Needlenose

Our hosting service notified us yesterday that our site had been hacked and that the prudent thing to do was for them to shut it down until we had a chance to clean things out. We took the opportunity to start with a clean slate: a fresh database, the latest blogging software, and a new look. The works.

We managed to import the posts, comments, and user accounts since our last major switch to WordPress. What didn’t make it through was the previous versions of the site that we were keeping around so old blog links wouldn’t break. Apparently, those old versions were to blame for having lax security.

So we hope you accept our apologies for having gone off the air. Hopefully, this should take care of things and other than the shiny new look, everything should be back to normal. If you find anything not working, feel free to post a comment here.

Thanks, and oh yeah:

Via Kevin Drum, I learned this evening of the latest(?) attempt to “map” the blogiverse… and, in an appalling lapse of judgment, Needlenose is included! (We appear to be an asteroid being sucked in by the gravitational pull of Eschaton, which is directly above us, but I don’t know if that’s intentional.)

So, whatever our faults and erratic orbit of late, we’re still on the map. Â I guess not everyone knows this is nowhere, after all.

I don’t know if this is our permanent new look or not. Hell, I don’t even know who did this.

But my guess is that one of my co-bloggers (probably Fubar) decided the best way to overcome our technical problems of the last couple of days was to start fresh with a new design theme. I have to admit it’s an improvement in some ways, though (hopefully) not a finished work — I think the intent was just to do something quickly to get things halfway readable again.

Or maybe it’s a desperate ploy to increase repeat readership (“Hey, come back tomorrow and see if the site design changes again!”). Hmm…

Needlenose was hacked by reactionary spammers! I got the login stuff fixed, but when using IE some weird redirect to a malware site occurs. Can’t figure out how to fix it. Mozilla appears safe, or any non-Microsoft browser.

UPDATE (by Swopa): Good news — Green Boy found the offending code, and IE is now safe to use. The bad news is, apparently our CSS style sheet got confused in the process, which is why the layout may be slightly off if you’re using Internet Explorer, or totally hosed on Firefox for Windows. (Mac browsers seem to be unaffected; I’ve checked both Safari and Firefox.)

Stay tuned for further amateur-repair updates. (Can you tell our regular tech whiz has been unavailable the last couple of days, and your less-savvy hosts have been stumbling through this on our own?)

We’ve switched over to the WordPress version of the site a bit prematurely due to some technical issues. For the moment, links to Needlenose 2.0 (y’know, the site that was here yesterday) are hosed, but Fubar is working to get that straightened out by sometime in 2009. Also, the present site design isn’t final, so there will probably be some tweaks to how things look as time goes by.

Enjoy the new commenting setup — there’s still some moderation involved that we don’t understand ourselves I won’t bother explaining at the moment, so don’t freak out if your comment doesn’t appear right away.

As always, we’re glad to have you along for the ride.

If you’re new to the site, please note that at least for now, you have to register before you can post comments (there’s also a link for registering at the top of the page). Once you’ve registered, just click the “Comments” link beneath a post to add your remarks.

If you want to give us any thoughts about the site in general, or about issues you want to address, feel free to add them as comments to this post. Thanks!

Does this text appear anywhere? Is this just some kind of “notes to self” feature?Is there a way to reset the clock so the right time appears? (I tried manually editing the time for this post… and the post didn’t appear! The system was probably “holding” it for the entered time.)

Also, how do I comment on a post?

And if I type a “blurb,” does it appear anywhere aside from when I’m editing the post? (Which would make it a “notes to myself” feature, I guess.)

That’s a musical reference you’re probably not familiar with. So, I can really post from work? Technology is a wonderful thing.