Another WordPress upgrade, this time dealing with a security issue which I think first came up in this thread.

The only thing the upgrade appeared to affect was my new captcha. I don’t know why or how, but it worked before I upgraded and now it doesn’t, even after applying the appropriate lines of code to the new wp-comments-post.php file. So I disabled it. Bad-Behavior and Spam-Karma-2 will have to blast spam all by their little lonesomes.

And on a related issue…

(Read the rest of “Wordpress 1.5.1.3 and Cranky Playground Ladies”)

Got home today and found my first trackback spam. Two of them from an apparently legitimate site: the car division of Expedia.com.

No time to make sense out of all this—the buggers are gaining on me! It was time to download Spam Karma 2 and turn it on.

Wow.

(Read the rest of “Trackback Spam, Spam Karma 2 and Captchas in General”)

Yesterday I walked past my open iBook and heard the “ting” indicating new e-mail. Being the e-mail junkie that I am, I sprinted to the iBook and saw…

I’d been hit with a junk mail comment. My first!

Well, I knew how to take care of that. I deleted it and pushed away from the computer, only to hear another “ting.”

Two more spam comments! Persistent little buggers, they are.

(Read the rest of “Take That, You Spammer Lowlifes, You”)

Why do some links “wiggle” and dance when a cursor hovers over them? I used to think their parents never taught them not to fidget, but then I had some links of my own and realized some of my link parenting preconceptions were a bit off.

I had an odd little problem with my links today. While playing around with an actual links page that uses an unordered list to arrange links, I discovered the links wiggled when the cursor passed over them.

I didn’t like the effect but was sure I hadn’t done anything different to produce it. It happened in Safari and Firefox, but not I.E. Mac. I looked over my stylesheet for “hover” statements and could only find:

.post ul li:hover {
padding: 0px;
font-weight: normal;

This was my first time placing an unordered list of links within a post and the first time I noticed the wiggle, so I felt certain the problem was here somehow.

I didn’t want to delete the statements; perhaps they did something elsewhere I haven’t figured out yet! I Googled the subject instead, searching for html links hover “link moves” and found this page: Menu Design: CSS Rollovers

Big John wondered why the link moves, so he noodled around with the code til he figured that IE just doesn’t like the use of % for the padding. Change it to em or px, and the link stays put.

Even though the link movement didn’t seem to happen in I.E. Explorer, and even though the stylesheet wasn’t using % for the padding, I removed the whole “padding” line from the above bit of CSS, saved the stylesheet, and Presto! No more link movement.

Oh, I am so clever.

Hot and smoggy and me stuck in L.A. traffic on the I-5. The exhaust fumes were so bad I had to roll up the windows. And since I couldn’t run the air conditioner without overheating the car, the air just got thicker.

I turned up the radio but after a few seconds it was drowned out by someone who pulled up beside me, someone with a loud, mufferless engine filling the air with an immense throbbing that made my ribs vibrate like our washing machine on the final spin cycle.

For a moment I wondered if I’d been squished by an 18-wheeler and deposited in Hell, only to learn it was staffed by demons on mufferless Harleys. If so, Hell looked a heck of a lot like the I-5 on a smoggy summer day in stop-and-go traffic.

But no, it was the regular ole’ I-5. And as I waited patiently for the chopper to pass so I could more fairly question the owner’s ancestry… I realized the chopper demon wasn’t a he, but a she.

She finally pulled up ahead of me and I could breathe again without rattling ribs. The picture is blurry because I was moving and my windshield was dirty (the bees are swarming in Carlsbad) but you can still see what I saw: a woman who waits for nothing and no one.

Me, I’ve spent my life waiting to lose some more weight before I do stuff like go to a pool party and actually go swimming, but I’ll bet this gal goes swimming at ALL her pool parties, and wears the tiniest bikini she can find—maybe even a thong.

Frankly, she appears to be the kind of woman who told the world the hell with it, I’m gonna get me some tattoos and a tube-top and some low-rider jeans and the biggest, baddest Harley sold in America today, and while I’m at it, the hell with the damn muffler, too.

Nobody gets in front of her at in the “9 items or less” line with 32 items and a fistful of expired coupons, nobody whips into the parking space at the mall that she was waiting for, and nobody EVER dings her van when she’s sitting inside it waiting for kids to finish swim team.

And even though I was taking a picture because it would last longer, I knew she could easily poke my eye out with her little finger if she was so inclined—so I didn’t spend any time trying to get the perfect shot. I just put the camera back into the bag and continued my stopping and going on the I-5, all the while wondering how big my butt would look on a Harley.

I’m offline as I wait for swim practice to end, unless I piggyback onto somebody’s unsecured wireless. And what if that connection is owned by a hot-tempered someone who might see me and take a baseball bat to my windshield because he thinks I gave him the Melissa virus?

(Read the rest of “Confessions of a Shameless Wi-Fi Hussy”)

Well, dang, if this isn’t just the funniest thing.

(Read the rest of “Tom Cruise Kills Oprah”)

It’s awfully hard to get anything done around here when I have this cuteness dreaming up ways to distract me.

I mean, when Mojo is snoring so loud you can hear him while you’re cleaning the bathroom upstairs, you might as well put down the Pine-Sol and come rub his belly instead.

I used to read a lot of fiction, but then the stick turned blue.

In fact, the moment I became pregnant I began to limit my reading to stuff like the What to Expect series. After a while, the parenting non-fiction stuff narrowed itself down to “How to” books, such as How to Keep Your Children from Turning All Your Brain Cells Into Slime. Not that any of it worked.

(Read the rest of “The Anvil at the End of the World”)

To answer unanswered WordPress Forum Questions,
or not answer them: that is the question:
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of unanswered questions,
Or to take up the questions myself,
And by answering them end any possibility of
REAL WordPress experts finding and answering them?

(Read the rest of “Sticking My Nose in Where It Doesn’t Belong”)