Once a while some page in Nomadig.com starts to attract spammers. Last week, a review of a good lunch restaurant in Emeryville was transmogrified to a spammer honey pot.

For reasons above my comprehension, that page is now responsible for 25% of all comment spamming attempts. The previous champion talks about ShortStat that was used as a mule for spam sites a couple of years back — so that’s understandable. But what on Earth is interesting in a restaurant for spammers?

No spam has slipped through, so no real damage has been done — but the spam comments are a nuisance to clean up periodically.

Helsinki is one of the most favourite destinations for cruise ships sailing on Baltic Sea. Most of the ships stay just one day, and the tourists do not have too much time to spend in Helsinki.

Some of them have booked readymade trips from the travel organiser and have their day fully set. Others are more advanterous and explore Helsinki by their own. I, of course, would prefer the latter.

The only downside is that you might not see the most interesting things, if you don’t know what to look for. Or you can spend too much time finding a restaurant or a café.

To help these modern day urban explorers, I’ve compiled a special Helsinki Cruise Guide that contains some of the best restaurants, cafés, shops and sights in Helsinki. In the guide, you can find exclusive, popular, and economical choices for having a meal or a coffee, or buying some Finnish stuff for yourself or for the people back home.

The guide can be found at www.nomadig.com/travel/cruiseguide. Have a ball!

I finally got enough time to upgrade Nomadig.com journal to the latest version of WordPress. The transition was soothingly smooth — these guys seem to know what they are doing — as there were not even minor hiccups.

To serve my readers, I decided duplicate the WP installation and upgrade the duplicate. After I found the duplicate working well, I switched the blogs.

The process required also duplicating the database, as otherwise the production blog would have gone haywire.

Follow these easy steps to upgrade from WP 1.5 to 2.0.2 with a duplicate settings.

1. Make a copy of the WP directory, for example, cp -a journal journal2.
2. Dump MySQL database to a file, mysqldump -u user -ppassword –opt database > ~/wp_backup.sql.
3. Create new MySQL database.
4. Add use new_database; in the beginning of the dumped file.
5. Upload the edited dump to MySQL mysql -u user -ppassword < ~/wp_backup.sql.
6. Change the blog and WP admin URLs in the new database to refer to the new WP directory. I used phpMyAdmin to find the rows and edit them.
7. Edit wp-config.php file in the new WP directory to refer to the correct database.
8. Edit .htaccess in the same directory to use correct rewrite URLs.
9. Test that you can view and log in the new WP installation.
10. Upgrade WP as instructed in codex.wordpress.org.
11. Test everything.
12. Change the blog and WP admin URLs in the new database to refer to the old WP directory.
13. Dump the new database to file, mysqldump -u user -ppassword –opt new_database > ~/wp_2_backup.sql.
14. Add use database; (the old database name) in the beginning of the dumped file.
15. Edit wp-config.php to refer back to the old database.
16. Edit .htaccess to use correct rewrite URLs.
17. Upload the version 2 db over the old database, mysql -u user -ppassword < ~/wp_2_backup.sql.
18. Rename the old WP directory, mv journal journal_old.
19. Rename the new WP directory, mv journal2 journal.
20. Test that everything still works.
21. Write an entry about the upgrade. Remember to be specific.

Yesterday, while checking my ShortStats I found out that there is no much traffic in Nomadig.com. The reason was imminent when I opened the site. The front page sported a PHP error and journal was broken, too.

After logging in to the system, I quickly checked the files and noticed that the PHP files were mangled. Whitespaces were missing and the bigger files were cut above eight kilobytes.

The first thing to do was to close the site for maintenance, so I created a small static HTML file for the front page and the journal to inform visitors.

The second step was to request a full restore for the site. Fortunately I haven’t been working on the site for a while, so I wouldn’t loose any precious changes. This had a flipside, too, as my offline backup was done last August…

Glancing through the files, I find out some PHP injections that looked very odd. They collected user information from $_SERVER and then posted that information to user7.phpinclude.ru. The URL of the site was “hidden” using base64_decode.

I read a few discussion threads about this and learned that the site injects links to paysites inside your content. While they were trying to accomplish this, they broke my site completely. Thanks, guys.

Closer inspection to the files revealed a huge number of backdoors with names such as includes.php, time.php, users.php and so forth. Every directory that was writable with PHP was infected. I painstakingly cleaned them. First used grep to find the files and then remove those. I also copied old development files from my hard disk over infected files and little by little I could clean up the mess.

There were changes also in HTML and JS files. Fortunately those have been there for ages, so I just copied everything over them.

My hosting provider restored their backup a few minutes ago and everything seems to be ok now. The file and directory permissions are fixed now, but due to this probably some of my PHP admin stuff is broken. Needs to be investigated later.

I’d better also set up a cronjob to make a backup of the site as soon as I get a Linux server of my own. I cannot store the backups in Nomadig.com, as the space will run out in less than a week.

Nomadig.com was unreachable at least in certain parts of the Internet due to a distributed denial of service attack (DDOS).

To be honest, my site was not target of the attack, but mere a victim. Someone was making a massive DDOS attack against Joker.com, my domain name provider. I also happen to keep Nomadig.com nameservers at Joker, and those servers were unreachable or unresponsive.

It kinda feels dumb that you know about the situation, but there is nothing you can do. At least not immediately, and most probably all your means are feeble, unless you have enough money and time to spent on the issue.

Of course, I could distribute Nomadig.com DNS servers to different service providers, but on the other hand I know that DNS is really flaky when the first server is down.

If you were missing me yesterday, don’t you worry. I’m back — in fact, I didn’t leave anywhere, Internet just lost track of my address for a while.

… we were still catching our breath after the trip to South-East Asia. Today, we haven’t been travelling for a while and thus I have time to add minor improvements to Nomadig.com.

I’ve added a new plug-in that provides links to articles written one year ago. The links can be found at the sidebar in the journal section, between the calendar and the search form. If there is nothing, then chances are that I haven’t written anything last year on the very same day.

Lately I’ve received a fair amount of comment spam in the blog. Fortunately, most of it is wiped away by Spaminator and none has passed through WordPress’ moderation queue for a really long time (knocking wood).

The most recent change in the spam comments is that there is no body, except two quotation marks (”"). Spaminator does not care about these, and they end to the moderation. I clean the queue twice a week or so, usually when writing new articles. So there are not a pain, but still somewhat annoying.

I checked Wordpress.org and found no mention of this issue except one entry in the forum. Maybe I should dive into the code and get this fixed — but on the other hand, I haven’t yet upgraded to WP 2.0. Spaminator could also tackle them with small modifications. Time will tell whether I get heated up with them and actually do something for it.

Wayne’s Coffee is a Swedish originated coffeeshop chain that has been steadily opening new cafés in Finland. Helsinki center hosts seven, most in malls or department stores. One of the biggest is located in Kaisaniemi, a couple of blocks to east from the central railway station.

The café has the normal variety of sweet and salty pastries, and all special coffees are available, too. The muffins set Wayne’s really apart from the rest of the cafés, as they are big, fresh and delicious.

There is also an Internet stand and a wireless network available in the café, but it is not free.

www.waynescoffee.fi, Kaisaniemenkatu 3, Helsinki, Finland, +358 40 413 9401