and getting hacked for the second time, I’m again starting to have doubts about WordPress. I just don’t know if there’s any alternative that I’d like better.

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Some Turkish hacker hacked this site, replacing the index.php to show this fun little message:

TURKISH HACKER HACKED BY FIRTINA BOZO WAS HERE
FUCK YOU PKK & USA
I LOVE YOU TURKEY
MSN & MAIL : Firtina.Bozo {at} Gmail(.)com
my friends : By SheKkolik & By Qkt@y & Caprazates.org User

I’m not sure what PKK is or why this hacker left his email address.

In any case I replaced the index.php and all is well for now. I’m not sure how this happened as I was on the latest WordPress besides 2.3 - this hacker might have used some unknown exploit.

This is the second time that my WordPress site has been hacked (here’s the first time back in June of 2005). It makes me wonder if I should look for some more robust blogging software…

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