12apostrophes looked a little funky yesterday.

As the blog is wont to do whenever I change anything, all the posts (temporarily) disappeared, and we had to run the site in the WordPress “Classic” theme.

I was updating to the latest version of WordPress to address a security flaw. An article I read pointed out that spammers had been hacking WordPress blogs and using them for nefarious spamming activities.

Ha, I thought. Well, I don’t think that’s happening, but I should upgrade anyway.

When I opened up my header.php file, I found hundreds of lines of text full of links to discounted pain, sleep, and erection medicine. They didn’t display, but they were in there.

Why? I didn’t know. It could be as simple as boosting their Google ranking by creating a large number of links to their sites. I went ahead and stocked up, then deleted the links.

Whatever the reason, 12apostrophes had been exploited by hackers, just like a blog ten times as well-known or frequently updated! I feel all warm and fuzzy. We’ve really made it.

[dork gibberish warning: just in case the following bit of insider baseball could help anyone out there like me, who uses a modified Kubrick theme and tried to upgrade their WordPress, and had the oh-my-God-all-the-posts-are-GONE problem, listen up: you didn't update the wp-content folder, right? Because you didn't want to overwrite your modified theme? Go ahead and update wp-content/themes/default/functions.php. It's OK. In fact, it will make all your posts magically reappear. The problem does not lie with a conflict in your loop(s), no matter how many hours you spend squinting at them. Ha ha.]

no longer!

Not only did he give a resounding, persuasive endorsement, but he said exactly everything I wanted to say. Just, you know, much much better.

Salma passed her dissertation defense! Congratulations!

Our cat, Hank, now appears over at www.catonmydesk.com. Internet star! CatOnMyDesk.com is a site for pictures of — you guessed it — cats on desks.

Perusing the pictures, you’ll notice that Hank is the only cat standing on a desk. The rest of the cats are sleeping on desks. Lazy bums.

CatOnMyDesk.com is another good example of the true power of the world wide web at work; that is, disseminating funny pictures of cats. If you missed ICanHasCheezburger.com and the entire lolcats phenomenon, you’re in for a browser treat today at work, where you previously had many important tasks planned.

Ah, Spring!

When a young man’s fancy turns to gloves.

A word to the handful of pitiable souls who have read 12apostrophes, and decided to come back and try reading us again:

If the screen layout looks odd, hold down CNTRL while you click “refresh” on your browsers. In both Internet Explorer and Firefox, that clears the cached style sheet and lets you see the new, tweaked look of 12apostrophes.

I think the caption contests are fun. The idea is that the latest caption contest will now run in a left-hand sidebar, all the time. Yep, that’s it. Only took 674 hours of my life, but I now have a deep, deep appreciation for Web programming types . . .

I’m testing stylesheets, layouts, etc. This new text-only post at the top of the page should help me troubleshoot. If anyone happens to be reading this (doubtful!), please bear with us a little longer . . .

As of 2:49 PM CMT, John Hodgman’s The Areas of My Expertise audiobook is available as a free download on iTunes. But for how long . . .

You may have seen Hodgman as the winning, deadpan, occasional correspondent on The Daily Show. He’s also been recently immortalized as “PC” in the back-and-forth PC v. Mac ads.

The book, my friends Dan and Salma say, is hilarious. I’ve got my download, hopefully ready to make the long, long flight to India seem a little shorter. Read by the author!

Follow this link to iTunes free download.

This is the kind of album that isn’t bad on its own terms. Mono plays moody, atmospheric instrumental rock that would have made a good soundtrack to The Lord of the Rings if Peter Jackson were as innovative as everyone says he is and didn’t bow to convention with a full-blown orchestra and choir. Several of the six songs stretch into the ten-minute range, the better to incorporate thrilling sequences of crescendos, climaxes, and decrescendos. The shorter, quieter songs are welcome interludes between the epic-battle, tragic-death compositions that dominate the album. And the art is great—the blue booklet imitates the texture of a cloth-bound memoir, the watercolor portraits inside remind me of Genesis’s We Can’t Dance, and the whole CD comes in a cardboard sleeve like Interpol’s Antics, with a different painting on each side so that you can choose your cover.

No, the issue with Mono is that I already have a Sigur Ros album in my collection, and it’s actually by Sigur Ros.

In other news, I see that Penis Enlargement felt it necessary to weigh in on Pulao’s prelims-vs.-virginity post.  I offer our guest this humble suggestion:  get some better search algorithms.