John Beales

A couple of weeks ago an article about hacked Wordpress sites came up in my Wordpress admin dashboard.  I hadn’t been paying attention to all of the noise that was apparently going on about hacked blogs, but this article got my attention, and I read it.  I learned a lot about how to see if my blog was hacked, but a lot of it consisted of searching for strings in all of my wordpress files, which would involve downloading them all to my computer.  What a pain in the ass.

Well, that was two and a half weeks ago. Times have changed. Donncha has come out with the Wordpress Exploit Scanner, (currently version 0.1).  It does the work for you!  Download it and check your wordpress blog.  I did, (and I came up clean).

The time has come for me to expand the shop a bit, and I am looking for some help, so, I am looking for a few coders who want to work with me making ideas into websites.

I need people who are good at some or all of:

• LAMP development
• Standards-Based (X)HTML/CSS
• Javacripting/DOM Scripting (Including AJAX)

I am also looking for someone to help out with a tricky custom theme for a Drupal site. If you’re experienced with Drupal, please mention it in your E-mail.

Abilities in other technologies or languages may be an asset. If you are a younger developer looking to to learn or an experienced developer please apply!

You will work on both old-school websites for businesses and new-skool social networks.

You can be anywhere in the world. I don’t have an office, so you will be expected to work remotely. Working hours are flexible, so long as you get the job done and it works how it should I’ll be happy.

What I pay you will depend on what you do, (of course), and your skills and experience. Hours will fluctuate depending on the current workload, I can’t guarantee full-time hours, but there may be times when you have as much work as you want, (and maybe more, although I’ll try to get another person when that time comes).

To apply for a position send me an E-mail at john at johnbeales dot com with whatever info you think I will need to make a decision about you. I’m looking forward to lots of responses!

I have finally upgraded my copy of Wordpress, and I took it all the way to the new version 2.5!

I’m looking forward to playing around with the new features, and maybe even a re-design. What I’ve seen so far looks great though. More will be published soon.

Over the past couple of days I have been privileged enough to receive the first comments on my blog. Wondering where they are? I deleted them. They were spam. It’s really too bad we live in a world full of spammers. Hopefully soon there will be enough people reading here and we’ll have meaningful discussion.

Well, it’s been a little quiet here for the past week and here’s why - I’ve re-done it!

This is a temporary design for the rest of the summer but I like it a lot. I took the photo at the top myself at Oka beach in June. The headers use sIFR to look as beautiful as they do, and I’ve brought everything more to a blog format. The plan is to release this as a Wordpress theme when I’m finished with it, (later in the fall).

For nostalgia’s sake - here’s a screenshot of the old home page:

The old design won’t be released for 2 reasons: It wasn’t made properly and I don’t like it.

So, for now that’s it. I still have some fine tuning to do and I have to add more structure to a couple of areas of the site but they’ll have to wait a few days.