It seems that somehow, somewhere, those ever so kind and nice hackers are targeting my site resulting in it breaking. Apologies for this, I am getting to the bottom of it. Little b******s!

Update It seems the the problem relates to xmlrpc.php which has a reported vulnerability. An email from Technorati details this further:

Dear Fiaz Khan,

I hate automated messages as much as anybody, however there is a
situation that concerns thousands of bloggers. I’m contacting you
regarding information related to your Technorati profile
(http://technorati.com/people/technorati/bohboh)
and the blog you’ve claimed on Technorati
http://www.nextbigleap.com/blog

According to our data, that blog is running a version of Wordpress that
may be suffering from a security vulnerability. See
http://wordpress.org/development/2008/02/wordpress-233/
The version we have on record is WordPress 2.1.2

Blogs are being compromised via this vulnerability on widespread scale.
The most common symptom of a compromised blog is the presence of links
to spam web sites inserted in the blog that are obscured by style
attributes that render the text invisible but are still seen by crawlers
such as Technorati’s, Google’s and Yahoo’s. You can find these links
by viewing the source of the blog pages or, when using Firefox,
looking under “Tools” -> “Page Info” -> “Links”

The impact of these spam links that may be unwittingly placed on your
blog are reduced rankings or being flagged as spam. We’re
discontinuing processing updates from blogs that exhibit symptoms
of being compromised. If your blog has been upgraded already and this
message no longer applies to you, please accept my apologies.

For WordPress support, I recommend checking the forums at
http://wordpress.org/support/
I will be monitoring this topic in the Technorati Support forum to
be of additional help:
http://support.technorati.com/discussions/topic/3295

Thank You!
-Ian Kallen
Technorati / Architect

Somehow, spam had ended up in a hidden div at the end of one of my posts. I have yet to discover how. This came to light when i was notified by a RSS subscriber of a large list of spammy links

If anyone knows how this snook in then let me know. One site mentions site registrants gaining access to posts. Registration is disabled here so suspect there is another door in.

If anyone has any answers then let me know.

Thanks to Ben at subduedmedia.co.uk for letting me know.

I have finally managed it, countless form filling and negotiation and I have now in my hand the keys to the new office.

It’s kind of exciting since I have never rented my own offices. I wasn’t looking forward to working all alone but fortunately that may no longer be the case with a recent addition to the team. More on that later.

In summary… new office, new member of staff, healthy project book and the site being considered as one of the best in 2007… I think 2008 is off to a great start.

ONWARDS AND UPWARDS!

Well would you adam and eve it, the bods at cssmania placed my site alongside 9 others as one of the top 10 sites of 2007.

Sweeeeeeeeet!

Yet again, I promised to keep this Blog updated… failed miserably

Due to the usual bout of way too much work and general goings-on I haven’t had the energy to write anything.

Here is an update on all things me. You may have already noticed that I am looking to expand. Glad to say that I have forged working relationships with local (and not so local) development bods, designers, copywriters and people who a ting or two about marketing/seo.

What a relief.

In addition to this, I have “almost” acquired an office. Jeez, getting offices is like bloomin difficult. It was easier getting a mortgage! So hopefully within the next few weeks I will be moving into new digs which will be cool, if not a bit weird, and a bit sad. Used to having no morning journey to make and having lunch made for me by my good wife.

As for projects, within the past 3 weeks have managed to launch 2 and a half sites. (the usual round of tweaks, amendments and can you justs).

www.nen.gov.uk (in their own words)

“The NEN is the UK collaborative network for education, providing schools with a safe, secure and reliable learning environment and direct access to a growing range of online services and content.” My role was as PHP/Database developer working on behalf of Gooii Limited providing them with a CMS and integrating supplied CSS templates.

More about the other sites later.