Brian Minor

For the last few months, off and on (mostly off). I have been trying to merge some of my side web projects into WordPress, Most of the sites I create use a blog, so I figured it would be a good fit, but the more and more I try to use it the more I wonder if I should just use it for the blog page and continue to use my own custom coding for the rest of the site.

WordPress seems to put me in this box. Which don’t get me wrong it’s a very large and nice box, but a box none the less. I have always been about creating my own code for pretty much everything I do. Oddly most of the time I actually really enjoy it. So I think for the most part I am just stuck in my ways. I know there are a lot of people and companies out there, that have designed their companies website completely using WordPress and some are just amazing, but in the end I still feel that it lacks the features that I personally want. So, unless you want to prove me otherwise I think I will stick with just using it for the blogging section of my sites.

So, my last few day have been spent waiting on the company we hired (by we I mean my boss, I had no say) to host and maintain the online store and ordering system for the company to fix a SQL Injection that occurred over the weekend. Let me first say that SQL Injections are not fun and if you are a webmaster and haven’t tested your code you best be getting to it.

Now the funny thing is that the company that manages all this knew that they “most likely” had errors in their code, but instead of manually testing it they have decided to spend the last few months looking for an automatic solution and have came up empty handed. (So if you know of one let me know.)

Anyways, the SQL injection attack we had added a javascript link to the end of our some columns in our databases tables. From some research the script would have ran and then download a trojan onto the users computer. Luckily the attack happened twice and the javascript code was broken, sadly so was the site and ordering system.

To make a long story short the company mess up while trying to remove the injection and erased data that we needed. We did have a backup that should be able to restore most of it, but I am sure we have lost some data.

So the moral of this post is protect your site from SQL Injections and know what you have in your database before trying to run a script that will remove all scripts from the database.

The End!

Learn more about SQL Injections here

Yesterday I got a call from a friend about a site I had worked on in the past. He was wanting the login information for the site, so they could have someone that they saw more often to start working on a new redesign and to do future updates.

I was cool with everything because, currently I have way too much on my plate anyways, with two other sites that I plan to be working on in the very near future. But before the end of the day. I got an email from a co-worker on a simple (yet still custom), site that he is wanting me to build for him. Obviously I said I could because I can never say no to a web job.

So now I currently have 3 sites that I am going to be building, all hopefully in the next month or two tops. And I also still keep 2 others updated with other informations on a regular basis. And all this is not including my full-time job, which is also web work and all the time I may be spending on this blog and twitter.

All in all I keep pretty busy, but at the end of the day I enjoy spending time on my computer and writing code. The coding process can get annoying at times, but it’s the best feeling when you get everything working the way it should.

Okay ending post now.

To be completely honest, I am really not sure why I created it, but I think for the most part I really just wanted to have a place to show off things that I am working on, without begin restrained by 140 characters given to us by the wonder that is twitter.

So my first task for the site will probably be to get the TWIT iPhone theme I created on the site (which will probably be done before I post this blog anywhere). But afterwards I plan to continue the site with more projects I projects I plan to work on and just other bits on information I enjoy.

-Brian