Landmarks, Happenings of Note 2014

Writing this list, I can hardly believe that all this happened in the past 365 days. I am very grateful, and hope for many more such years.

• First draft of second novel and 8th edit of first novel, launched fiction page, failed to finish first novel
• London Book Fair
• 2nd in UK Catan Championship in May, 4th in Catan @ UK Mind Sports Olympiad
• Got allotment in June, plenty of gardening fun
• Visited Ardley, Cambridge, Dartmoor, Peterborough, Plymouth, Salisbury, Wales
• Built computer with brother for his birthday
• USA in July, Seattle, Portland, Yosemite, San Francisco
• Proposed to Alice atop of Glacier Point in Yosemite
• WDS2014
• VegFest Vegan Conference
• World Catan Championship in Berlin, placed 39th overall
• Managed event as volunteer at St Albans Literary Festival
• Saw Ibrahim Maalouf perform at Southbank Center
• Saw Akala perform The Ruins of Empires
• Meditation Classes
• Flotation Tank sessions
• Made fresh pasta, pizza, jam, crumble, strudel etc.
• Veggie August
• Designed ‘Nut Bars’ for reliable organic food source
• Gave up refined sugar
• Advised on first full launch of theme @ EpicPlugins
• Advised SmugPup and helped launch
• Pivoted EverClients, wrote a new vision
• Wrote 10+ WordPress plugins, mostly as Joint Ventures
• Sold nearly 1k copies in 5 days in one JV launch
• Sold several domains, registered far too many more
• Many great meet-ups, meals, evenings spent with friends and family

EverClients – Pivoted to Serve Good-Willed Freelancers

Books, Podcasts, Talks, Videos

In 2014 I read 25+ books and skim-read several others. I’m happy to say that I abandoned several books before I hit their half-way mark, letting crappy books go in preference of better writing. Life’s too short. John Steinbeck, Huxley, Hemingway, and the amazing Frank Herbert lit up my year. Having never read such fiction, I have been blessed by finding as many great works in a single year as I have. I also really enjoyed The Little Prince and Stoner, who both hide life lessons under their respectively different hats.

Through non-fiction I continued to study Stoicism; Meditations by Marcus Aurelius read like an operating system update for my mind, ushered in by the sturdy The Obstacle is the Way by Ryan Holiday, and wholly reinforced by the sweeping greatness that is Mastery by Robert Greene. I’ve found that a mixture of Stoicism and Buddhism blends well and always seems to wrench me from whatever foul mood or false perception I may get stuck in. I look forward to continuing to explore these, and other philosophies.

In June I secured an allotment, and as a result I mixed in ~10 gardening books and plenty of documentaries on the subject of growing food. Monty Don has proven the most apt teacher, with a focus on organic growing, and plenty of worldly experience (see Zen gardens episode of Around the World in 80 Gardens). The River Cottage Veg Patch book was also very useful.

Lastly, and of significant note, there has been a few extra voices which have really affected me at the close of 2014. George Orwell jumped out of the page at me in Why I Write, slapping me in the face with a satirical, but honest glance at the English persona of 50 years past, instilling in me a strong desire to follow suit, to write more, and to do my share of ripping at the illusionary veil of the herd. Akala added inspiration with his excellent short narrative in The Ruins of Empires, (which was wicked to see performed live). Thoreau recently added even more weight to the desire to finish my novel, though reading Orwell and hearing Akala has given most form to my intent, with their modern unrelenting focus on the truth at the crux of man. The voices of these men, along with Marcus Aurelius, Seneca and such, have deeply impacted me this year, all for the better.

• Dune by Frank Herbert
• Doors of Perception by Aldous Huxley
• The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck 
• Cannery Row by John Steinbeck
• For Whom The Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway
• The Little Prince by Antoine Saint-Exupery
• Stoner by John Williams
• The Kingkiller Chronicles: The name of the wind by Patrick Rothfuss
• Slaine: The Horned God by Pat Mills and Simon Bisley (2000AD)
• Ark Royal by Christopher Nuttal
• The Ruins of Empires by Akala
• Finding Your Way Without Map or Compass by Harold Gatty
• Meditations by Marcus Aurelius
• Mastery by Robert Greene
• The Obstacle is the Way by Ryan Holiday
• Make Your Mind an Ocean by Lama Yeshe
• Start Something that Matters by Blake Mycoskie
• Tribes by Seth Godin
• What I learned losing a million dollars by Jim Paul and Brendan Moynihan
• A Biography of Alexander Bell by unknown
• Didn’t read Meet you in hell by Les Standiford (on Carnegie, over dramatized)
• Skim-read Jab, Jab, Jab, Right hook by Gary Vaynerchuk (shallow)
• The Complete Gardener by Monty Don
• Veg Patch by Mark Diacono (River Cottage book)
• Skim-read several other allotment/gardening books
• Grammar for Grownups by Katherine Fry and Rowena Kirton (grammar was useful, examples painfully bleak)
• The Elements of Style by William Strunk Jr.
• How to market a book by Joanna Penn
• On Writing by Stephen King
• Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott
• Why I Write by George Orwell
• Started reading “Where I lived, and what I lived for” by Thoreau
• Wrote reviews for all books on Goodreads

Worth Watching/Listening to

I’ve watched plenty of documentaries, interviews and stand-up comedy this year, here’s a few of my favourites:

• Bill Hicks – Revelations (note the black monolith from 2001)
• 2001: A Space Odyssey
• Robert Greene on Joe Rogan Experience
• Jaron Lanier on Future of Technology
• Unlearn your MBA with David Heinemeier Hansson
• John Jantsch at WDS2014 (I was in the audience!)
• How to Change Your Mind – Julia Galef
• Fire in the Booth Cypher 2014
• How School Kills Creativity – Ken Robinson
• Jodorowsky’s Dune
• Ryan Holiday on Tim Ferriss Show
• Kevin Kelly on Tim Ferriss Show
• Fed Up
• Peter Joseph of Zeitgeist Movement on London Real
• Century of Self (4 episode documentary)
• Graham Hancock on Joe Rogan Experience
• Randall Carlson on Joe Rogan Experience
• Noam Chomsky 2014 Interview with Chris Hedges

Stick to the plan?

This time last year I made a plan for 2014, and though I had the best intentions, I’ve not achieved a whole lot of it. But that’s okay; failing is part of the process. Of my 7 goals, I’ve partly achieved 3 and failed at the others. I’ve gladly found a few great people who I’d call mentors as much as friends, had a solid year advising EpicPlugins, and very nearly won the UK Catan Championship (came 2nd, got sent to Berlin World Championships, then placed 39th). It’s been a ride. This year I’ll tackle my year plan a bit differently, opting for fewer firm goals and an overall direction rather than specifics.

In the spirit of introspection, I’ll hammer out some highs and lows below, but overall I am glad for both.

What Worked & Highs

I’ve made less money this year than previous years, but I’m happier. This is a marked change in my outlook which I am happy to note. Culture and the people around me are as important as any economic success, probably more important. “Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.” Thoreau is right, and it’s taking a few years to steer my ship true. I end the year in no debt, in little positive balance, but still I am all the more enriched by the words and sentiment I’ve been lucky enough to have absorbed.

Here are a few highlights which make me smile from 2014:

• Love, Friends & Family
• Great books
• Persistent Meditation (160 day chain & classes)
• Yosemite National Park & proposing atop a mountain
• Index cards for organisation (hat tip to Ryan Holiday & Tim Ferriss)
• Giving up refined sugar (watch Fed Up and give up!)
• Successful Joint Ventures
• Networking, saying yes, and meeting awesome people
• Pivoting my company away from money-chasing toward service

What Didn’t Work

For 2015 I’ll be honing my plans, because although this stuff didn’t come together, I see most of them as a failure in planning. Those that I’ve failed at for other reasons are just good learning. I should be so lucky to fail this much in 2015

Novel not published – It wasn’t ready, but I’ve now done my homework and will attack it again in 2015, watch this space.
Creating a SaaS/WordPress plugins for the money – I could of noticed the hints from my subconscious that I was veering away from my true intent, but I soldiered on trying to force the market to love the product, rather than trying to serve people. Months of work created a good product for a tiny, unaware market. I’ve since pivoted to a new, wholesome vision, and will be building a product for the people in 2015.
Health – Loads of colds, flu’s and hints of my childhood asthma. My immunity is low and my desk-time suffered. After much time wasted at the GP I’ve taken my health thoroughly into my own hands, improving diet and eliminating potential causes. I’ve finally come to a realisation that SBS is likely the main influence, and that my body is particularly reliant on clean air. Thanks to my Withings scales I was able to identify that my modern apartment actually has unhealthy levels of CO2, and that, in fact is a major problem.
Frayed attention – I’ve had this problem for years, but in 2014 it reached fever pitch when I noticed I had over 100 tabs open in Chrome, (I’m thankful for the RAM in this pc). This is just one symptom of a larger failure to organise. Another symptom is my indiscriminate creation of side-projects. I’ve built many, including web-apps to budget my time, but ironically not used or finished them due to a feeling of lack of time. This feeling is without basis, I’ve filled my time very meaningfully, and ought to simply clean up after myself and discriminate more with side-projects.

Summary

2014 was a foundational year for me. More than ever I’ve chosen what to spend my time doing, and through discriminative study I’ve been able to dispel much illusion and chaff. I am beginning to see the ways in which I can help others best, while feeding myself, and truth-seeking. I am grateful for all who have shared this with me, and look forward to elaborating on this base in 2015.

I leave you with two formative videos, and some photos. Hope to see you in 2015!

The post 2014 Review first appeared on Woody Hayday | Blog.

Note: With big intent for 2014 I will be moving to a new blog where I can be more focused and share only the big great/painful stuff, it’ll focus on concious self development and will be the future home of this kind of post. Visit WoodyHayday.com for up to date info on this. For now, back to last year:

Books

In 2013 I read 2x more books than in 2012, I’ve been intentionally amping up my reading. 2013 was a fantastic year for inspiration and looking back over the list of titles I’m glad to say that most were solid reads. Autobiographies gave me great inspiration for living and learning, with a smattering of modern thought tethering it all to today. I was initially looking for role models I could gleam advice from, seeking to replicate – but I ultimately found so much more in a lot of these books.

Here’s my 2013 pick, I can’t recommend these enough:

[None of these are affiliate links.]

Talks, Podcasts, Videos, Music

Glad to have found all of these. Thanks to the friends who’ve shared links and the authors that have lead me to find them. The Joe Rogan Experience podcast is the most coherent thing to my vision of my own existence I have found all year, props to Joe for having rational conversations that tip the balance to positive. Add Akala & Low Key to the mix and I see a future.

• Seth Godin Q & A
• Graham Hancock – The War on Conciousness (Banned TED talk)
• The Pretotyping Manifesto
• Chris Sacca Interview
• Tim Ferriss on London Real (and this post made me smile)
• Akala – Another Reason & Low Key – My Soul
• Joe Rogan Experience Podcast, notably:
  • Lorenzo Hagerty – http://podcasts.joerogan.net/podcasts/lorenzo-hagerty
  • Graham Hancock – http://podcasts.joerogan.net/podcasts/graham-hancock-2
  • Dave Asprey – http://podcasts.joerogan.net/podcasts/dave-asprey
  • Steven Pressfield – http://podcasts.joerogan.net/podcasts/steven-pressfield-aubrey-marcus
  • Stefan Molyneux – http://podcasts.joerogan.net/podcasts/stefan-molyneux

Akala – Find No Enemy

Projects

2013 was a full year of “work”. I consulted for ~3 months, building several WordPress plugins and a few web app prototypes, after which I became CTO at SAM, building the MVP there. Towards the close of the year I’ve now reset my goals and started working on the future of StormGate and Woody Hayday, in business terms (I’m looking for software problems to fix & finishing my novel!)

Social Gallery – Social Gallery moved in to the Epic Plugins.com suite of WordPress plugins, it’s since gone on to continue to sell well and is constantly in the “top sellers this week” section on CodeCanyon. It’s now beaten 2k sales and is on its way to 3k.

SAM – Social Asset Management (samdesk.io) – I joined SAM as CTO in March 2013 at inception stage and spent six months building the first MVP. SAM is a platform for media professionals to find and manage Social Assets (tweets, instagram photos etc.) in a modern, coherent way. It’s at the leading edge of innovation in the market and I’m glad I took it to MVP. I got to stretch my legs with almost all of AWS, and up to date JS. I moved on from SAM in October but I am confident it’s going to be a big success, definitely one to watch. James (CEO/Co Founder) continues to be an inspiration.

Writing/Other/Futures – In the last part of 2013 I began experimenting with a few options. I started working towards releasing my sci-fi novel in 2014 (perhaps August – click here to get notified), but for bread and butter I’ve been working on some software projects (SaaS for freelancers, authors and many other ideas!). I also finalised a joint venture that will begin in January. I’m keen to keep a fairly open field until I find something which matches my desired conditions.

Travel

We didn’t intend to travel that much in 2013, what with moving house, twice. We started in Belgium, moved back to Hertfordshire and still fitted in West Wales, Edinburgh, Dunfermline (Carnegie!) Great Yarmouth, Amsterdam (IBC2013) and finished the year in Romania. I couldn’t think of a better place to spend some time than Sinai with good friends! Now we are back in the home counties we are having lots of great evenings out in London and a few good talks too, it was a highlight of 2013 to go to four Akala gigs, his last featuring Low Key especially.

Time Management

In 2012 I started logging time I spend on a computer against projects. This was in part for consultancy billing but developed into a total analysis of my time spent. In 2013 I logged every minute I spent at a computer, tagging the time against a project (I used Toggl, which is excellent.) The process was interesting, as are the results. Doing this is definitely a solid step towards efficacy in your everyday life.

Time logged: 2871 Hours 54 Minutes

Or: Average 55 hours a week / 8 hours a day!

Here’s the distribution of my time – the big blue section is SAM, the other projects seem to share out quite evenly!

• Email took up way less time than I had expected, totalling around 53 hours (just over an hour a week!) – I had been purposely lean on this in 2013, trying to avoid all “busy work”. Success.
• “Lunch Reading” took up a bigger chunk than I had expected, though was still less than most people traditionally spend on lunch breaks.
• I spent more time in the gym than I remembered!
• I spent less than 100 hours playing computer games (Command and Conquer, Battlefield) – Again I was trying to keep lean here.
• Several little projects produced fantastic returns per hour overall. I wonder how this scales.

2013 Summary

The post 2013 Annual Review first appeared on Woody Hayday | Blog.

Just a quick post to say that yesterday evening I released the free version of Social Gallery. As Social Gallery has been so popular (now over 700 copies sold on CodeCanyon) it seemed only fair to share some of the awesome out to the WordPress.org family (and to the non-profit’s and such that asked me for assistance.) This “Lite” free version of the premium Social Gallery gives the major functions of Social Gallery but just has all the frill chopped out – it’s still a great way to get more engagement out of your blog images and will no doubt help lots of WordPress fledgling bloggers get more likes & comments on their content. I’m glad to release this free version so as it can be used by all!

If you want to try out Social Gallery Lite you can get a copy over at WordPress.org:

Or read more about this free version release on the Social Gallery Plugin.com blogpost.

Happy Social-Lightboxing to all!

The post Free “Lite” Version of Social Gallery released! first appeared on Woody Hayday | Blog.

Owing to the fact that I just wanted to get everything down and perhaps because it was my first ever, my 2012/2013 review ended up a pretty mammoth document. I’ve published bits I would like to share here, the actual review though covers as many angles of my life as I can compute

If you haven’t ever done a personal annual review I urge you to give it a try – it doesn’t even matter if it’s later in the year – it’s a great way to take stock and remember your big-picture intentions.

I hope to get around to a project this year which will delve into such human “systems” in far more detail (I want to write a book on it) – but from this first year alone I can tell you there’s a lot of value in this process, give it a try!

I’m Woody Hayday and here’s my 2012 Annual Review:

(Stolen from my very own facebook)

Books

I didn’t read a whole lot in the first half of 2012 but endeavoured to catch up with myself by the end of the year – in my eagerness to absorb M.Scott Peck’s fantastic “Further along the road less travelled” and the Dalai Lama’s “The Universe in a Single Atom: The Convergence of Science and Spirituality” at the same time I blew my own mind out of the back of my head in January. This was totally unhelpful to my overall flow of reading (this year I’m avoiding heavy stuff when I need to keep motivated.)

Here’s my pick of my 2012 reading – some fantastic books here, I can hardly give them enough praise:

• Poor Charlie’s Almanack by Charles T Munger – This coffee table sized book has more value in it than 80% of business book’s I’ve read, combined. Phenomenal wit  and fantastic, rational truth’s. Learn: Margin’s of Safety & Framework of Models.
• Seeking wisdom – From Darwin to Munger – A more consise edited version of Poor Charlie’s Almanack – you can read one or the other but you might miss 20% of the good stuff overall. This is incredibly dry until about half way through, but persevere!
• Letters From a Stoic by Seneca – Phenominal wisdom from 2000 years ago, shame most of humanity is too preoccupied to absorb it! Absolute imperative read.
• Winning Concepts by Dave Gannaway – Simple, positive, 80’s businessman attitude building
• The Rights of Man by Thomas Paine – American & French Revolution commentary never had such retort, fantastic example of a semi-modern genius rationale, highlighted to me the vacuum of non-correction which seems to exist around societies, specifically Great Britain.
• Hear Us O Lord from Heaven Thy Dwelling Place by Malcolm Lowry – Fantastic, mad literature that’ll catch you off guard.
• The Picture of Dorian Grey by Oscar Wilde – A classic, bored me until it won me over in it’s penultimate pages.
• The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho – Storified advice on following your dreams. Well written and enjoyable, a great, stealthy way to get positive drive on a big project.
• The Universe in a Single Atom by The Dalai Lama – The Dalai Lama is responsible for several great books – this one is a step heavier than some since and covers the convergence of eastern spirituality and wisdom with modern science, quantum physics and such. Immense but heavy!
• Further Along the Road Less Travelled by M.Scott Peck – If you haven’t read “The Road Less Travelled” read that and come back to this a year later. It’s dense with reality, wisdom and psychology in the best way possible, but in being so I also found it overwhelming (perhaps I read it too fast.) This is one I’ll re-read for sure.

[None of these are affiliate links.]

Projects

Mixing client web development consultancy via StormGate with my own projects, 2012 was still a less fractured year to those before it. I committed to a few major projects which I will mention here but I also didn’t manage to get round to a few I hoped to (finishing off that novel) – C’est la vie!

ChooseFest – The largest project I took on in 2012, ChooseFest is “A festival search engine that matches your music tastes to a better festival” and was fairly successful, closing the year with 600+ users and some really great feedback. Long-tail search engine rankings and a viral nature have carried it well into 2013, where it should continue to grow. Unfortunately work on this one was cut short early in 2012 due to other things getting in the way, I hope to work more on it this year.

Social Gallery – A side project founded from a client’s request, Social Gallery is a WordPress plugin which adds a “facebook style” social lightbox to your blog images – it’s pretty kick ass as you can see. Though this started out as a small experiment it’s been fantastically recieved and is now on it’s second version. It continues to sell well on CodeCanyon. (Branding on this one was done by the fantastic MRK Designs.)

Other noteworthy side projects: Remote backup & health monitoring system for shared hosts (I can now get insane value by using the best of the shared hosts coupled with this setup.) Sales Rocket Pro – this client project had some nice gamifaction intentions! Easy Envato Assistant (tiny project but useful.) Base CRM Contact Form plugin. Seedr’s listing for ChooseFest (temporarily postponed). Lots more including several innovative facebook integrations, a Facebook HTML5, CSS3 and jQuery animated game, a handful of mobile related WordPress plugins and lots of other alpha release’s that I can’t reveal yet

Travel & Health

Compared to previous years I only took a fraction of time away from work this year – I was back and forth between Belgium (Gent) and the UK fairly regularly, with trips to Romania and Denmark. I also got a great week of strategising in a log cabin in the Ardenne. I was glad to see lots of my friends and family visit in Gent, but otherwise had wanted to maintain focus on work. I also hit Wilderness Festival which was cool.

I started out the year averagely healthy and ended it about the same – my intention had been to pursue the slow carb diet and continue to do MED workouts at the gym, alas I let work get the better of me and did not maintain this. I did manage to run my first 10k (the Gent Staad Loop) though, which was exciting.

2012 Summary

It was a full on year of development, I probably produced more lines of more elegant code, drank more coffee and blogged less than any other recent year. Overall I am happy with the outcomes achieved, what else is there to be, after all ChooseFest turned out to seal the end of a fantastically large learning curve, Social Gallery a surprise hit and I managed to find 3 or so books which have utterly transformed my outlook. I should hope to remember that any future successes should be proportionally devoted to Charles Munger, Seneca and my special way of learning: the practical art of digging yourself holes you then have to climb out of.

I hope to realise enough success in coming years to confidently share the hell of a ride it’s been so far.

Have a phenomenal 2013!

P.S. You may get a 2012: Looking Forward post too, if your lucky!

P.P.S. I borrowed this post title from Chris Guillebeau’s 2012 Looking Forward (hope that’s OK Chris), if you haven’t read anything of his stuff check out his latest book $100 Startup, it kicks ass.

The post 2012 Annual Review: Looking Back first appeared on Woody Hayday | Blog.

Do you use Auction2Post [A2P]? If you don’t its a wordpress plugin which automatically implants listings from ebay as wordpress posts, including affiliate links through the ebay partner network from which you earn a commission. Its quite useful. Read my post about it here. Anyhow if you don’t use the plugin you can pretty much skip this post, unless you use a similar thing which is generating all kinds of nasty strings you don’t want in your posts

This post will show you how to sanitise your auction2post posts for annoying (and contract breaking) ebay auction strings, it even has 125 rules already in a file for import!

The problem

Auction2Post is great in lots of respects, its well written and does a prescribed job. Where it caused irritation for me is arguably after its done its job, after the wordpress plugin had created its posts. You see you can create posts via templates, which is great, it allows enough customisation for most, however I wanted a bit of text processing as often you are left with irritating auction footers and garbage text which make the user hit back or close at a displeasing rate (some of these ebay strings might actually make your Auction 2 posts sites break ebay partner network terms of service, its really worth sanitising your posts as I describe below!)

The Solution

This problem with Auction 2 Post and wordpress is one of the reasons Automated Editor was born, to give a bit more freedom in text processing, wordpress filters are great but I don’t think filtering hundreds of ebay phrases like that is effective.

If you want to cleanse your Auction2post posts of dirty ebay auction footers and the like here is how I currently do it:

1. Install Automated Editor plugin on the blog in question. (Get it here and install like a normal plugin.)
2. Go to the plugin (Auto Editor on its plugin menu) and read the disclaimer (big red box) and THEN accept it.
3. Download the rules file I have created (Get it at the bottom of this post) and unzip it somewhere.
   
4. Go to “Import/Export” on the Automated Editor plugin menu.
   
5. Choose the aforementioned rules file and hit import.
   
6. You should now have 125 or so rules in your rules list
7. Now go to Schedules on the plugin menu and then click Add New.
8. Scroll down and hit Select All (under the long list of rule checkboxes ebay1, ebay2 etc.)
   
9. Scroll down again and select Most Recent Post from the Target dropdown.
10. Make sure run option is on “After a post is published”.
    
11. Save it.
12. Turn on schedules.
    
13. Post a test post, either via A2P or manually, it should remove any of the 125 annoying (common) ebay auction strings it finds! Sorted.

Notes on this method:

• You will need the Full version (Ultra Pro) of Automated Editor, the free version is limited to 3 rules and this rules file alone has 125 ebay-string removing rules. It’s cheap though here.
• If you already have Auction2Post auction posts in the system you will have to setup a different schedule to operate on those, I usually set this up before I set any automation (it’s quite easy, just do the same thing and switch out “Most Recent post” for “all posts”, run it once then disable the schedule – you don’t want it operating on them all every time!)
• Currently this removes 125 strings I have found previously, mostly from uk auctions, I am considering writing a simplified version of this whole setup, an “Auction2Post Post Cleaner” which you can just activate and leave, perhaps with cloud rules, so watch this space. Good thing about the above setup though is you can continually improve your own rules file by adding your own strings.

Rules File

The link below offers a RAR’d version of my Automated Editor rules file which contains 125 x ebay string removal rules, yours for free Please however do use carefully, as with all automated-editor situations if you don’t understand what you are doing then don’t use it, this is for the people that understand the above problem and have the full version of the plugin.

Download Rules File
[Right click-Save as]

The post Remove unwanted eBay strings from A2P [Auction2post] posts with Automated Editor first appeared on Woody Hayday | Blog.

Website hacker entrance vectors (have any security holes?)

Common CMS, E-Commerce systems and forums (out of date or zero day, they all have or have had vulnerabilities) – WordPress, Drupal, OSCommerce, Gallery, PHPBB, VBulletin etc. etc. Particularly relevant here are the open source systems, but they are all susceptible – how many of these do you have installed where? For me these could of been answered with “a lot” and “some places”, clarity has now been restored but more on that later.

CMS Plugins (^^) – Often overlooked (especially by me), installed plugins can in themselves be entry vectors, often CMS’s push their communities to develop additional functionality for their system, which is a good thing, however if the system itself doesn’t deal particularly well with the security of folder structures or indeed how plugins are accessed they can offer ways in. Be careful with plugins which deal with file management and code execution (e.g. file attachers/uploaders etc.) Try to use late version highly rated plugins from reputable sources, with things like WordPress, plugins are low risk though as it has an excellent security model.

Bespoke server-side code and CMS’s – in my experience these is often LESS likely to get hacked, firstly “hackers” in this case are more likely to be script kiddies sitting in web cafes in some of the poorer world nations, they often use known exploits on common systems rather than trawl the web, searching for one off programmer mistakes. If you are behind the bespoke stuff leave out as many foot prints as possible and triple check everything. For bespoke stuff the most likely point of entry is simple SQL Injection, use SQL parameters.

FTP/WebDav – This really comes down to passwords as next indicated.

Passwords – Acquired by trojans or traffic sniffers, it becomes irrelevant what security you have in place across the whole setup if you don’t look after them properly. Avoid connecting to anything unencrypted (or at all if possible) on any network you don’t 100% trust, WIFI and wired, even if it’s a friends they could have a network sniffing Trojan on an idle machine. Install good anti-virus and protection software. Use Avast (free for private use) and Spybot Search and Destroy (these two are plenty.) Be careful with providing access to other users, whether it FTP, CMS, SSH, whatever – you may trust them but do you trust their computers?

Detection and Fixing – Realising you’ve been hit and fixing it

So after they gain entry, what would a hacker really do? Often with web hacking the motivation is kudos, money or sabotage – all are achieved through defacing, deleting or modifying web pages/logic and/or altering/downloading databases. A nightmare from the point of view of shared hosting users.

Depending on how they gain entry a hacker (or their automated executing code) may search through all of the files they can access, through ftp or server-side scripts, built to identify possible files to manipulate. They may download copies of things (e.g. databases!) but will likely set about cycling through all available webpage files and doing things such as:

• Inserting code within the page (iframes to bad websites, links to their websites – designed to improve their search engine rankings, redirect code which just shuttles people on to their sites)
• Replacing the file with a predesigned page (kudos fronts ‘this website was hacked by…’)
• Replacing common server-side functions and variables (e.g. replacing all the send values on email scripts to forward emails to an account other than the owners)

If you have a single site, or 10 or something the chances are you personally check them all every now and again, getting a little facetime at least once a week say. In this case your opportunity for hosting a hacked site is 7 days, not awful, not great – Google and browsers will start blocking your site if the hacker has inserted any code going to malware or similar, and otherwise may start to drop you down the rankings if your site now displays a ‘hacked by..’ page instead of your wholesome site.

In the case of a lot more sites on the host this can mean no detection for a longer time, if no system is in place, often first recognised through a drop in statistics/earnings (more likely earnings as in the case of iframed malware a change in the number of hits can be not hugely obvious.)

To add confusion to the mix it’s not unknown for hackers to mask their changes to you, it’s very easy with .htaccess files and php/asp headers (for example) to show content relative to its viewer. E.g. the hacker could shuttle people coming in from Google to a hacked page but people that access the site directly (typing it in) get shown the normal site. Furthermore they may not hit every site you have, perhaps a handful of random choices, some folders not others, a smokescreen like attack which could change each time.

Chances are once you get all your pages fixed and get around to looking at where the security hole is that when you recheck your sites they would have been hit again. This tells you two things, 1. The hacker is relentless (or more likely has a relentless automated program, exploiting 24/7) and 2. You have not plugged the security hole. Or if you are really unlucky you are being hacker tag teamed.

So anyway, detection. How do you go about knowing the integrity of your web portfolio? What if it spans 10 shared hosting accounts or 4 servers? Well likely if you own your own server you have spent the time/cash in locking everything down, what I suggest here would be useful to you guys but you may already have a better solution in place.

Currently there are a bunch of services which will do this for you, of which I have tried zero. “Monitoring” services are available worldwide ranging in prices drastically, for me though even the high end services didn’t offer a full set of features and were mostly hugely overpriced but for the top 50% of the portfolio, not effective for me.

The good things about using external monitoring services are obvious but none seemed to be able to offer realistic change monitoring (e.g. WordPress blogs may change content between <div id=”whatever”> and </div> every hour but the rest of the page should stay almost the same.) It is important they see the addition of malicious code to good pages and not throw constant false alarms. For ‘this website was hacked by..’ pages though they probably do a good job (as well as malware detection.) Uptime monitoring is also common as part of the packages, useful without doubt.

I suggest another way though of monitoring an established portfolio, that is the way I have resolved my recent hacker attacks, a realistic option for shared host/anywhere-in-the-world-with-a-laptop client based use. Ultimately an extension of a few older applications I wrote to manage a growing portfolio, weathered by several hacks across accounts within the past 6 months – Hard checks of every important file.

At first I wrote my system to simply allow me to take stock of the sites and CMS’s I have in place, to work out possible security holes from behind the scenes – but it turns out it works surprisingly well in identifying breaches. By checking your actual live file structure (.htaccess, index.php, default.aspx, index.html etc.) against a known correct file structure snapshot, you take the whole http part of the checking out of the loop, effectively making it a higher level integrity check than external services can ever offer.

By making Checksums of every critical file (often hackers just hit index.php, index.html, default.aspx etc.) within a given ftp/file structure and then automatically rechecking at scheduled points it becomes easy to minimise your window for financial fallout from hackers. This may seem like a time/bandwidth/processor consuming task but in actuality 100 websites with WordPress installed could be checked in a few Mb of download – in terms of modern data use that’s a few browses of a facebook photo gallery. What’s more it can run in the background, only prompting you on changes to files, as frequently as you want.

The side benefit of producing complete hosting account checksum snapshots is you are also able to accurately backup a working copy of your hosting account. Built into the checking process this means that you can then correct hackers’ malicious changes with a click of a button.

This of course does not take into account more hard-file based websites, database changes or regularly altered sites. I recommend automated screenshots to cover these or the combination of external monitoring services and integrity checking.

I have written an alpha release of this system (named Website Integrity Checker for now) and will gladly distribute/discuss it if you drop me a comment below. A beta copy might make its way out sometime.

The post Hackers wrecking your shared host account? Check your Website Portfolio Integrity first appeared on Woody Hayday | Blog.

The post Small update for Reddit Wallpaper Grabber first appeared on Woody Hayday | Blog.

*update: I found a similar software here on new scientist, its not the same that inspired this post but its relevant, video from there.

But what about other avenues? democratise the tools of remapping motion from film and it could be like the mass adoption of photoshop, only for video. With clever mapping of 3d objects within a video stream you could augment your characters as if they were 3d objects, recolour body parts, resize them or inflate their limbs, replace their face with that of a 3d model, give them a tail, wings. As the software gets more clever perhaps we will see more of these quirks in our video.

Perhaps also it will lead us to question what we see in video, just as photoshops *should* have made us re-evaluate our trust in images (innately we seem to trust them still but I guess its only been a decade or so.) Mapping of video in 3d could allow modifications which alter the truths they it appears to show, conspiracy theorists could call fake a whole lot more. No doubt secret services or some agency does similar now but more fakes could become mainstream, with the ability to map anyone’s face over a video of another person no doubt people would use and abuse the technology. Making the system realtime could allow tv presenters to be thinner, accentuated or fat, it could change the way the media consuming world thinks of body image.

Apart from the possibility for fakes I would like to hope it opens doors for a whole new breed of indie producer, an indie film reproducer, remapping digital actors or placing 3d cut out actors onto new or improved sets, writing extensions to old movies and remapping classics. Replacing actors, improving lighting, adding dimensions or taking away reality. Remixing film like we do music, perhaps new breeds of film will spring up, what could the dubstep of film be?

The post Indie remapping of classic films first appeared on Woody Hayday | Blog.

As I said last post if I couldn’t find a reddit wallpaper downloading program I would make one. Well I found upboat (which is good) but with windows 7 (or display fusion) offering cycling desktop backgrounds every x minutes I thought I might write a more brute force downloader. So I did.

Reddit Wallpaper Grabber is essentially:

It’s only about 8 hours work, is unofficial and probably mildly buggy, but it works for me (and probably everyone on windows > 98.)

Features

• Save wallpapers in bulk, direct to a folder on your computer
• Get wallpapers from all the popular wallpaper reddit’s
• Sort by reddit sections (e.g. Whats Hot or Top of All Time)
• Include (or dont) NSFW Wallpapers
• Preview wallpapers before you download them
• Portable exe (No install needed, just runs when you open it)
• Its Free!

If you want to suggest feature requests/point out bugs then please do on the comments of this post. If you haven’t already – go ahead and download it.

Download v0.1 now of Reddit Wallpaper Grabber (its free!)
RedditWallpaperGrabber_0.1.exe (77kb)	RedditWallpaperGrabber_0.1.rar (52kb)

The post Reddit Wallpaper Grabber V0.1 first appeared on Woody Hayday | Blog.