It seems to work a treat and it’ll be easy for me to add new images as and when. All I have to do is crop them, add a caption and them upload them to a folder on the site. The PHP script does the rest. Marvellous.

Now that I have being playing with WordPress for some time, I am getting more familiar with the hands-on customization of templates, the loop and all the other great funky functions that allow developers to get it ‘just so’.

You see, this blog was the first WordPress install I ever did. I admit I was a little apprehensive at this wondrous beast. The theme was adapted from one by my web host (Dreamhost – sign up now!) and all those PHP functions and ‘if’ statements were a little confusing.

Since that first attempt, I have also been building Drupal hosted sites, and although they are different, the core principles of CMSs helped me progress with WordPress when I came back to it.

I thought it was now time to revisit the O.C. blog and clean up the templates and css files to get a more consistent look across posts, comments, category archives and search results. I still have some further tweaking to do, but overall I’m happier with my blog-baby.

I do wish, however, that I could create a more funky header that sums up the Englishman.

I suppose it was a bonus that we get on so well, with him also being an immigrant like me. He hails from that fine Antipodean country of Australia so although we’re from opposite sides of the planet we have a lot in common (Y’know, from our dark imperialist past!).

So, if you’re looking to buy or sell real estate in Orange County, give Glenn Ritchie a shout and tell them that I sent you. He’ll sort you out for sure.

For those that don’t know, I do websites and am fortunate to get paid for it!

I had a site go down – falconhealthcare.co.uk. When visited, it was just a blank page and I couldn’t FTP in. I checked the hosting company for any issues and they reported a performance issue on the servers. I gave it some time, but still nothing happened.

To see if it would help, I re-uploaded the index.php file of the site, which was running on Drupal CMS. Huzzah! The site was working again. I was about to go back to playing on Facebook, when I thought I’d just check some of the site’s links were working ok. Suddenly I was being redirected to allvideo.org.uk – a very nasty site that has lots of malware and other evils. Needless to say I gave a huge WTF?! and was very, very confused.

As if you didn’t already know: Google is your friend. It was mine too as a search produced this post by Tony Geer that explained everything. Reading it I discovered that sure enough, my .htaccess file had been altered and I’m guessing so had my index.php. Fortunately the addition to the index.php file had knackered the site good and proper, preventing any innocent users from being hijacked.

I sorted out the site, upgraded the Drupal core and changed the password for ftp. Was this all linked to the ‘server issues’ Heart Internet were having? Who knows. I have reported it to them, so we’ll see what, if anything, they have to say on the matter.

And thanks Tony, you da man.

Update: Heart Internet have suggested that it’s a PC virus that intercepts usernames and passwords and uploads the dodgy content. They helpfully pointed out it was the Gumblar virus. Hmmm, I smell a cover up. Why? Because I use a Mac and I’m the only one with FTP access! Perhaps this issue is a bit closer to home than Heart Internet realise or want to admit.