But that was more than 10 years ago. Now I noticed that something is wrong when I started recieving a lot of comment spam from this blog. Captcha plugin was doing an excellent job before, so I decided to check what’s going on. Somehow all plugins were disabled. Re-enabling them solved the problem with comment spam, but then Goolge started generating weird excerpts for ivankuznetsov.com search results. That’s when I started digging deeper and discovered that a hidden div with advertisments was inserted into WordPress PHP scripts.

Dreamhost support was kind enough to point me to the description of the attack that was used to break my blog. This particular problem, as well as some other security issues have been fixed in the latest Word Press release – 2.5.1. Lesson learned – update software on time and make backups.

If you are using WordPress older than 2.5.1 I would recommend you to upgrade ASAP.

(To be fare I should say that Dreamhost provides excellent value for money. If you are looking for a good hosting – use IVANKUZNETSOV promocode and get a $50 discount when setting up an account on Dreamhost)

A thought of reinstalling all modules and reconfiguring Joomla from scratch was simply too depressive, so I decided to try another CMS. As a Ruby on Rails convert and a strong believer in open-source ideology I decided to go for Radiant – open-source CMS written in RoR. It is still in beta (latest release is 0.6.4), but it is surprisingly stable and powerful. Take a look at the footer of www.ruby-lang.org – official Ruby programming language web site – it is powered by Radiant

Installation of Radiant was rather easy – thanks to this guide and my prior experience with RoR applications deployment on Dreamhost. It took me a couple of hours to figure out how to actually create sites with Radiant – there are not that many tutorials available yet, so it is pretty much  “make by example”. Split into pages, snippets and layouts makes a lot of sense onse you get your head around it.

From my experience Joomla is an overkill for most of the small sites, and despite being WYSIWYG, it still requires a professional or at least a tech savvy to configure it. After Radiant is set up and configured it is no more difficult to add content there than to edit a wiki page because of its Textile support. But it is so much simpler and easier to use than Joomla.

I managed to restore the ruined site in a day’s time – fetched most of the lost content from Google cache, converted Joomla template into Radiant’s layouts and recreated the pages (well, it was a small site after all). First time I dealt with Joomla – I spent several days trying to figure out where are the settings that I actually need in the endless menus.

Radiant is clearly following “less is better” principle. If you want to try Radiant – there’s a live demo where you can do whatever you want with the content.

I really liked this comment:

But what needs to be said is that this proves what blogs can do. I
post my problems online, I get an almost instant answer from the
relevant product manager of a multinational company. This would have
never happened have I gone through the pre-blogging channels of calling
the support etc.

Tommi Vilkamo then escalated this issue in his S60 applications blog.

Another report came from New Zealand – Nokia N70   Nokia LifeBlog 2.0 Update Problem (Windows XP Pro) about synchronisation issues.

I totally agree with Niko that without blogs it would’ve taken much longer for this information to reach Lifeblog development team. But fortunately it did, so as the first step we can provide complete information about the problems existing in Lifeblog 2.0.23 available now for download from Nokia  Lifeblog site.

1. Lifeblog 2.0 doesn’t start on N90 firmware releases older than 3.0535.4.3 from 01-09-2005. The only workaround for this for now is to upgrade the firmware (which is a good idea anyway).

2. If after installing Lifeblog 2.0on N70/N90 synchronisation with Lifeblog 2.0 PC doesn’t work it is possibly caused by disabled synchronisation profile.
To work around it – open Sync application in Connections folder, select Lifeblog profile, then Options->Edit Sync Profile, then press
joystick right to activate second tab in settings – you will see a list
of applications there, scroll down to Lifeblog and check that the
setting there is "Yes", while as it is "No" for the rest of apps
(Contacts, Calendar, Notes).

3. Calendar metadata is not searchable on N70/N90, so what I was talking about in Search in Lifeblog 2.0 post would not completely work.
Workaround for this is for now to synchronise data to PC and use search in PC application.

More information and possibly a fixed version will hopefully appear soon on Nokia web site.