For 5 years I was a devoted user of Canon DSLRs. I carefully collected a set of lenses that gave me great versatility at the expense of carrying 3kg of expensive glass while out and about. I fussed over noise, precise white-balance, vibration (mirror-lockup!), sometimes caring more about the sharpness of a given shot than if it was actually worth taking in the first place.

A couple of outings a year. A handful of galleries full of pleasing-enough pictures. A dull ache in my shoulders for a week after each holiday. While planning the much longer (5 month) trip that consumed half of 2011 I began to worry that I would return with a deformed spine if I didn’t downsize my gear.

I decided to buy a Panasonic GF1. And it changed everything.

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Another title might be “A Website’s For Life, Not Just For Christmas”. It’s also technically a Lesson From ’12, but hey, it’s still January, so near enough.

I made the mistake of not regularly updating one of the applications installed on this server for a few months. Zen Photo, which runs the gallery where I host my photographs, had a pair of lethal security holes thanks to some insecure versions of 3rd-party code (TinyMCE and ajaxFilemanager) which resulted in a rather ingeniously stealthy hack being deployed without me noticing.

UPDATE: acrylian from ZenPhoto mentions that TinyMCE itself was not involved in the breach, just the ajaxFilemanager plugin.

Plus, I’m fairly sure I wouldn’t have detected it, if it hadn’t been for the security breach at my hosting provider, Dreamhost, a few days ago.
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2011 saw an explosion of ‘hacktivism’ and black-hat chicanery – the antics of LulzSec and AntiSec, the breaching of Sony’s PlayStation Network, HBGary and Stratfor; previously confidential data getting sprayed onto Pastebin on a weekly basis.

Despite none of my precious private data being involved, all this carnage steadily convinced me it was time to take my password management much more seriously. Although I had a handful of decent passwords in play, some were shared amongst several sites, some were years old .. and who knew what my logins were for the swathe of random forums and mailing lists I’d accrued over the years? Decidedly amateur.

Enter KeePass and Wuala.
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It used to be so simple.

1995! GeoCities, CompuServe, Netscape, <BLINK> tags! Back when one could smash together a website using Notepad and Paint Shop Pro in an afternoon. Download a few animated GIFs to sprinkle about, stick up a bunch of links to other sites and whoosh! You’re a web designer, high-five!

But now? While assembling this site I have had 5 different browsers installed on my laptop for testing, along with two breeds of smart phone to hand, not to mention various debugging plugins, minifiers, profilers and validator services. Then there’s analytics, SEO, page speed optimisation, mobile browser support, spam protection… no wonder people get paid to do this. Perhaps I should have just stuck with the default theme.

I’m a C++/C# developer by trade. While I might have tried to keep an eye on web development over the years, I never put aside enough time to properly learn any of the things I was reading about. As a result, my personal sites became inelegant sprawls of HTML faux pas with fragments of half-baked CSS and PHP.

They were also a pain to maintain and update, so after working up a backlog of things I wanted to publish I decided enough was enough. Over the last few years I endeavoured to catch up with the web, learn some new skills and try to build something that didn’t completely suck. This gleaming new mostly-standards-compliant ego-portal is the result! Time to spoil it all by filling it with junk.