Asian Tiger

Wordpress 2 by default, comes installed with a rich text editor. I’ve been struggling with some of my blogs as the alignments or formatting that I specify is consistently overwritten by Wordpress. I have no idea what or why this happens but it does.

To alleviate my headaches, all I need to do is turn off the rich text editor and write using HTML codes. The steps to do this is pretty straightforward:

1. Go to your WordPress Dashboard
2. Click on the “Users” link
3. In “Your Profile“, scroll to the bottom of the page
4. Under the heading “Personal Options“, untick the box next to “Use the visual rich editor when writing”
5. Click “Update Profile“

Done! You can now write your blog posts according to whatever formatting or alignments you desire.

I bloody pissed today. Not one but two of my sites was defaced by someone or some organisation that goes by the name Mosavi1986. One of the common defaced sites will look like the screenshot on the right. Basically the defaced website will say:

Mosavi1986
Special Thanks to Nobodycoder
A Hacker from Iran
and a Help with the link pointed to mosavi1986@gmail.com

I did some investigation and soon found that both the sites were on Mambo and Joomla respectively. I took a closer look and noticed that while most of the site structure remains intact and untouched, the configuration.php file was 328kB in site. As far as I could remember, the file should be no more than 4kB in size. I checked my other mambo sites and true enough, sizes varies between 2kB and 3kB.

Now, I am in a rut because I have no backup of my sites. I just assumed that my webhost will take care of that. Boy, was I wrong. Here’s how I recovered my sites:

1. Copy an existing configuration.php file to my local machine
2. Edit the configuration.php file to reflect the affected site. Here, typically, you need to set your MySQL data and other site information. Pay attention to the site’s path.
3. Delete the affected configuration.php file (the one that is 328kB in size)
4. Upload the edited file to your webhost

Note: if you have forgotten your MySQL password, simply access to your cPanel, delete the MySQL user and re-create again.
2 lessons learnt from this event. First, never set your configuration.php file permissions to 777 or 666. Make sure it’s set to 644. Secondly, backup, backup, backup. You just never know when you need that dreaded file.

I have been cracking my head and fingers on my Paypal Subscription button. My struggle began when I wanted to add a Paypal subscription button to one of my blogs (selling advertisement space). After entering all the required information and generating the button, I added the Paypal codes into my blog without any problems.

Testing the button was a different matter altogether. The moment I clicked on the subscription button, my browser displayed a Paypal Abort page stating:

We are sorry, we are experiencing temporary difficulties. Please try again later. If this error occurred while making a payment, avoid duplicate payments by checking your Account Overview before resending a payment.
Message 5302

I found it strange and thought that I made a mistake during the button generation. I tried three more times; each time, paying careful attention to the data that I enter or options I chose. Each time, the same error appeared when I tested it.

Frustrated, I googled around and was surprise to find that many Paypal users are facing the same issue with their Buy Now buttons, their Donations button and Subscription buttons. For those of you who are facing this similar problem, here’s the solution.

When you create your buttons, there is a section called Security Settings. Instead of selecting Yes to encrypt your button, select No (refer graphics below). This simple change solved my problems and my visitors can now purchase advertisement space on my blog.

Good luck!