I looked around and found some totally whacked out solutions involving applescript or bash scripting but finally found an incredibly simple and obvious method using System Prefs. I recommend it for everyone who is sick of using the mouse to hit the tiny green jewel.

Detailed steps to set a Maximize keyboard shortcut in Mac OSX 10.6

• Launch System Preferences from the Apple menu
• Go to Keyboard settings
• Go to Keyboard Shortcuts tab at the top of the window.
• Go to Application Shortcuts in the sidebar of the window.
• Click the small + button
• In the popup thing make sure ‘All Applications’ is selected for Application:
• In the Menu Title box type in exactly: Zoom
• In Keyboard Shortcut type in the shortcut. I recommend Command-Shift-M
• Click Add button.
• Restart each app you want it to work in.

Note on restarting apps: These shortcuts work on an app-by-app basis so it will only work in a given application after the app is restarted. Thus if you restart your computer it will immediately work in all apps.

Note on choosing a shortcut: I chose Command+Shift+M (Command is the ‘apple key’) because it matches the Command+M keyboard shortcut for Minimize/send-to-dock and will be easy for me to remember. You can set it to another combination if you want, but think carefully as you don’t want it to be something that any other applications use or you might have strange results.

Physicist Stephen Hawking (via. acidcow)

Pointed out by Eddie Avila as both the worst and best thing about Bolivia.

I would have called it George Bush.

Now a few months have passed since then and its time to move on. Move on to something other than WordPress events? No. Move on to smaller, more regular, less stressful WordPress events (and hopefully some posts here on my blog about other topics, we can still dream).

We’re going to use the Montreal WordPress Community group on facebook to organize evening meetups about once a month (join the group to get invited automatically). Patrick and the members of Station C have generously offered to let us use their coworking space for our get-togethers. This is great cause its sexy and well stocked with tools, but sad cause its not that big. Hopefully we can keep a healthy level of attendance without exploding.

The first meeting will be this thursday, when we’ll have a presentation and discussion about programming tools and how they can speed you up followed by a discussion of GPL and what it means for paid themes, plugins etc. I also told people to bring drinks and food, so it should be a cool party as well. You can read more about it and RSVP on the facebook event listing.

Today the tickets went on sale (25-30$) which is a huge relief. There’s still lots of work to do organizing the speakers/schedule, sponsors and all the other details, but we’re on our way to a really useful and fun event if I have anything to say about it.

I’ll be doing a talk about whatever is missing from the lineup of speakers who come forward, which reminds me: Would you like to become a speaker? We’re still looking for WP experts to share their wisdom and experience and hopefully some laughs, so get in touch if you think that might be you. Oh yeah, if you’ve got a pile of money and have been hoping for some visibility maybe you’d like to sponsor WordCamp Montreal? It’s the perfect way to make yourself known to an incredibly useful new subsection of the north american technocracy!

I vote for Global Voices Advocacy, the anti-censorship (and anti-blogger-imprisonment and pro-internet-awesomeness) wing of Global Voices. GV Advocacy is something made of pure good, a blog about bloggers getting shafted in countries where freedom of speech isn’t a cliche, its a dream that people can only hope for. Sami, our editorial lead for the project, is himself the victim of censorship in Tunisia, and his dedication to the project and the cause is astounding.

Obviously I’m biased as far as this contest goes, my paycheck comes from Global Voices and this money would be going into that pool, but I work for GV because I believe in it, so this post is my biased but sincere vote for my employers to get the funding and recognition they deserve (if only my coding/design was as good as the content our authors and editors produce…)

This blog post is part of Zemanta’s “Blogging For a Cause” campaign to raise awareness and funds for worthy causes that bloggers care about.

This has happened to other sites I’ve been managing (specifically to Global Voices over the years, and I’ve learned a lot about hardening your server and WordPress installation to help solve the problem. The #1 piece of advice is of course KEEP YOUR WORDPRESS INSTALLATION UP TO DATE, NO MATTER WHAT. In the case of this my personal site (as opposed to sites I manage professionally, which I deal with much more carefully, because they are more important) I was doing a halfway version of this by keeping my very old but theoretically still secure copy of WP 2.0.x up to date. This is the legacy branch (current actual branch is 2.7.x) that was supposed to offer long-term security support, but it seems that is no longer the case. I loved having the bragging rights of being the only person in a room with even 100 WordPress users who had such an old but still secure version (well, except David Peralty), but obviously staying secure is much more important.

If you’re still running 2.0.11 I strongly recommend you give up and get on the normal upgrade schedule now, it seems to have been compromised.

Full details of how to clean up a hacked site below:

Fixing a hacked WordPress site

In case anyone is curious, here are the main steps I performed to clean up and secure the site:

• Replace all files with a backup from before the site was hacked (in my Dreamhost.com account this was easy enough as they have an automated ‘domain restore’ feature, normally you should always keep a backup of all plugins, themes and uploads somewhere far away from your actual site for this purpose).
• Upgrade all WordPress files to the newest version (2.7.1) and upgrade the site. In this case make sure to delete all old WP files first to make sure only clean files are in the WP directories like /wp-admin/ and /wp-includes/.
• Replace the database with a backed up version (i didn’t have one (idiot!) and had to do extra steps below to secure my dirty database)
• Test all site functionality (upgrading to a new version usually breaks things)
• Test all plugins and upgrade them as necessary (same)
• Go through every folder in my web root and look for any out of place files, anything new or strange is probably a hacker file. Even one of these files can let a hacker back in and let them have full control. Remove any strange files. Sort files by recently updated in FTP, this will usually indicate which ones were added by hackers.

Cleaning up a hacked WordPress database (because you forgot to do automatic backups)

If you didn’t have a clean version of your database from before the backup you’ll need to do some extra steps on your now contaminated DB:

• Look through all the user accounts in the system and change their passwords.
• Check that the setting for ‘anyone can register’ in SETTINGS > GENERAL is ‘off’ (on Global Voices the hackers had turned this to ‘on’ and set it so new accounts were administrators, thus allowing themselves a back door whenever I managed to kick them off).
• Check the setting for ‘upload folder’ in SETTINGS > MISCELANEOUS , mine was set to something insane.

Making sure Google doesn’t punish you for what the hackers did

I actually noticed that my site was hacked not on the site itself but on Google. I know from experience that if you search for my name “Jeremy Clarke” I am always the first result, but when I searched myself (i forget why, I guess I’m vain) I wasn’t even on the first page. This is likely because Google was punishing me for having all those trashy spam links (Google is smart and works all day to avoid these Blackhat SEO Spammers from unfairly altering results). To get things back on track I went through the re-consideration policy using Google Webmaster Tools

• Go to Google Webmaster Tools and claim my site using their verification method (have to create a html file to prove you control the site)
• Use the Request reconsideration link in the dashboard and send Google an explanation of what happened (i was hacked and the links were inserted against my will) and asking to have any locks on my site removed.
• I haven’t gotten a reply or noticed a change yet, but these steps are vital. If you don’t do this Google could continue to block you in results, which will mean less visitors/money/power/whatever you were trying to achieve with a site. I have been in charge of sites that had similar problems before and the reconsideration process is slow but effective at getting you back in the search results.

Once you’ve done this stuff you shouldn’t have any more immediate problems with the hackers but you never know. The only real way to know you’re secure is to have both a complete backup of all files from before the hack AND a full backup of the database. If either of these is still contaminated in any way (remember, just 1 PHP file is enough!) you may be dealing with this more in the near future. Take this time to start automatic backups of both. Good luck!

If you haven’t been and are a blogger/developper in the area you should check it out. If you’re in Montreal there will also be WordCamp Montreal in June but that’s pretty far off and we haven’t come up with many of the details yet. Not sure if I’ll be speaking in Montreal as well but it’s pretty likely ;)

See them all here. (via Fannie Laurence)

click image for full size

Ungrateful Biped archives.