stereotypical single woman

It all happened because I was trying to upgrade to Wordpress 2.3.1, mainly because there were some security issues with the recent upgrade. Not that anything on my account is so incredibly important that it can’t be replaced, but I just didn’t want anyone getting in and erasing my most embarrassing moments (that I’ve broadcast on the internet.) How else would I remember and relive them? I was also concerned about soemone erasing the pictures of my cats. Because then I would have to hunt them down and kill them. Do not fuck with the crazy cat lady.

So I tried to upgrade, but when I logged onto my hosts web panel the window I was supposed to see wasn’t there. Not a problem, I email Dreamhost, and a few hours later I’m able to update. Great, everything’s working, so I while I’m upgrading stuff I also install FireStats as a new plugin because I LOVE my statcounters. Don’t worry, they don’t tell me who you are or what you’re wearing when you visit (although it would be so cool if they did), but they do tell me what you like to read and what you use to read it so I can design and write to cater to your tastes. Which I really don’t, instead I just create fictional identities and stories about all the people behind the returning ip addresses to amuse myself. (please don’t go away because of this - really, it’s flattering - okay, um, wait, would it help to tell you that your particular identity was one of a hard-bodied, incredibly good-looking, enormously wealthy, mysterious and unparalleled genius that not only finds the time to read my blog regularly but also travels around the world saving babies and puppies?)

Anyway, on FireStats I was seeing something I hadn’t seen before, specifically a reader called radianrss-1.0, indexing one of my of my articles something like 50 times a day. But other readers, like Google and Bloglines, which I know are also indexing my site (because I check it on them for consistency), aren’t showing up. So that leads me to believe it might not really be a reader. And to make matters worse it’s not one of my better articles it’s accessing. And dammit, I just want to know why or who is doing this?????? Surely no one is so interested in the time I spilled coffee on my computer and about had a panic attack that they need to read the article every half hour - for days and days at a time???? I mean honestly, wouldn’t they have rather read about the time I flashed a police officer?????

So I go online do a little investigating and come up with practically nothing. Apparently lots of people are being visited by this Canadian based reader with an ip address of 142.166.3.122 or 142.166.3.123, but no one knows who or what it is. It may just be a reader (that is obsessed with the the fact that I’m officially a dumbass), or it may be a worm or bot because it coincidentally popped up right after the Wordpress 2.3 upgrade release (so if you’re also using Wordpress update immediately, if not sooner.)

That’s all just a little too suspicious for me. So, very late one night, frustrated and desperate to protect my most embarrassing memories from some irrational foreign invader, I try to block the ip addresses with a .htaccess file. This was a very stupid thing for me to do. I have only the most basic grasp on Wordpress code. Even I know that I should not be fucking around with stuff like that. But I’m not very sane at 2:30 Monday morning, particularly after a long and draining weekend that I’ll tell you about later, so I did it anyway. And proceeded to break the blog. Because I ended up blocking access to EVERYONE, even myself. Which had me emailing the poor people at Dreamhost, desperate to get everything back up again, at 3:30 in the morning, because I can’t see the .htaccess file to delete it.

I had to completely delete the newest Wordpress upgrade, wait for Dreamhost to fix the screen yet again, and upgrade again. But it looks like just about everything is back to normal. Even the stupid radianrss-1.0 reader is popping up again. Dammit, I’m pissed. Does anyone have any more information about it? Or has anyone else had any luck blocking it?