When I got up this morning and checked my email, I thought I smelled a faint hint of that acrid smell that means that the “magic smoke” has escaped from something electronic.  I checked everything and all seemed ok, so I figured it was something that had wafted in from outside.  When I got home, I quickly determined that the magic smoke had escaped from the power supply in the Linux server that runs Asterisk (my VoIP server), the DHCP server for my network and one of the DNS servers.  So most of the things on my network at home weren’t happy because they didn’t know who they were because the DHCP and DNS servers were down.  I don’t think it was down for that long because the last entry in my Asterisk server’s CDR was 15:40 localtime when I called in to check my voicemail and I got home around 17:15.  Fortunately, my local computer store is open late and I was able to get a new power supply and had everything back up and running by about 19:00.

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So, CSS Naked Day on gordon.dewis.ca has finished.  For 24 hours, my blog didn’t have its usual fancy trappings because the cascading style sheet (CSS) was disabled.  I was quite impressed how it looked sans CSS, so kudos to the WordPress developers for creating such a robust system.

As of the time of this post, there were 1983 sites listed on the CSS Naked Day site.  Congrats to the organizers!

A few months ago, I wrote about encountering a spam injection exploit affecting my WordPress blog and what I did to expunge it from my system.  A few days later, I wrote a short entry about how to identify sites affected by this particular exploit using Google.  There were a lot of sites at the time, but now it looks like the list is shorter, which is a good thing.

But, there are still a lot of similar exploits affecting WordPress blogs and indexing services, like Technorati, are starting to react.  Mark Ghosh over at the Weblog Tools Collection and Dougal Campbell at Geek Ramblings both wrote about an announcement from Technorati, one of the larger blog search engines, announced in their blog that they are going to stop indexing sites that have been exploited by things like what I wrote about because it’s polluting their databases.  This means that a lot of sites are at risk of dropping off the radar, so to speak, because they haven’t stayed current with the latest version of WordPress.

Currently, anything before WordPress 2.3.3 should be upgraded immediately to version 2.3.3 or later.  Ideally, upgrade to WordPress 2.5, which also offers a bunch of cool new features.  I upgraded at the end of March and haven’t had any problems as a result.

What’s stopping you?