A few weeks ago, I saw a notice that there was a security flaw in Wordpress that needed patching. Unfortunately, I've been dealing with lots of stuff that trumps site maintenance and I didn't get to it until last week.

Apparently that was too late because as I sat down to upgrade/patch Wordpress, I saw that one of the most recent posts (one on the front page) had tons of spammy text hidden from view with CSS. As that was a telltale sign of having the site exploited.

So, I quickly changed a bunch of passwords and went looking for other posts that had similar text in them and found none. Having cleaned up the mess, changed passwords and upgraded Wordpress, I moved on.

Then, yesterday, I checked in on my Adsense revenue. I only do that once every couple of weeks as it's pretty consistent. What I saw was disturbing. The number of page impressions was WAY down. As I had more pressing matters to look at (it's tax season, ya know), I made a mental note to check it out in more detail this morning.

It was then that I found that the drop in traffic actually dated back to April 3. On every day since then, the traffic was a fraction of normal. Instead of hanging out just south of 3000 page views a day, it was closer to 500. Uh oh.

I headed to the normal site stats and noticed that somehow, MSN's Live.com was now the highest source of referrals. Hmm. Where were the Google links?

Sure enough, a search for "site:wynia.org" returned absolutely no results. Yikes.

I went looking for an explanation and discovered that I wasn't alone. Others had been booted from Google because of their Wordpress installation getting hacked. A few more searches and the comments on that past revealed that I needed to use the Google Webmaster Tools to resubmit the site.

I did that, but am uncertain exactly when or if the 1000+ pages of this site will reappear in Google. That's because there's no way to actually test whether you got all of the offending content. They just give you an "example" of the kind of thing that got you de-listed.

They just point you to the webmaster guidelines. That's all fine and good if the reason you were removed was deliberate action. However, in this case, even Google indicates that they know it wasn't a result of my actually building the pages this way:

"This appears to be because your site has been modified by a third party."

Beyond that, from what I can see, it was that single post on the front page of the site that triggered the blacklisting. A single page out of 1000+ (that was up in it's incorrect form for less than 48 hours) causing the complete removal from the index is something that strikes me as not exactly in keeping with the motto "don't be evil".

So, I guess what I'd really like is if anyone sees this problem here on the site, PLEASE let me know so I can get this all cleaned up.

Photo by: Bob Jagendorf

Back at the beginning of 2007, I had an idea to highlight some of the amazing photographs that are added to The Commons every day. In my zeal for the idea, I jumped right to trying to do a "Best of 2006" book, but didn't start until January of 2007. Thus was the project doomed to the inevitable interference of life.

Fast forward to early this year and I got the itch to revisit this project. However, fully aware of how easily a grandiose book project could get pre-empted, I instead let it brew for a while before just jumping in where I had left off.

What I've seen works best for side projects like this idea is when things are built up out of small components. Those small components or small tasks lend themselves well to an hour here and there generating actual progress and usable results. There is no grand churning in the background with a final product emerging at the end.

So, for this idea, I think it makes much more sense to use the domains I bought for the project (fromthecommons.com and .org) and the subdomain I set up for the photo version specfically (photos.fromthecommons.com) to do smaller highlighting of great Creative Commons photos on a daily or weekly basis using a blog format.

A later book at the end of the year would thus be much simpler as all of the nominated photos would already be chosen.

So, I set up Wordpress on that domain and modified my tools for finding great photos from The Commons and it's up and running. Because I plan on putting ads up, I'm currently limiting the photo selection to those that are licensed Creative Commons Attribution. While I think that there's clear freedom to also use some of the other licenses, this one is clear and there's no shortage of great photographs to choose from.

The theme I'm using isn't exactly what I want for the long haul and I need to change the photo template HTML a bit, but those are tweaks that can come as things progress. In the mean time, if you enjoy good photography and are interested in open source creative expression, it's probably a site you may want to watch.

A while back, I sent an email to Dave Slusher about making money in "new media".  He asked if he could publish it and a few emails went back and forth, including some extra bits that he wanted to include in his posting about the conversation. I sent a quick message via Twitter that if it was worth saying, it was worth saying in public and he could do whatever he wanted with what I emailed him.

Dave's response to me really hit me when he commented on that stance. See, that quick summary of being open and transparent really is an oversimplification. That Dave called the stance hardcore really made me want to clarify my actual policy and describe it as it actually is for me.

When I was young, I constantly heard my parents and other adults say, "if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all". You probably did too. As I grew up, I developed a more sophisticated understanding of the underlying principle of that statement. Sometimes the "not nice" thing is, in fact, the right thing to say.

However, at its heart, I believe that that old adage points to the importance of being responsible for what you say. That principle has always stuck with me.

Another principle that I integrated pretty deeply is a belief in transparency as a check on integrity. When your words and actions are out there, you think about what you say and do in a different and, I believe, more critical way.

Those principles have always been at the fore of my mind when writing for this site. On every single post, I ask myself a question:

1. Is there anyone that I'm nervous about reading what I'm about to write?

I then *assume* that, sitting out there, ready to read it is that very person. And, I write as though I am 100% certain that the person in question *will* read it. When that filter stops me from writing, it's usually a sign that I probably shouldn't be saying it in person to anyone either because it's not worth saying.

The thing is that I actually have a filter that's earlier in the process. That filter is the one that wasn't mentioned in my discussion with Dave.

I look at my writing on this site as well as conversations that I have in person as my way of sharing my experiences, knowledge, opinions, etc. with others. I value the exchange of ideas highly.

However, the absolute first thing I ask myself before even sitting down to write or sharing a story at a gathering is: "Is it mine to share?".

Lots of things that make up portions of my day aren't mine to share. The details of my work for clients belong to them by contract. Most of the things that go on in the lives of my friends and family, despite me often being involved, aren't exclusively mine to share. Sometimes, anonymizing the incident can work to make something mine to share, but often that's not the case.

Incidentally, that whole policy tends to lead one to spend more time focused on ideas and opinions than on people and incidents. It keeps gossip out of your conversation and guards against ad hominem attacks.

That question has actually been the source of a fairly deep online silence the last few weeks. On a normal day or week, there are things that are: mine to share, worth sharing (at least by my measure) and something I want to write about. The more frivolous of those things go out over Twitter. Those things that are a bit more involved go here on this site.

The last few weeks have seen very little make it past both filters. There's a lot of stuff going on and the vast majority of my days lately haven't been mine to share. On several fronts, it looks like that might be changing in the next few weeks. Only time will tell.

This weekend, Dave Slusher expressed frustration in trying to explain why most of the arguments related to money in podcasting seem to miss the point. I wrote what was originally going to be a 140 character Twitter post (no, I will not use the tw**t word) that ended up being 2 longish emails instead.

He thought it was worth sharing with others and said so. I try to minimize the amount of meta, "blogosphere" stuff on this site. That whole frothy, new media world where everyone has accounts on Flickr, Twitter and Facebook , subscribes to podcasts and hangs on every word from Steve Jobs' mouth is just something that I don't have much interest in.

So, I gave him the go-ahead to put it up on his site. In case you're curious, you can read it here.

Hey folks. It's been a long couple of days. Starting early on Monday, all of the sites on this server started having what first appeared to be MySQL problems. However, upon investigation, it was actually that MySQL couldn't get a lock on some files on the filesystem. That, in turn, ended up being caused by a hard drive failure.

Between mid day Monday and early this morning, lots of effort went into getting the hard drive replaced, the data restored, MySQL cooperating again and all of the sites back online.

Now, at 5:30am, things look like they're back to square. Unfortunately, the server was down for much longer than the normal SMTP timeout, so if you sent me email in the last couple of days, you probably got a bounced response (even if it's just in your spam folder), so you should re-send it to me or send it to jwynia@gmail.com just in case.

Sorry if it caused any inconvenience for anyone out there.