OT: computers again - hacking question

[The Natural Philosopher]

+1

LEARN HTML. and produce clean lightweight code that runs like lightning

[Bert Coules]

I wonder slightly if it would be any messier than the coding I would produce by myself, even with the aid of templates and libraries, but I take the point. Thanks.

Bert

[Mike Barnes]

Andy Burns :

More useful than WYSIWYG is WYDSWYE (Why You Don't See What You Expect). For that you want a browser with a built-in debugger. I've used Firefox/Firebug and Safari's Web Inspector, both excellent.

[Tim Streater]

They generally produce s**te html.

[fred]

Oh god no, you come across as someone who takes pride and care in what you do, a true DIYer, and I would expect the same care in your use of templates and coding. I would not expect the source of your hack to be related to your previous choice of manual coding.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Yes.

The temptation is to do everything by preceding every single paragraph with a load of fixed firmat and font statements to guarantee WYSWIYG

This is absolutely the wrong approach.

The right approach is to spend time setting up a style sheet, and determining the blockk areas on screen and using tables divs or frames to set them up flexibly and THEN start formatting the text and images.

[Johann Klammer]

Perhaps you could just use plain textfiles? People will surely remember it in a positive way, as nearly every site is full of graphics diarrhea, which is just terribly distracting and slows down page access.

[Bert Coules]

Thanks very much for that.

I'll certainly do my best. I'll investigate the various options today.

Many thanks to everyone who responded; much appreciated, as ever here.

Bert

[Dave Liquorice]

And "clever" editors tend to be constructed to produce code that works well in a particular browser but doesn't in others. Half the battle with web pages is getting them to render more or less the same across a range of browsers.

[Martin Brown]

I would be *very* worried by this. YMMV They should know how to override anything that a hacker can do to their servers filesystem.

It also hints at the possibility that your password was not broken or local website scripts compromised but their server configuration was hacked directly and they are no longer in complete control of it.

Almost certainly to spread malware and recruit more botnet members.

You may find other compromised sites containing lists of forests.

[Tim Streater]

Is the correct answer.

[Andy Burns]

Temporarily turning-on garish background and border colours for the blocks at the design stage, then seeing how they react to changing screen/window sizes helps ...

[Bert Coules]

I rather like this idea, perhaps with the addition of a "gallery" section which would be the only area of the site with graphics and images. Thanks.

Bert

[Bert Coules]

and Dave Liquorice wrote:

I rather like Johann Klammer's suggestion of only using plain text (though I think would vary it slightly with a single "gallery" section). This would both be distinctive and different, and should also go a long way towards making the site work for different browsers.

Bert

[The Natural Philosopher]

we have all done that too.. as doers looking at the source in a window that detects and highlights errors and or running it through a page validator.

[Man at B&Q]

Be afraid, be very afraid. Of your ISP, that is. They sound like a bunch of idiots to me.

MBQ

[Bert Coules]

It was only the chap at the end of the support phone line who found that the added subdirectory and files were seemingly undeletable. He passed the problem on, and today everything has been eradicated.

Bert

[The Natural Philosopher]

He didn't have root access obviously

Except the means by which access was gained in the first place.

[Mike Tomlinson]

En el artículo , fred escribió:

I think it's probably more likely he uploaded the files with permissions that were too loose.

[Mike Tomlinson]

En el artículo , The Natural Philosopher escribió:

There's a bug (well, a stupid default) in the Apache shipped with CentOS

5.5 that allows third party PHP scripts to be run.

in /etc/php.ini:

allow_url_fopen = On

should be

allow_url_fopen = Off

got bit by this.