That’s what I keep telling myself today.  If the day before is a bad day, telling yourself that today is a new day is a new way to start over. Start fresh. Let your mind reset itself, and try again.

I posted this as a Facebook status earlier: “Today is a new day. Today is a new day. Today is a new day” and a great comment to the effect of “the brain can be tricked. Replace “new” with “good” and see what wonders it’ll work.”  Which is amazing advice.

It’s amazing what you can do if you set your mind to it.  Just telling yourself that you’re going to have a good day can do for your mentality.  Just telling yourself that you’re going to be positive actually works.  I’m trying that as my mantra for this week.  Be positive. Stay positive. Act positive.

I’ve been keeping busy this last week, which is why I haven’t updated much.  Lots going on, and my hand in too many pots at once (as usual), and trying to stay above water.

I finally booked a vacation after 5 long years of not having one!  Trip to Vegas in June with friends.  I rented a house, ’cause that’s how I roll.  Go ahead, be jealous.

Oh, and I finally finished my taxes.  Having to repay the government the $8,000 First Time Homebuyer’s credit was rough.  Apparently the law is that you have to live there for 3 years. Even though I still own the house, and rent it out, I had to repay it.  That took a big chunk out of my refund, which hurt. But c’est la vie.

That’s all I’ve got for today.  That’s as interesting as what’s happened in the last week. Sue me.

I’ve been looking for a new theme for this site for a while. And I’m honestly too lazy to make my own from scratch, so I found this one. Modified it a bit to suit my needs, and voila. Here we are.

I’ve added back in the “Music” section, which isn’t complete yet, but it’s almost all of the lyrics to songs I’ve written in my lifetime.  I haven’t written in years, and I’m hoping seeing all of my past stuff on the site every time I come to will inspire me to write something new.

So, there you have it.  Read away. Comments are turned off for the lyrics, but feel free to send me a message if you’ve got any feedback, or even comment on this post.

Note of warning, try not to read anything from the ’90s, I was just a kid and wrote cheesey meaningless crap back then.  2000 and 2001 were good years for me, at least I think so.  Anyway, enjoy. Or not.

As you may (or may not) know, LiveUniverse is a company that provides the ability for website owners (ie; me) to put ads on their site, and make money from it.   Rather than going out and trying to sell ads yourself, LiveUniverse sells them for you, and pays you when you put them on your site. Simple, right?

Not so simple.

In August of 2007, I was contacted by Rob Ellis, who was a “VP” at Peerflix Media.   He promised that we’d make money with our website MovieSnobs, and all we had to do was put an ad on the site, and they’d pay us a monthly fee.   Seems easy, right?

Well, we signed the deal, got our bonus check and things were perfect.   Until LiveUniverse bought Peerflix Media in August of 2008.   (“Publishers” were not notified ahead of time, we were just sent an email letting us know it happened.   I got mine August 11th, 2008.)

Our account manager (if you can even call her that) assured us that our relationship would continue, and we’d be paid the same amount.   She was unsure if there’d be a delay in payment for July or not, but would let me know.

I e-mailed her once every three weeks until November 3rd, when her e-mail no longer accepted incoming mail. (Along with any other @peerflix addresses.)   I tried calling Rob Ellis, the “VP”.   His phone number was disconnected.

I shut down the Peerflix ads on October 31st.   I ran them in July, August, September, and October, and LiveUniverse owes me for those four months.

No one from Peerflix or LiveUniverse has responded to a single message I’ve sent about this.   Another publisher had luck getting the moneys he was owed, by putting up an anti-LiveUniverse website.   It seems the only way to get any attention, is to make net-waves.   So, LiveUniverse, you twisted my arm.   I’ll be sure to spread the word about what a horrible company you are to everyone I know.

If I had the money to start a class action suit against you guys, you bet your asses I would.   But I’m Mr. Lowely Blog owner, and you’re Mr. Big Corporation.   No doubt who’ll win that monetary battle.   I assure you though, I’m not going to give up until I’m paid every cent I’m owed.   And if you think you can bully me to stop telling people that your company sucks… good luck.

To sum up, if you’re a blog owner, stay away from LiveUniverse.   They’ll inevitably screw you in the end.   Just Google it, there’s hundreds (if not thousands) of us former Peerflix folks that got screwed out of money.

I ask one last time: Peerflix/LiveUniverse; pay me my God Damned money.

I got tired of the old design for this site, so I updated to a new theme.   Still modifying it completely, but here it is.

Also, I had to move the photos from the old gallery into a WordPress powered one, which was a pain.   So, while the images now have the ability to have titles and descriptions, they mostly don’t (aside from the RockBand BandMate gallery).   I’ll be doing that over the next few weeks/months, and will do it as I add more galleries.

Hope you enjoy the new design as much as I do.   I’ll probably get bored with it in a few months, anyway. So if you hate it, come back in a little bit, and there’ll most likely be something new.

Working for a fairly large webhost, I often see people who got “hacked”, and their websites destroyed.   I often laugh, because people don’t often get “hacked”, but often simply have their password guessed, which gives the “hacker” full access to your site, account, and files.

98% of the time, that’s the case.   Given, there’s always the chance that someone got root access to your server, and really did “hack” you, but that’s very rare in today’s day and age.

So, I often laugh, until it happened to me back mid-June.   I noticed I couldn’t load the stats pages for any of the sites in my hosting account (of which there are quite a few), so I contacted my host.

Their response was “The page won’t load because it’s 0kb”, a file size of zero? That stats package has worked for years on some of my domains, I thought that was odd.

So I uploaded a new version, and went on about my business.

Hours later, I realized I should go through FTP, and look for other files that had been modified recently.   Sure enough, every index.html and index.php file, in every domain, in every subdirectory had been modified.

The “hacker” (read: bored kid in some random European country) added some code to all my pages that was supposed to redirect a visitor to a spam site.   Luckily, he did it wrong, and none of my visitors were affected.

Needless to say, I was bullshit.   I spent a few hours going through, and removing all of the code, by hand.   I got annoyed, and finally asked one of the guys who works for me, for help.   He wrote me a nifty little bash script that I could run.   Luckily, my host gives me SSH access, and I managed to run it against my entire account, and clean out the rest of the modified files, without issue.

The reason I got hacked? Simple. I had a stupid, easily guessable password.   Exactly what I laugh at our customers for.

So, I panicked.   I went in, and first changed my hosting and FTP passwords.   I then thought about how to change my MySQL password.

The problem with that is complex, but follow me.   If I change the password on the MySQL server, my sites will go down, until I update them one at a time.

If I change my password in the sites, they’ll go down until I change it on the server.   Follow?

So I opted to create a new MySQL user, with a new password all together.   I then (using the same find and replace code from earlier) updated my username in all my scripts, then my password, and voila, back up and running.

I then began thinking about how to protect myself, should this (or something worse) happen again.   I looked for scripts that I could run on the web server, to backup my sites and databases, but couldn’t find anything that would work.   I then stumbled upon HandyBackup, which runs on my computer at home.

It simply connects to your account via FTP, and downloads all of your files to your computer.   This is great, assuming you’ve got storage space to keep all those backups around.   If you upgrade, you can also have it burn to DVD automatically, but that’s costly, and not very effective.

So, each night of the week, I have the application connect, and download all of my changed files.   On Saturday night at midnight, it connects and downloads all of the files (changed, or not).   So, at worst, I’m a week out from a complete restore of files.   And any file that’s changed, I’m only 24 hours (at most) out from a clean working version.

It takes up quite a bit of space, because I host a lot of sites, however I think it’s worth it.   It’s also helpful for when you accidentally break some code on a page, and didn’t think to save a copy right then.   You just jump to your backup, and voila.

If you run any website that you “make money” from, or that “is my business!!”, you should take it upon yourself to do the backups, and not rely on your host to do it.   While most hosts do it anyway, some charge you to do the restore. (My company doesn’t, but the company I host with, does.)   You know what they say, if you want something done right, do it yourself.

I feel compelled to post something. Mainly because I’m bored silly.

Let’s see, what’s going on…   I finished the website for Christine’s aunt (http://www.kathydiamant.com). I’ve also been fine tuning some applications that I’ve written for personal use.

I’ve got a “Task tracking” system that I put together, and have been fine tuning. As well as an invoicing system that I use to bill my clients.   Both of which I’ve done some pretty major overhauling to recently, to bring them up to speed with some of the newer stuff I’ve learned since writing them.

Did some work for a new client in Florida, helping her write some conditional statements to display different CSS styles, based on the browser.   I’m hoping she’s got more work to farm out to me in the future. The more the merrier.

In the “boring life of…” part of my life:   our lease is up in 2 months. We’re debating whether or not we can afford to buy a house yet, with Christine out of work, or if we should move to another apartment.   Our apartment’s sucked since the people who live upstairs moved in. I swear the hell they’re dinosaurs (only in weight, not in age), or they were just never taught how to walk like human beings.   Oh, and they’re opening a road 10 feet outside our window in the next few weeks.   And our rent is ridiculous, too.

I want to buy a house, but we may not be financially ready for that yet. Who knows, we’ll see.

I decided what my next project’s going to be, which will be a lot of work.   I’m going to re-record the entire audio track from The Prestige, which is one of my favorite movies.   My re-recording will be the “spoiler filled” version, and contain dialogue that will pinpoint the spoilers throughout, making it blatently obvious what the ending holds.   I have no idea if these is even possible to do, with the technology I’ve currently got, but who knows.   I’m sure someone’d file a lawsuit and tell me to knock it off, as soon as it was put online.   Who knows.   I think it’d be interesting to do.   I’ll probably never do it, because it’s a lot of work.

That’s about it, just pluggin’ away at life, on a daily basis.   Commute, work, lunch, work, commute, dinner, bed.   Rinse, and repeat.   Somedays it seems like are never gonna end.

Don’t get me wrong, creating WordPress themes is not for the faint of heart, nor for the casual blogger who doesn’t really have a good grasp on developing websites. However, if you know your way around PHP and basic HTML, you should have no issues creating your own theme, or adapting a website into a WordPress theme.

Generally, themes go into the same location, regardless of your blog structure; /wp-content/themes. It depends on what your theme name is, as to what folder you put it in. However, each theme has its own folder, to be kept separate.

When you first install WordPress, you’ll get the “default” theme, which is a great place to start. Usually I copy that folder down to my desktop, and make a clone of it, to work off of.

A theme needs to consist of a few basic files, to make it work:

• index.php
• style.css
• comments.php

You can take it a step further, if you want to easily update/change aspects of the design, and add in a header.php and footer.php. For this example, we’ll use header and footer.

At the top of any existing theme’s CSS file (or when creating a new file), you need to always ensure that you’ve got some information to let WordPress know what the theme is. It’ll generally look like this:

/*
Theme Name: What do you want to call your theme in WordPress?
Theme URI: Where you downloaded the theme from
Description: any details?
Author: your name
Author URI: your URI
Version: You don’t need a version, but can put one in here if you want to.

General comments/License Statement if any.
.
*/

This will tell WordPress information about your theme, to display under the “Presentation” tab.

So, you now have your theme set up, but need the files. Why? Simple, to make the theme work. Here’s a quick run down of what each file does.

• index.php – this is the homepage of your WordPress. You can get away with only having an index, if you don’t want to create different pages for each place in your installation.
• style.css – the stylesheet for your design. You should be fairly comfortable with CSS by this point, if not, there’s a ton of resources available on the internet.
• comments.php – this is the template for what your comments page/form will look like. If you don’t have one, no one will be able to comment on your WordPress
• header.php – this file can be included at the top of all of your “pages” and “posts,” so that you can easily change something across all the pages, without editing each one. This is where you include the majority of your design.
• footer.php – same as the header.php, but goes after your content, instead of before. This is where you conclude your design that comes after the “content” or “body” of your site.

Generally, there are a bunch of other files you can include, too; 404.php, single.php, page.php, author.php, archive.php, search.php, etc.

Each page serves a separate purpose. I won’t get into too much detail, as to not confuse you. Here’s a quick example of what an index.php might look like, if you made it yourself:

<?php get_header(); ?>

<?php if (have_posts()) : ?>

<?php while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>

<div class=”post” id=”post-<?php the_ID(); ?>”>
<?php the_content(‘<br /><br /><div align=”right”>Continue Reading <?php the_title(); ?> »</div>’); ?></span><div align=”right”><br /><br />Posted by: <a href=”<?php the_author_url(); ?>”><?php the_author(); ?></a> on <?php the_time(‘F jS, Y’) ?> at <?php the_time() ?><br><span class=”postmetadata”>Posted in <?php the_category(‘, ‘) ?> | <?php edit_post_link(‘Edit’, ”, ‘ | ‘); ?> <?php comments_popup_link(‘Leave a Comment »’, ‘1 Comment »’, ‘% Comments »’); ?></span></td>

<?php else : ?>

<h2 class=”center”>Not Found</h2>
<p class=”center”>Sorry, but you are looking for something that isn’t here.</p>
<?php include (TEMPLATEPATH . “/searchform.php”); ?>

<?php endif; ?>

</div>

<?php get_sidebar(); ?>

<?php get_footer(); ?>

So, what does all that do? Pretty simple, I’ll break it down bit by bit:

<?php get_header(); ?> – this bit simple calls my header.php file to be included.
<?php if (have_posts()) : ?> – this is very important, your theme won’t work without it. It simple tells WordPress if you have posts, to do the following.
<?php while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?> – if you have posts, show them on this page.

This next bit’s a bit more complicated, because there’s a lot of parts to it:
<?php the_content(‘<br><br><div align=”right”>Continue Reading <?php the_title(); ?> »</div>’); ?> – php the_content is what shows your post. The “continue reading part” will get shown if your post contains a “More” link in it. I’ve set this particular one up to show “Continue Reading This Post”, where “This Post” would be replaced by whatever I’m calling the post in WordPress.

Posted by: <a href=”<?php the_author_url(); ?>”><?php the_author(); ?></a> on <?php the_time(‘F jS, Y’) ?> at <?php the_time() ?><br><span class=”postmetadata”>Posted in <?php the_category(‘, ‘) ?> | <?php edit_post_link(‘Edit’, ”, ‘ | ‘); ?> <?php comments_popup_link(‘Leave a Comment »’, ‘1 Comment »’, ‘% Comments »’); ?> – This will simply show: Posted by: Mike (as a link to my author page) on 10/19/2007 at 12:01PM. Posted in Design, WordPress Tutorials, WordPress. Leave a Comment (or if there’s comments, it’ll show the number of comments already left.)

This bit: <?php edit_post_link(‘Edit’, ”, ‘ | ‘); ?> can be a bit confusing. What this does is simply show you a link that says “Edit” when you’re viewing your post, and you’re an admin on the blog. Other people won’t see it though, don’t worry.

<?php else : ?> – Very important to have, this closes the previous bit where we tell WordPress what to do if we have posts.

<h2 class=”center”>Not Found</h2>
<p class=”center”>Sorry, but you are looking for something that isn’t here.</p>
<?php include (TEMPLATEPATH . “/searchform.php”); ?>

Above is a simple include to a search form. In case someone tries to access a URL that doesn’t exist.

<?php get_sidebar(); ?> – includes a sidebar, if you’ve got one.

<?php get_footer(); ?> – includes your footer.

It seems a lot more complicated than it is, and there’s an infinite amount of variables, and things you can do with your theme. I’ll cover some more variables next time, and what they do. Hope this helped get you started.