I provide webhosting services and Wordpress support. I LOVE blogs and enjoy blogging.  So why don’t I write here often?

Because I use this blog mainly for alerting my webhosting clients to updates, changes to systems and warn them of scams, viruses and anything else that might affect their webhosting and blogging enjoyment.

I maintain and write a lot of blogs which are hosted through these services and you can see some of those in the blogroll on this site.

So, if you’re looking for someone very experienced in setting up and maintaining blogs, setting up domain names and web hosting I’m definitely the person you should be contacting!  Even if the number of posts here are low.

A recent alert went out about a worm invading Wordpress blogs that aren’t updated.  This alert is real and particularly  if you allow multiple users on your blog, the threat needs to be treated seriously.

If you are choosing to do the upgrade yourself there are some things you need to do first:

1.  Backup your existing blog – there’s a great backup plugin I use all the time.

2.  Check the amount of webspace left available – if less than 20megs, get the webspace increased first, or you will experience a crash. Believe me – it’s happened to me.

3.  Login to your control panel and then click on the Fantastico icon at the bottom of the panel – it’s blue.

4.  Click on Wordpress on the left menu and then upgrade on the right-hand side of the page and follow the prompts.  Save the file information it gives you for restoring – just in case that’s needed. I usually save that file with the rest of the webfiles for the blog on my computer.

5.  View your blog – it should be showing fine.

If I manage your blog for you anyway, then I will be doing this automatically for you and you may find the dashboard of your blog looks a bit different next time you login – depending on the version of Wordpress you were using previously.

I don’t host your blog or website but you’re visiting here anyway? Then visit my webhosting services for details.

Misleading unsolicited emails from Asian domain name companies

30/Apr/2009

auDA is aware that at least two companies apparently based in China and Hong Kong have been sending unsolicited emails to people with .au domain names, attempting to mislead them into registering their name in a number of Asian domain spaces.

Examples include:

We are a domain name registration service company in Asia,

Last week we received a formal application submited by Yadu Investment Co Ltd which wanted to use the keyword “***” to register the Internet Brand and with suffix such as .cn /.com.cn /.net.cn/.hk/ .asia/ domain names.

After our initial examination, we found that these domain names to be applied for registration are same as your domain name and trademark. We aren’t sure whether you have any relation with this company. Because these domain names would produce possible dispute, now we have hold down this registration, but if we do not get your company’s an reply in the next 5 working days, we will approve this company’s application

In order to handle this issue better, Please contact us by Fax ,Telephone or Email as soon as possible.

and

We are a professional domain name registration center in asia, mainly dealing with the domain name registration and internet intellectual property rights protection.

We received a formal application from a company who is applying to register “***” as their domain name and Internet keyword on Apr 2th, 2009. Because this involves your company name or trade mark so we inform you in no time. we would like to confirm if this company is your partner, subsection or some one you authorized, if it is not, pls inform us if these domain names and internet keyword are important to you and it is necessary to protect them by registering them first or not, thanks for your cooperation, looking forward to your reply.

auDA does not have jurisdiction to handle complaints about these emails, as they do not involve the registration of .au domain names. We have been advised that authorities in Hong Kong are investigating at least one of the companies sending these emails.

In auDA’s view the claims made in these emails are most likely false and misleading, and we advise people to disregard them.

Kind Regards,
Adam King
Technical Administrative Officer
.au Domain Administration

If you have your blog hosted with acswebservices and recently had your site shifted to our new server you might find some odd characters showing up – it does depend on what version of Wordpress you are using.  The characters I mean show up like this: Week’s

This has something to do with a clash between the newer software on the server and that version of Wordpress.  But there is a fix.  You can download the wp-utf8-sanitize plugin which I’ve found to be very useful.  It’s worked about 95% of the time for these strange character sets that show up.  Just download the plugin, unzip the file, copy it to your plugins folder in your blog and then activate it in the plugins section in your Wordpress dashboard.

Many of you will know that I use SpamArrest to handle my incoming email and process spam as well. I used to wake up in the morning and find 3-4 pages full of spam with the occasional unapproved email amongst it all. It is now less than a page that comes through overnight. What has made the difference?

I disabled the challenge message a month or so ago. Can’t remember why I did it – perhaps I read something somewhere or was thinking about it. At any rate I figured that spammers might not pursue my addresses (I have several listed at SpamArrest) if they didn’t get confirmation back that the address was live, i.e. the challenge message.

Whether or not, that’s the reason, only time will tell, but for now it seems to be working and I’m happy that I don’t have to wade through more than a dozen or so messages in the morning before getting on with my day.