YugaTech | Philippines, Technology News & Reviews

Just 3 hours ago, Wordpress released the latest security upgrade for StrayHorn v1.5.1.3 . Go ahead an upgrade your blogs.

After the recent security breach of PCIJ’s blog, I believe that bloggers will be more aware of the importance of regularly updating their web softwares. Along with WP, PHPNuke and PhpBB are two of the most widely exploited web apps. WP is quick in releasing patches and updates, while phpBB (now v2.0.16) regularly releases new updates as well.

Anyone who knows about the vulnerability can easily exploit them and your site might just be the unlucky target. PCIJ is still lucky the script-kiddie (not a hacker as popularly dubbed) only had limited access to their hosting account and logged in thru a WP hole, otherwise he/she could have wiped out all the files.

I am posting the simple hack I made with using dynamic images to replace the date entries of my blog. Just follow the short tutorial here to implement the same with your Wordpress blog:

• Create your own date image template in Photoshop. Make sure that you layout them so that the month, day and year are all distinct from each other and not overlapping. See my example here :
• Using the ruler guide in Photoshop, slice the template into three parts.
• You will need to determine the date format you use in your blog. Mine uses day of week, day and month. Now create individual images using the sliced template and name them accordingly. For day of week, the naming convention is mon.gif, tue.gif, … sun.gif; for the day — 1.gif,… 30.gif; for the month — jan.gif, feb.gif,… dec.gif.


(Note: If you use full date names, you will need to name your GIF files similarly (i.e. Friday, February 22, 2005 will use “friday.gif”, “february.gif”, “22.gif” and “2005.gif”).
• Now, we’re ready to hack the WP date function to replace text dates with images. Go to your WP theme folder and look for the post.php file and open it for editing. Note: depending on the WP theme you use, the file could also be index.php.
• Look for the date function as such:
  < ?php the_time('D, M j') ?>

  You will need to break that into 3 parts like this:

  < ?php the_time('D') ?>
  < ?php the_time('M') ?>
  < ?php the_time('j') ?>

  Now we edit them so the code echos the image equivalent:

  < ?php $d = strtolower(get_the_time('D')); echo ("< img src= 'wp-images/{$d}.gif' > “); ?>
  < ?php $m = strtolower(get_the_time('M')); echo ("< img src= 'wp-images/{$m}.gif' > “); ?>
  < ?php $j = strtolower(get_the_time('j')); echo ("< img src = 'wp-images/{$j}.gif' > “); ?>
• You will need to check on the date format parameter string if you have a different date format.

I hope that was fairly simple to understand. I’m not sure if this hack can be made into a plugin though. Maybe some other time.

David Shea of mezzoblue.com made a simplier version using HTML/CSS. Update: Josh of File Me Away made the same tute for MT.