Tomorrow marks the 6th anniversary of bucketFountain. w00t.

After many years (maybe 4?) of using the same theme I thought it was time for a change. I’m still not really satisfied with it, but I’m hoping it will spur me on to keep working on it.

After nearly 6 years of trouble free interneting, bucketFountain was compromised by evil-doers. The exploit involved changing a theme file so that it called a javascript file that inserted all sorts of hidden spam links into the footer. While I confess many of the links looked highly interesting, they had to go. The worst thing is that bucketFountain has been blacklisted by the almighty Google.

Needless to say I immediately upgraded (which was long overdue) and replacing the offending file in the theme.

A number of good things have come out of this:

• Wordpress 2.5 is spiffing
• This chap has a rather useful category on Wordpress security
• The Wordpress Automatic Upgrade (WPAU) is excellent

If you run Wordpress, check your blogs source now and go straight to the bottom, it will be obvious if there’s a problem.

Yesterday marked the fifth birthday of bucketFountain. I find it pretty amazing, I have a shockingly bad memory but I can clearly remember the day I set the site up (a tiny desk; a Dell laptop with a series of keys that didn’t work; two very shifty aussie flatmates in a shite flat in London; a warm sunny day; it was late afternoon…). It doesn’t seem like yesterday, so I guess that’s what five years feels like.

Also, this time last year we were enjoying the weekend after Webstock 2006. That seems like much longer than 12 months ago!

The most interesting part of looking at site stats are the search terms people have used to find the site. Sometimes they’re lewd, sometimes they’re slightly odd, and sometimes people just need a hand with something. Take, for example, this poor chap:

dsl-g604t not connecting with windows vista

Oh dear! Well, on this happy occasion I’m glad I can guide this reader to a solution.

Another painful upgrade, although I guess I’ll get used to them. What I hate is that the site is down and I’m never sure how long for. That’s mostly due to the slow FTP speed I get with Bluehost. It’s certainly something I don’t want to do regularly, but I was unlucky enough to upgrade to WordPress 2.1.1 which had been compromised by a cracker. 2.1.2 fixed that, but no upgrading for me unless necessary or highly beneficial.

After a hiatus, bucketFoutain is back!

Oh momma it’s been a long time!! The site has been migrated to WordPress and is on a new host. I like WordPress so far, yet the stability of the host is yet to be determined.

Urg - what the hell was I thinking when I marked up this site!? It’s amazing how your entire approach changes as you gain experience - I have a bad case of div-itis and class-istis…

I missed the birthday myself. When I put the site together I doubted that I’d be able to keep it going for a year, but there you go….