Since I have so much invested in Font Burner it may come as a surprise that I would embrace Google’s system, a direct competitor of Font Burner. Actually, I am thrilled that there is a new (and arguably better) solution to the dilemma of limited type options on the web. I believe that the font industry monopoly is at best selfish, and at worst damaging to the internet as a whole. Now that there is an open source option in which Google picks up the hosting tab, hopefully more and more font designers/foundries will loosen their grip on their typefaces.

When I created Font Burner two years ago I wanted to do anything I could to help expand the options for type on the web. While I am proud of the popularity of Font Burner, it has grown into a service that has stretched my resources significantly. The hosting move I made last week was a direct result of Font Burner and the hosting requirements it demands. Font Burner users generate over one million page views each month, and that bandwidth is steadily growing. With over 11,000 downloads of the Font Burner plugin for WordPress, the demand for alternative font options is obviously high. In attempt to meet this demand I also released an update to the Font Burner plugin that allows users to “self-host” their fonts. This should help keep my Font Burner servers fast (and affordable) along with reducing the risk of service outage for WordPress users. But enough about Font Burner…

Frankly, the Google Font service has several advantages over Font Burner (and the sIFR technology it uses.) First, it is easier to use. Just add a line of code to your web page, and then start using it in your stylesheet with standard css. You don’t have to convert fonts into swf files. You don’t have to mess with writing javascript. You can use it for body copy. You can style it with CSS. The fonts are hosted by Google. It loads quickly. And it is just going to get better.

The gorilla in the room is TypeKit. While some people have embraced this service, I haven’t. The reason is because this is a business venture. Unlike the free open source service of Google, Typekit uses commercial fonts with expensive monthly fees. While there are many commercial sites that may benefit from this service, it is not practical for the average website owner. Paying to use a font on your website (that you may even own already) is ridiculous. I can’t endorse a service that adds another middle man into an already overly complex and expensive system.

So, I really hope that Google Fonts takes off. I hope that the assortment of fonts grows steadily. Knowing Google, it will be the standard in no time.

As soon as I heard Google’s font service announcement I started working on a WordPress Google Fonts Plugin to make it even easier for WordPress users to take advantage of the Gooogle font service. My plugin will be available in the WordPress plugin directory as soon as I get it approved. I will add the link here the instant it goes live.

The reason I have been silent lately is that I have been finishing another chess project that I will hopefully be announcing soon. It is a service that makes it really easy to share chess games with friends using Facebook and other social sites. It has been a fun project and I can’t wait to get it launched. Again, stay tuned.

The other big news is that I just completed a switch to a new web host. If you have been experiencing any outage on this or any of my other sites I apologize. I am moving from Media Temple to DreamHost. I will hopefully post a more detailed comparison of the two companies in the near future, but to make a long story short, Media Temple has been hitting me really hard with GPU overages and it didn’t make financial sense to stay with them. Not to mention they allowed my site to get hacked. And my sites have been intolerably slow. Yeah, I am not a happy camper. However, things are good so far with Dreamhost.

That’s all I can say for now. As always, thanks for stopping by, and next time I will have a real post and not just more teasers. I promise…

The first product I am proud to announce is a WordPress plugin called “Daily Chess Puzzle Widget.” The plugin is a simple way to add chess puzzles to the sidebar of any WordPress powered website. The only prerequisite is that the theme you are using needs to be “widgetized.” The official home of my plugin will reside at adrian3.com/projects/wordpress-plugins/daily-chess-puzzle-widget/

The Daily Chess Puzzle widget pulls its puzzles from shredderchess.com, a website that offers the puzzles for free. Each day they deliver an easy, medium, and hard puzzle. My plugin gives you a dropdown menu where you can choose the size of puzzle you want shown.

While this chess plugin is a relatively simple project it did teach me some valuable lessons that I am planning to build on in future releases. For example, this is the first “widget” I have created and that will be a valuable tool to have in my arsenal going forward.

The next chess plugin I am working on involves a chess game viewer that allows you to post a games into your blog post for people to replay. It will allow you to customize the style, color, size, and features of the chessboard. I am pretty happy with it so far and plan on releasing it in the next week or two so stay tuned.

Not sure how long I will stay in the chess plugin phase, but it has been fun so far!

I have been playing chess online a bit more lately and have been looking for ways to incorporate chess into my blog a bit more. I don’t know what form that will take, but one of the things I have been experimenting with is a WordPress plugin called “Chess by Blog.” This WordPress Plugin allows you to paste a chess game in PGN format into your web posts. For example, the example below shows a game I played last week.

Here is my initial results from trying to use the Chess By Blog WordPress plugin. The plugin seems to work after a little bit of trial and error. For example, I had to manually surround my PGN code with the div class of “CBB-board” to get the game to show up. Perhaps I am missing something. In the HTML tab there is a “Chess By Blog” option that I couldn’t get working, either. I am in Safari right now so maybe I should try it in Firefox. It looks like you can create custom styles and themes for your board, which might be fun to play with. I will add to this post more as I figure out more features/problems with the plugin.

Just so I can leave you with a sample chess game, here is an example using my own Chess WordPress plugin (not Chess by Blog). Enjoy…

This was a fun game. I started out aggressive, but played sloppy leaving myself down several pawns and then a knight. Luckily I was bailed out in the end because my opponent didn’t see the checkmate coming. I plugged the game into the computer at move 37 and was surprised the computer gave me a draw despite being down so much material. I find that some of the most enjoyable games are the one’s where victory is snatched from the clutches of defeat. Of course it is never fun to be the person on the other side of the board when this happens.

By pure coincidence I happened to be looking at my robots.txt file last night. Actually, I didn’t even have a robots.txt file on my site. I was playing with Google’s Webmaster Tools and noticed that Google was giving errors when it read my robots.txt (which didn’t exist). I went to the address where there shouldn’t have been a file at all (http://fontburner.com/robots.txt) and saw a page of text filled with links to porn/spam sites. This sent me off on a wild goose chase to figure out how my site had been exploited.

The first place I looked was at my .htaccess file. My guess was that they were using the .htaccess file to redirect robots.txt to some other file. In my .htaccess file I noticed this code which I was pretty sure wan’t put there by me:


RewriteEngine On

RewriteRule .* http://allvideo.org.uk/in.cgi?4&parameter=sf [R,L]


The thing that threw me off was that this looks like legitimate code because the first line looks like it might be telling Google not to index the images of your site. Is this the work of a clever hacker adding decoy code before the really nasty stuff?

Deleting this code from my .htaccess file didn’t seem to affect my robots.txt file so I kept looking for a solution.

At this point I opened a ticket with MediaTemple, my web host to see if they had any advice. They responded quickly with a link to a knowledge base article called “Working with a php injected website.” This article confirmed my .htaccess suspicions and also pointed me to a line of code found in php files. Removing the .htaccess code was easy, but how do you find a line of code in the thousands of php files on a WordPress powered site?

MediaTemple also hinted at the possibility of needing to reinstall all WordPress files, something that I really didn’t want to do. I did some searching and came accross a good writeup of the situation on kyle-brady.com called “WordPress, MediaTemple, and an Injection Attack.” If you are a victim of this attack, I encourage you to read this post because it gives instructions about how to fix and identify the problem as well as many comments from other victims.

It turned out that in addition to removing the malicious code from the .htaccess file I also had to remove code from the index.php files in the root of my site. Once that was all cleared out, my robots.txt file issue was corrected. It looks like other people encountered deeper problems that affected the links in blog posts. Those people had to recreate their recent blog posts manually. Yuck.

This whole ordeal has left me feeling violated and unconfident about both WordPress and MediaTemple. If someone can add code to your .htaccess and your index.php files, that is a major hack. I feel lucky that they didn’t do more harm than they did because it seems like if you can hack those files you could easily take a site down or worse.

I am unsure who is actually to blame for this exploit, if anyone is. I heave read that MediaTemple blames WordPress and WordPress blames MediaTemple. There are reports that Drupal sites have also been exploited, so the problem isn’t limited to WordPress only. WordPress has released an update in the last week, but I don’t see any evidence that this issue was addressed in the latest security fix.

MediaTemple has told me that they changed all affected sites passwords for FTP. They also said that they scanned their servers and removed the malicious code. This is a confusing statement because neither of these things appears to have been done in my case. My FTP password still worked, and unless I removed the code before they did, they didn’t remove it from my site.

The good news is that the issue is (hopefully) behind me. If you are hosted on MediaTemple, I would advise you to take a look at your robots.txt (even if you don’t have one) because if I hadn’t noticed it I never would have known my site was infected. You may be a victim of the hack and not even know it.

Easter Egg Plugin

I am proud to introduce my latest WordPress Plugin. This one is called “Konami Easter Egg” and it makes it easy for anyone to create custom easter eggs on any WordPress powered website. If you aren’t quite sure what an easter egg is, let me backup and give you a little history lesson. Easter eggs are hidden secrets that can be found in movies, websites, books, Tivo remote controls, and pretty much anything where the creator has hidden secrets. They are called “easter eggs” because they are hidden treasures that you have to find. The creators of these things often hide them as a wink to other people who know the secret code.

One of the most famous easter eggs was created by video game maker Konami in 1988 when they hid a code in their Contra game that allowed the player to gain 30 extra lives. The code was entered by pushing a sequence of buttons on their controller. The code was “up up down down left right left right b a start select.”

The Konami code has since been used in countless games and has transcended into popular culture. Most recently, the code has been added to Facebook with “start select” being replaced by “enter.” There is even a website dedicated to documenting all the websites that use the Konami code, http://konamicodesites.com/.

I have always been intrigued by easter eggs and have long wanted to be able to add hidden things to websites that I make. When I learned about a javascript file called konami-js available on Google Code I realized that I could make a WordPress plugin for creating secret codes that reveal hidden messages on a website.

My plugin will hopefully appear in the WordPress plugin directory soon, but if you would like to test it out ahead of time, please contact me and I will send you a demo.

The Konami Easter Egg plugin is available now through the WordPress Plugin Directory. Here are the installation instructions:

Click here to view a screenshot of the settings page of the Konami Easter Egg Plugin.

konami easter egg screenshot

Installation
Installing Konami Easter Egg is very easy and do not require any template modification. Just follow these steps :

1. Upload the folder ‘easter_egg’ to the ‘/wp-content/plugins/’ directory.

2. Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress.

3. After activating the plugin you should see “Easter Egg” in the sidebar under “Settings.”

4. *IMPORTANT* Before the easter eggs will appear it is important that you enter the name of the outer most Div tag used in your theme templates. This can be found by viewing the source code of a page on your site. The first Div after the will look something like “<div id=”wrapper”>”. Take the name of this div (in this case it would be “wrapper” and enter it in the settings page for the plugin.

5. Enter the YouTube code of the video you would like to show.  Change the “key” if you want a unique key combination to unlock the easter egg. Change the message to say something unique. Customize the CSS to change the appearance of your Easter Egg as desired.

6. Congratulations, you did it!

By the way, I wonder what would happen if you entered the Konami code right now. Only one way to find out!

Here are some of the features of Dream Feedr:
• Quickly post a new dream in a “Twitter-style” interface.
• Each dreamer will have their own page showing their dreams.
• Each dreamer has their own RSS feed.
• Keyboard shortcuts for quick editing
• You can tag your dreams with keywords.

Click over to dreamfeedr.com to look around or to join for free. I have about ten dreams entered in there already, and I find it really interesting that all these thoughts would have been lost and forgotten if I hadn’t took a little time to write them down.

Dream Feedr is very much a “beta,” so it could change quite a bit depending on the response I get from people. Let me know what you think. If you have any interest in starting a dream journal I encourage you to sign up for a free account and test it out.

The tentative names for my three themes are going to be Minima White, Zen Parchment, and Blue Wood. The themes will be hosted on Cath3dral, and I am hoping to use this as an opportunity to expand Cath3dral into an actual site, instead of the place holder that is currently there.

One of the unique things about my themes will be the integration of Font Burner. This will give users access to any of the 1000 fonts available through Font Burner without having to mess with sIFR at all. My Font Burner plugin was actually the result of the work I have been doing on my themes. It started out as just the control panel that gave the WordPress admin the ability to customize the fonts used in my themes, and grew into an actual plugin.

So stay tuned, and contact me if you are interested in testing my themes before they are publicly released.

iphone_control_panel_plugin_screenshot

Bookmark icon

The bookmark icon dropdown menu above lets you choose the icon that appears on a users home screen when they bookmark your site. When you click “save changes” you will be able to preview your new icon on the phone in the Plugin screen. If you want to us a custom icon of your own design, simply replace one of the six images in the “icon” folder of this plugin.

CSS

You can enter custom css that will only be seen by iPhone and iPod Touches. Keep in mind that the phone will also see your other stylesheets, so you need to redefine your styles here in order to “overwrite” them.

Viewport

Think of the viewport as the size of the window that is seen on the iPhone’s screen. The width of the screen of the touch devices is 320 pixels when held vertically and 480 pixels when held horizontally. The optimum viewport for your site will vary so experiment with it until you get it right.

Redirect

If you would like to redirect iPhone and iPod Touch devices to another url, enter it in the “redirect” box. Other browsers are not affected by this redirect, just touch devices. This will add a redirect code to every page of your site, so use it carefully. Leaving this box blank and no redirect will occur.

Installation Instructions
Installing iPhone Control Panel is very easy and does not require any template modification. Just follow these steps:

1. Upload the folder ‘/iPhone_Control_Panelr/’ to the ‘/wp-content/plugins/’ directory.

2. Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress.

3. Click on “settings” and you should see a iPhone Control Panel link. Click this and follow the directions to customize your iPhone settings.

The plugin is a free download and is available through WordPress plugin directory.

Version 0.6 was a major rebuild, and some people may be interested in accessing the previous version. Click here to download iPhone Control Panel version 0.5.

Visit the plugins homepage at <a href=”http://www.fontburner.com/the-font-burner-wordpress-plugin/”>FontBurner.com</a> or download it from the plugin directory at WordPress.org. If you use the plugin please give me any feedback that you have. Being my first plugin I know it can be improved and could use all the help I can get.

Since this was my first plugin, I wanted to take a few lines to describe the process. The rest of this post is pretty technical, so feel free to skip it unless you are interested in plugin development…

I have been tinkering with WordPress for a few years now and building a plugin was the obvious next step in my development. PHP isn’t my native language, but the more I hack around in WordPress the easier it is too understand how it works. The best teacher for me is always trial-and-error. If you are interested in creating a plugin of your own, my advice would be to find a plugin that already exists that does something remotely similar to what you are looking to create. Dissect the plugin and try to figure out what it does and how. Change the variables and try to change that plugin to do something else. If you are lucky, you might just end up with the plugin you were trying to create. The thing that I found the most helpful was a “themes option framework” from Jeremy Clark. Once I got theme options page doing what I needed it to do it wasn’t too hard to convert it into a plugin.

Once I had my plugin created, the next thing I needed to tackle was getting the plugin posted in the WordPress directory. WordPress plugins need to loaded into their system using subversion. I haven’t had good experiences with subversion, so I wasn’t sure how easy this would be. The first step is to request to have your plugin added. I made my request on a Friday evening and had approval on Sunday evening. Not too bad, but while I was waiting for approval I read some horror stories of this taking a week or more.

Once I was approved it was time to tackle subversion. I wanted to avoid the command line, so I started looking for a Mac application that would make subversion easier. I found two programs that did the trick. One was Versions and the other was svnx. While neither program made the process completely painless, I think Versions was slightly better. Luckily, I found a pretty good tutorial that explains step-by-step how to add a plugin to the WordPress repository using subversion. If you are braver than me, WordPress has a pretty good overview of how to do it all through the command line.

With my first plugin behind me I am already about finished with number two. The next one is iPhone related and might go live later this week. Stay tuned!