Advice for the recent WordPress ‘botnet hack’

Posted on April 15, 2013 by Kimb Jones

WordPress was recently targeted by hackers in a hack attempt which was so widespread that even the BBC wrote a very poor article on the subject.

There is a lot of advice out there about how to negate or fix this hack, but the cause is quite simple – our old friend the ‘admin’ user.

Matt Mullenweg lays out the basics on his blog:

Here’s what I would recommend: If you still use “admin” as a username on your blog, change it, use a strong password, if you’re on WP.com turn on two-factor authentication, and of course make sure you’re up-to-date on the latest version of WordPress. Do this and you’ll be ahead of 99% of sites out there and probably never have a problem.

http://ma.tt/2013/04/passwords-and-brute-force/

Follow these guidelines and you should be OK. If you are worried, contact your webhost (this is what I’m currently doing) and ask them to run a extra security scan.

I’m also taking this opportunity to do some security updates and general housekeeping so not all is lost :)

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The subject of day-to-day-job stuff

Posted on November 22, 2012 by Kimb Jones

Yesterday I posted a quick update about the RWD conversion I’m working on for for the main website.

In this post there was a titbit which eluded to my ‘day-to-day-job’ stuff – this is the work I do as part of my role that isn’t really design or development or learning new things or making things or fixing things or anything else (I could go on….).

I think of it as ‘getting on with business’ and this has been the week so far.

This week

This week has been a prime example of ‘getting on with business’ – I came back from a weeks leave on Monday with an overflowing inbox and a handful of messages that needed following up. This took pretty much the whole of Monday and some of Tuesday morning. The work was mainly broken down into:

  • Replying to emails
  • Organising meetings
  • Taking phone calls
  • Adding news items to Intranet & website
  • Setting up and auditing new Intranet editors
  • Fixing problems that had arisen while I was away

Tuesday was slightly different because I only had a few hours in the office before I left for Manchester to attend the Public Sector Communications Awards for which I was nominated for ‘Best Public Sector Website’ (spoiler, I didn’t win, these guys did).

This time out of the office meant I was even more behind with all of my ‘day-to-day-job’ stuff and any design/dev time I had scheduled was quickly slipping away.

Wednesday was another oddity, I managed about an hour in the office before Mike the Knight showed up to our Children’s Ward and it was my job to take photos. This then meant spending an hour cropping and cleaning up said photos (I’m an awful photographer but decent with Photoshop). These photos were then added to our Facebook and Twitter profiles as well as a short news article on our website to promote them.

After this I had a couple of meetings and some more emails and phone calls to follow up. I then managed to quickly ‘design’ (in the loosest possible terms) a poster for our Project Management team for a local event they are running. I then went back to some more Intranet editor/news stuff and organised some more meetings.

Eventually I got some ‘work’ done and published the previously mentioned blog post which was actually sitting half-finished in draft mode from before I went on leave so it only took about half an hour to prep for publication.

Today (Thursday) is another day and although my calender was cleared for work on Canopy and some LESS work (zero meetings yey!) all of that is linked to the fact that I’m moving away from Coda (Mac)/Dreamweaver (PC) to Sublime Text 2 (Mac/PC) as my major text-editor so I can seamlessly do work on both platforms using a similar interface.

This is a pretty big task considering all of my projects will need to be re-organised and planned around this new workflow (this video series has been a big help).

Tomorrow (Friday) is already block-booked for board papers being added to the website in the morning and a visit from our local MP in the afternoon. With those types of distractions I doubt I will be able to get much of the design/dev/project work that I really want to but I’ll fit in what I can.

Reality check

So that’s my week in a nutshell, I’ve felt busy every day but have done very little ‘work’ (design or development work).

But that’s the reality of my role and as much as I desire being sat at my desk with headphones pumping Spotify into my ears while working on coding up the latest iteration of the website or designing a new microsite or learning something new sometimes I have to look up from my screen and do something else.

And let me be clear – I’m not complaining in this post – The ‘day-to-day-job’ stuff may remove me from my comfort zone but it makes the time spent working within my core skill set even more precious.

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Responsive Web Design and decorative ‘junk’

Posted on November 21, 2012 by Kimb Jones

Responsive Web Design isn’t just about better serving mobile customers. One thing that I’ve ended up doing as part of the responsive re-work of the hospital site is re-thinking some of the design decisions that were made last year when I started putting this iteration of the site together.

Not much has changed design-wise since this version was pushed out almost 12 months ago

Junk?

Although I built the design and framework of the site to be as lean and accessible as possible (always putting content first) I’ve noticed a lot of ‘design junk’ creep in.

For example our delightful homepage animated banner (AKA ‘the slider’) is much loved by everyone who has given me feedback about the site, but it’s junk.

The small thumbnail images on the homepage are also junk, they are totally unnecessary visual cues known as ‘decorative’ elements in accessibility terms (for example using images for links where you could just use text and a description).

So whilst I’m also using Responsive Web Design as a tool to alter the way our website is displayed on different sized screens I’m also using it as an excuse to cut down on these junk design items.

When will I be done?

I started this work 3 weeks ago and have probably only really written about 4 to 6 hours worth of real code, the rest has been planning, testing and research (the other bulk has been ‘day-to-day-job’ stuff).

And even though I tried to make sure I built this version of the site in a flexible responsive-ready way it’s a larger job than I anticipated to make everything fluid and work out the best use of breakpoints/media queries (I’ve even considered starting over and using the Bootstrap Grid).

I now expect a prototype of the responsive site sometime in the new year (2013). Which just goes to show, even though I made the existing site with responsiveness in mind, it wasn’t enough.

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Making our main menu responsive

Posted on October 25, 2012 by Kimb Jones

Here is a quick video of the new responsive version of our main menu:

The main thing I wanted to achieve here was that the menu should at no point be hidden from view (displayed as an icon > dropdown). The major challenge was working out the different percentages for the slightly larger items.

Percentile headaches

The ‘Jobs & volunteers’ and ‘Patient Info’ links caused major headaches and led to code like this:

nav#global ul li {
    width:10.666%;
}
nav#global ul li.jobs,
nav#global ul li.patient {
    width:18%;
}

That had to then be re-worked over 3 major breakpoints (media queries).

In the end I managed to get the menu down to 2 lines and STILL be usable on a portrait smartphone (although I’ve yet to fully test any finger-fudging on real devices).

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Responsive testing/hacking

Posted on October 24, 2012 by Kimb Jones

It may not appear obvious but the hospital website was built with a responsive (fluid) layout in mind. There just wasn’t time to finalise all of the changes and do full testing before launch so a fixed-layout was used at the last minute (almost 12 months ago now).

In this video you can see some of the work I’ve been doing behind the scenes (on our dev server) to finally introduce responsiveness to our homepage and navigation:

It’s early days yet but once I’ve got this hacked up version working I’ll post a more in depth update.

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