B&P is having comment problems

Technical difficulties dogFor some reason readers are not able to leave comments or see comments on the Bits & Pieces posts.  I can’t see them either.  This is a whole new kind of problem.

I tried disabling the comment editing plugin, but that didn’t fix it.  I haven’t added any new plugins recently.

  I’m looking into it, but I’m not sure what I’m looking for.

Maybe that 3.6 earthquake shook things up.

I tried changing themes and still have the problem so it’s not that.

 

Update:  I think I fixed the problem.  I re-uploaded the .htaccess file and commenting seems to be working now.  

 

B&P inspiration

I occasionally get emails like the one I received from Aryo in Indonesia yesterday:

I’m a long time fan of your site Bits & Pieces. It even inspired me to do a similar site in 2008. It contains funny Bits & Pieces specifically for Indonesian People. But most of the stuff on my site is because we simply have bad english 🙂

Anyways, if you found anything that you like, feel free to put it on Bits & Pieces. It’s http://nicetry.me

Aryo

It’s nice to know that Bits & Pieces has inspired someone to start their own site.  I’ve heard this a few times.  I wonder how many other people have been inspired at least partially by B&P.

Technical Difficulties

ComputercrashI’ve been having computer problems all day.  I upgraded my Norton 360 from version 4 to version 5 a couple days ago and ever since I’ve been unable to connect to my home network (printers and second computer) and had difficulty getting my browser to connect to the internet.  I was able to get Firefox and Chrome to work but couldn’t get IE to work.

I have 3 PC’s and two of then upgraded correctly.  I had the internet connection but in my efforts to fix the printer and network issue by making changes I’ve lost the ability to connect to the internet in any capacity on my main computer.  So, right now I’m in the process of restoring the system software to a time before I installed the upgrade.

Crossing my fingers. 

Update:  The System Restore did the trick.  I still have to upgrade installed and everything seems to be working now.

 

B&P hacked Again… And fixed (I think)

HackedI’ve learned that Bits & Pieces has been hacked with a Google redirect hack.  If you typed bitsandpieces (or anything else that displays a link to B&P) into Google search and click the link you will be re-directed to another site.  (A site that doesn’t come up).  It also affects Google Reader I understand. 

I have found some rogue code in the .htaccess file that did the redirect.  I replaced it with the correct code and it seems OK now.  Now I have to wait and see if some malware reinstalls the hack code.  I’ll also do a complete computer scan overnight tonight.

 Stay tuned.

B&P RSS Feed has been hijacked

For those of you who view B&P via the RSS feed, you’ll notice that the site has been hijacked by someone called DiTesco (or at least that’s what’s popping up when you click on the feed). 

I’m grazing new territory here and am not sure how this happened.  I tried to set up a feedburner account for the RSS feed and that’s when all Hell broke loose. 

I’ll take another look at this tomorrow and see if I can figure out how to fix this.

B&P experiencing technical difficulties

Computer problemsBits & Pieces was down this morning due to  “overloading of the server” it’s on.  My account was suspended sometime over night when  they discovered something on the site was causing their server to be overused.  They don’t normally give you a lot of help, or at least help that I can understand, though I must say the guy I talked to was better than most.  Most of it is still over my head.  I was able to get them to re-instate the account while I try to figure out the culprit.  At their suggestion I disabled a few plugins and am beginning to go through an access log text file from the last 24 hours.  So, for now the comment editing and BABBQ countdown clock are disabled.

Right now I’ve loaded the access log file into a spreadsheet and am sorting the 846,991 line spreadsheet by IP address to see if there might be one main culprit.  If so I can ban that IP address from accessing the site.

10 Million Page loads in 2010 !

I finally got around to working up a few stats for Bits and Pieces for last year.  I was surprised to see a total of just over 10 million page loads.  A page load is defined as any time someone opens a page on a website.  Whether it’s a single post or a homepage with 10 posts on it.  When you change pages the page load count increases. 

2010 bp Stats
via StatCounter  Note: Google Analytics has the total number of page views at 9.7 million. 

People from 214 countries visited Bits & Pieces last year.  They’re ranked below from the highest number of visitors per country to the lowest number.

BP Reader Locations 2010
via Google Analytics

B&P Readers in the U.S. by state

2010 BP US readers

Thanks to each and every one of you for making that possible.