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October 2010, an update!

Posted on October 17, 2010
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So a year on from starting at IE, what’s news? Besides spring and the joy of hayfever again, I thought I’d give a run down on what’s been keeping me busy.

Hoyts.com.au and hoyts.co.nz; the website for the cinema chain that operates here and in NZ is both a business and technical challenge on many levels. Dealing with external vendors, multiple stakeholders and a codebase that was far from Sitecore best practice has been a learning experience. In the year since we’ve managed to put live a home page redesign, regular maintenance updates and bug fixes, and most importantly; the new rewards program which is going strong.

Hoyts Corporate Australia and New Zealand; architecturally what should have been a fairly straight-forward exercise to create a ‘microsite’ running off a main site presented it’s own challenges when working around some publishing booby traps left by the previous developers. Also learnt some lessons about working with a multi-site Sitecore installation.

Hoyts Mobile Australia and New Zealand; a couple of brand new Hoyts websites, no Sitecore integration. Designed to replace an older WAP mobile site, the new mobile website incorporates some of the latest HTML5 and CSS3 techniques to streamline front-end development. Server side, it was awesome to work with MVC2, not having done any MVC development for a while, it took a while to get used to again.

Other stuff about mobile development and this site:

Maxxia NZ; just to make sure Sitecore isn’t the only CMS I work on, I did Level 1 and 2 Umbraco certification. Just in time to build the Maxxia NZ website. Nothing notable about the site itself, from the point of view of CMS’s though, it’s refreshing to work with a different CMS and one that really is bare-bones compared to Sitecore. Highly recommended for small/mid-level organisations looking for a .Net CMS, or for anyone not looking to pay for Sitecore’s full feature set.

IE Website; much to the amusement of the other .Net developers, I also put my hand up to play with WordPress. I’m not sure I’d call myself a WordPress guru, but I did get to play with a couple of cool new features of WordPress; custom post types and taxonomies.

Along the way, I’ve also learnt a hell of a lot more about front-end development than I expected. I’d even say I know my way around Photoshop and creating non-table layouts in CSS… it’s only taken me a few years to catch up to everyone else on this.

Finally, I couldn’t finish this post without giving a shout out to all the peeps at IE. They’re pretty sweet ;)

Special kudos to the .Net team there, the dorks… and Mig’s mum. She’s super sweet. ;)

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OCAU Hacked! Whirlpool Hacked(?)

Posted on November 23, 2009
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Another day, yet another vBulletin break-in. Making off with potentially thousands of passwords… this time it’s Overclockers Australia forum.

Possible Security Issue (ya think?)

Just got this via email…

We’re still investigating what happened.  However, it is very likely that your OCAU password has been compromised.  Therefore please change your OCAU password as soon as possible.

Also, if you use the same password elsewhere, you should probably change those as well.  However, please be aware that using the same password on multiple services is a bad idea.

While there probably isn’t anything lower you can do than to hack a community forum, hopefully the fact that vBulletin now store passwords MD5′d and Hashed will add a level of security to prevent a stolen User table being brute-forced easily.

Still, it’s a timely reminder to only give out access to those you trust, and if possible, lock down database access to only a handful of site engineers & developers.

UPDATE:

Holy shit! Looks like Whirlpool was hit too.

*craps pants*

*cries*

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Why I deserve a Google Wave invite

Posted on October 5, 2009
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Dear Google,

I believe I deserve a Google Wave invite far more than the other people who are desperately begging all over the ‘net, turning every tech forum into a gigantic, online slum for the Wave-deprived. Here are a list of reasons why I expect Lars Rasmussen to personally deliver my invite to me in Melbourne.

  • During the early days of Gmail beta I offered Gmail invites to friends who were using Hotmail for a small fee. This shows a history of taking advantage of Google’s ingenuity for my own personal profit and if given access I promise to do the same with Wave invites.
  • This included selling one to my own sister; “1 gig of storage for your emails doesn’t come cheap!”
  • Very few people know, or will admit, that I am actually the person responsible for the two o’s in the middle of ‘Google’. ;)
  • Sergey Brin lost the company to me in a game of rock-paper-scissors in 1999 but I was too busy becoming the world’s best Counterstrike player to take ownership of the domain.
  • Wave is useless if you don’t have friends, I have created more fake accounts to add to my friends list on Facebook than the average developer :p

Seriously, it does look very exciting, but personally I’m more interested in the mythical GDrive project and when Google think they might release this. With Microsoft now offering 25 gig free on Windows Live Skydrive, I don’t know how much longer I can wait for Google to make their offering in this space public.

PS. My google username is ronald80. Important I add that so you know where to send my invite!

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Who is responsible for WordPress maintenance?

Posted on September 14, 2009
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This post is a response to a blog post by Jeff Chandler at Weblog Tools Collection titled:

Are You Responsible Enough To Run WordPress?

As Jeff mentions, the advent of such a powerful blogging framework lowers the bar of entry significantly for web publishing, but to blame the end users for a failure on their part to update their WP installations is unfair. While I don’t think WordPress themselves are in any way to blame, I don’t agree with the implications of expecting content authors to also be website administrators.

I think WP publishers are no different to end users of the Windows operating system. What WordPress and the massive developer community around it has achieved is unprecedented in the history of the web, but to ask end users of this product to see themselves as having some measure of technical responsibility for their site will require a significant paradigm shift.

You can’t just upload WordPress, perform a bunch of customizations, install 50 plugins, 50 themes, and think everything will be fine from that day forward.

Yet this is exactly what WP users are doing and nothing in the installation process really makes someone pay attention to the community around WP development or stay informed with product development. Anyone who buys hosting space and sets up WordPress immediately falls into “end user” mode. It’s like expecting your average Excel user to keep updated with Microsoft Office security bulletins.

Yes, WordPress is incredibly easy-to-use, easy-to-install and a walk in the park to customise, but there’s still plenty of room for improvement. I believe the developers of an application have a responsibility to make sure the users are being properly educated on their obligations, so why aren’t people installing WordPress told more about security, why aren’t people installing plug-ins or themes being told (perhaps they need to be told more forcefully) about how these installations can impede their upgrade options and the security ramifications that can result?

You don’t have to be a fan of Microsoft or Apple to recognise that they got rich by buffering end-users from the technical details underlying the technology we use every day.

The sentiment from some sections of this community; that people without the technical knowledge to manage Apache configuration, understand PHP code or perform an SVN merge have no business running a website is something that needs to die (in a fire).

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