No More Worrying About Plugins
I like to read Hackaday’s weekly security posts to get a quick summary of the latest security issues. Last week’s post had the following Wordpress section:
István Márton at Wordfence has the story on a pair of WordPress plugins with severe vulnerabilities, effecting a whopping 500,000 sites combined. Up first is AI Engine, with 100,000 installs. This plugin has an unauthenticated URL endpoint that can expose a bearer token, which then allows access to the MCP endpoint, and arbitrary control of users. The good news here is that the plugin is not vulnerable by default, and requires the “No-Auth URL” setting to be configured to be vulnerable.
Changing the Tagline
For most (if not all) of the past 20 years I’ve had the same tagline on the blog: “Insights on fatherhood, technology, culture, photography, and politics”. It is still TECHNICALLY accurate, but it doesn’t really reflect the balance of posts for the past few years. I’ll be changing it soon and just wanted to document it here since it’s been the tagline for so long.
Talk Python Bits
Michael Kennedy from the podcasts Python Bytes and Talk Python has recently written a couple blog posts that I wanted to highlight here. First up is his post about rewriting the Talk Python site in Quart (aka async Flask). Three and a half years ago I wrote about realizing that it’s not about Django vs Flask vs FastAPI, but actually about finding the right framework for your workload. I didn’t completely state my current thought process in that blog post, but I was pretty close to the advice I currently give. If you want a Python-based site that needs CMS features and you don’t want to have to reinvent the world, Django is your framework. If you are making websites where you want to be in control of every puzzle piece, then you want flask. You only bring in what you need. And if you’re writing REST API based site (controversy about whether REST truly is REST aside), you want FastAPI. Well, I respect Michael Kennedy’s opinion on this matter for a few reasons:
Wordpress to Hugo Migration Process
As there are many people who are currently looking for alternatives to Wordpress in light of a little…. instability… I decided I would document my migration process. I figure my case is one of the more extreme cases, as I ran a self-hosted Wordpress instance for the past 19 years (since Feb 2005) and have ~4000 posts that needed to be migrated. I also have lots of photos, videos, and other media. Finally, I have made heavy use of many Wordpress features.
Update Your Rss Feeds
I’ve moved from Wordpress over to using Hugo to power my blog. If you’re still using RSS to follow this blog you’ll need to update your feed reader to the following URL: https://www.ericsbinaryworld.com/index.xml
A Little More on the Hugo Transition
So far, with the help of a few scripts (both bash and Python) I’ve been able to get most of the site back up to the way I want it to be. Most of the images should be working now. I still have to create and run another script for the way that this theme wants cover images to be references. I think that does bring to light one of the annoyances with Hugo vice Wordpress. When it comes to themes, each one expects things to be organized differently. It is much more chaotic than WP. Perhaps the type of person who runs Hugo is more likely to roll their own theme? Or will pick one and not change until they abandon their blog?
Moving to Hugo
I’d been thinking about moving to a static site generator like Hugo, Jekyll, or Pelican for a while now. I probably would have used them from the beginning vs a fully-fledged CMS like Wordpess had they existed back then. But the recent shennanigans with Matt Mullenweg and Wordpress were the catalyist I needed to make the move. I’m going to try it out for a while and if I don’t like it, I can always go back to Wordpress. (I haven’t deleted my content.) For now most of the images on the site will be broken until I update them to exist on Hugo.
Federation Test
I had to change my wordpress username as it contained characters that were fine back when I started this blog in 2005, but didn’t work for federation. So this is a test to see if the post will properly federate now that I’ve changed the username. Here’s hoping!
It's Book Review Time
I’ll be getting caught up on book reviews, so through the end of the year you’ll see at least one book review per day. I’ll still be occasionally writing my usual blog posts, but the most consistent content will be book reviews.
This Blog is Now On Mastodon/Fediverse
You can now follow the blog on Mastodon by searching for:
Then you can follow and see all of the blog’s posts. There is a bit of an error with my author posts, but since I’m the only author on this blog (I think there are maybe 2 posts by my brother), it’s not a big deal. I’m not sure what the etiquette / norms are if someone has a blog on the Fediverse. Is it gauche for me to also post about those my blog posts on my own Mastodon account? I expect the norms will evolve along with the Fediverse, especially as it expands to include Facebook and Tumblr (assuming their owners go along with that idea). For now I’m probably going to post a limited number of blog posts on my Mastodon account - I guess as a way of boosting. Or maybe I’ll just boost my blog’s posts? Again, I imagine it’s going to evolve for all of us as time goes on. (Although, as I wrote that previous sentence, I guess boosting it makes the most sense)