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BTW
599.php is encrypted and I have no idea how to decrypt it.
Can anyone help?
I want to see what it contains
rgds
emmdee

Hi there
I've been using the "Hack Attempt Identifier online calculator" for a little while.
Due to a poorly written component on a joomla site, I was successfully hacked with (log file)

200.63.47.57 - - [16/Jun/2012:08:50:41 -0600] "POST /administrator/components/com_maianmedia/utilities/charts/php-ofc-library/ofc_upload_image.php?name=.598.php HTTP/1.1" 200 31307 "-" "-"
200.63.47.57 - - [16/Jun/2012:09:44:33 -0600] "POST /administrator/components/com_maianmedia/utilities/charts/php-ofc-library/ofc_upload_image.php?name=.599.php HTTP/1.1" 200 31307 "-" "-"
etc....
ending with
200.63.47.57 - - [16/Jun/2012:12:58:43 -0600] "POST /administrator/components/com_maianmedia/utilities/charts/tmp-upload-images/.599.php HTTP/1.1" 200 31538 "hxxp://www.mysite.com/administrator/components/com_maianmedia/utilities/charts/tmp-upload-images/.599.php" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; ru; rv:1.9.0.14) Gecko/2009082707 Firefox/3.0.14"
I guess because the request is POST it cant be flagged in your identifier?
These guys got straight into Admin no probs.
rgds
emmdee

[reason for edit by SteveW: made link to ".599.php" unclickable]

[color palette editor]

I've created this message thread for bug reports, feature suggestions, feedback, or questions about my online color palette editor.

You can start a new message thread, if you prefer.

[online calculator]

I've created this thread for bug reports, feature suggestions, feedback, and questions about my online calculator that generates and displays Iterated Function System Fractal images.

You can start a new message thread, if you prefer.

I agree with Nathan. Steve's assertion that "90% of option traders lose money" doesn't make sense when you think about it. Someone has to be receiving the money that those "90%" of people lose. And as it turns out, it's the option writers. They have the advantage because time is on their side; most of the time, they are selling something which will eventually become worthless. It sounds like Steve was mainly trying to buy options and then sell at a higher price before they expires, which is extremely risky and an uphill battle.

I lost a lot of money trading options.  I don't know if I was addicted or mainly greedy.  I think I was addicted to greed because when I made a ton of money (thousands) winning, I thought I could do it forever.  Turned out it was plain luck.  Now, after 35 years, I'm getting back into the game (after all, it is a game).  I plan to stick with one stock initially (AAPL) and just follow the moving averages and volume.  I have been paper trading for months (knowing full well the differences between paper and actual) and made a lot of money.  I think lots of people not only make a lot of money trading options, but a ton of money.  I knew two guys who traded options.  One guy didn't know anything, relied mostly on luck, and the other guy just sold options.  He had a ton of money, which is what it takes to sell them because you have to back up your losses and the brokerage house won't let you sell more than you can lose in your account.  I don't plan on using any of the sophisticated trading games used in options, only buying, and only one stock at a time and no more than 5 contracts.  I have a plan to sell and buy back the option if I'm in a losing position and I have the amount in my head that I won't go over in a loss, such as $100 - $500 bucks.  If the option keeps rising on heavy volume, I will keep it til the volume tapers off and then sell it and wait for a while before I buy again.  Good luck to you traders who haven't made any money and to the ones who have mastered this game, keep up the good work.

On further reflection and with a fresh start on a new day, I found a way to report useful timestamp information without making all users go through the hassle of defining a timeframe to report on even if they don't have one in mind or aren't interested in a report on that information.

This morning, I published a new version of lookforbadguys with these added features:

1) Wherever a filename is listed on a line (in all the reports), its timestamp is also displayed.  

2) There's a new search routine to find all files that were modified within a user-defined time period of interest. You set the starting and ending dates/times in the User Configuration section. If the user hasn't configured starting and ending dates different from the defaults, the script simply skips the time window search.

Thank you for your suggestions.

It's so wonderful to have a sounding board about all this! Nobody I know does what I do; being able to discuss this has been such a huge help. I've been thinking about it a lot while I work on the conversion to the new domain, and your comments have been extremely helpful in organizing my thoughts.

What I realized is that to the outside world, I have one huge website. In reality what I have is 86 stand alone websites. This came to me because I also have another small throw away website that I also needed to move from the old host, which had its own hosting package. When I moved to the new site, I was told I could put it under the same package that hosts unlimited sites. So, I had the new host transfer the site to the new package. When they were done, the file for the 2nd website appeared as a folder in my current huge site. This freaked me out at first, and I contacted the host, who moved it to a separate folder telling me that the default is to put all sites under the main folder.

Also, when they initially moved the main site, all the subsites looked like regular folders instead of the ones with the world icons on them. It finally dawned on me that when I published a subsite and the icon changed, in actuality the subsite became a separate stand alone site. Until I actually publish a subsite, it has no themes and no navigation. It is just a folder in the main site. Since I use full urls to redirect to other locations in the overall site, what I'm really doing is sending people from one stand alone site to another.

Yes, I agree with you that first I need to get through the conversion to the new host. But, now I know what I'm facing when I'm ready to move to the new software. Fortunately, some of the subsites are very small (only 6 or 7 pages), while others are as large as 2,000 pages. I will be able to start with the smaller ones where I can't do too much damage, and learn all the processes I'll have to go through.

First and foremost, I'm going to need to learn PHP because that seems like it's going to be the easiest way to strip the parts that are dependent on webbot includes in Frontpage. I'm so happy! It's going to be a lot of work, but now I have a road map. Thank you so much, Steve, for all your help with this!

the url of the subdomains look like this: hxxp://example.com/blog/ where "blog" is the name of the folder in Frontpage that has the world icon on it. It's as if I have 86 domains because when I work on one, it's like working on a separate website.

In that case, it sounds like the breakup of the sites into 86 subsites only has to do with FrontPage's internal management of them, and has nothing to do with subdomains. That is, it sounds like your publicly accessible site, to the external world, is just one big site with no subdomains.

Since you're forced to change hosts, your top priority would seem to be to get the site up and running correctly at the new host. I certainly wouldn't make any structural changes to the site, or change your web design software, while you're doing that. 

After that is accomplished, the next priority is to make all the necessary changes to the site that will completely eliminate your dependence on the FrontPage Extensions so you can turn them off.

I can't decide whether it's better for you to do that while still using FrontPage, or if it's better to experiment with a new program first. FrontPage could be a hindrance by forcing you to deal with just one of its subsites at a time, when it sounds like the direction this seems to be going is that the site will eventually again be reunited into one big site with no subsites. On the other hand, a new program could be a disaster if it automatically strips out any of your existing FP webbot code immediately upon importing the site into it. That would prevent doing the conversion, since the conversion consists of converting the webbot code to new code.

In some respects, the conversion might best be done using only a text editor such as Notepad++ and no web design software (at least to start with), because at least you can trust a text editor not to make automatic and potentially damaging changes to your code before you get the chance to make the needed changes yourself.

----

You'll need to determine whether my speculation above is correct: to the outside world, a) are you really using subdomains, or b) did FrontPage force you to break the site into 86 "subsites" just because FrontPage couldn't handle a big site properly without your doing that? 

If it's b), then you won't have any "subsites" in your new web design program. It will all be one big website again, and it would probably be best to start thinking of it that way again, as it was before.

Switching to PHP includes will probably be the most straightforward task of the conversion so it's probably a good task to start with.

The FrontPage navigation will need to be converted to something else. If your page hierarchy never changes after it's been set up (if you never rearrange page locations in the FP Navigation pane), you could convert your existing link bars to plain HTML. If identical link bars appear on multiple pages, you could put the code for those in PHP include files, and include them on those pages. You'll still be able to use the same navigation button images that you use now, but the calls to them will be from plain HTML navbar code that you create, not from dynamically generated navbar code produced by FrontPage.

Did you really mean from hxxp://example.com/blog/ to hxxp://blog.example.com/, or the other way around? The subdomain notation is hxxp://blog.example.com/. If the currently existing references really are to hxxp://example.com/blog/, then they're not really being referenced as subdomains currently.

Yes, I really mean that. Currently, the url of the subdomains look like this: hxxp://example.com/blog/ where "blog" is the name of the folder in Frontpage that has the world icon on it. It's as if I have 86 domains because when I work on one, it's like working on a separate website.

I started seriously thinking about changing programs when my host notified me this week that it is going out of business. I've already found a new host that has been wonderful about transferring my site from the old host. The new host has Frontpage Extensions, but while the site is still live on the old host, I'm having to go through each subsite and republish it as a subdomain. On the new host, all the folders are missing the little globe (as well as the navigation structure) until I republish from my computer. This is a tedious task ... I'm on 25 of 86, but also doing other clean up in the process. At one point the Frontpage Extensions failed and had to be reinstalled and I had to go back and republish the subsites I already did. If the Frontpage Extensions fail again, I don't want to have to go through that process over and over again. Another reason I want to change to different software.

I'm thinking that when I decide on a new program, after testing as you suggested, that the solution would be to move each subsite out from under the main site (a separate site folder on my computer), that I could still publish to the identical individual folder at the new host site. But that still leaves me with the navigation problem, because I do use the images the navigation feature in Frontpage Creates.

[from]

I just realized, that within each subsite there are literally thousands in some cases of internal hyperlinks in the format <a href="BlueWidgets.html"> that would also be affected by any structural changes.

But maybe only when you're working on the files in your web design program. On the live server with the subdomains properly set up, I think those links should continue to work as they always have.

I quickly learned to just use the full url in ALL my hyperlinks: <a href="hxxp://www.mystite.com/subsite/BlueWidgets.html">. That way I never had to worry that a link would be broken no matter where I used it. So, the site has a lot of a full url hyperlinks.

I believe that's good, and it makes me think that your best option is #1 above, NOT to convert your subsites to folders in FrontPage. And on second thought, that's especially true because you're not abandoning the subdomain organization.  It's just that from now on the mapping of your subdomains to their folders will be handled by cPanel and Apache on your server rather than by the FrontPage Extensions on your server. So the structure of your sites and the interlinking of their pages shouldn't be changed because, on the live server, that structure and interlinking should continue to function as they always have. 

The only question is whether Dreamweaver or Expression Web will have their own awareness at design time of the domain/subdomain relationships in the way I assume FrontPage always has. 

In the alternative, would I be better off switching to Expression Web? Since it is a Microsoft product, would it know better what to do with the subsites?

Maybe, but Dreamweaver might also have the ability to be aware of subdomains within the site. It just won't call them subsites, and it might handle them differently. Expression Web might deal with them in a more familiar way, but not necessarily better. 
 
If Adobe and Microsoft still offer free trial versions of their programs, I'd suggest getting both and giving each a thorough workout. The last time I was paying any attention to reviews of the two programs (a few years ago), EW was getting very good reviews, and a surprising number of Dreamweaver reviews were more negative than you'd expect based on their longstanding reputation. I think your choice should be based on which you like better based on your own experience with them.

I already know that if I convert the subsites back to folders, I'm going to lose the navigation in the subsite immediately.

When you stop using the FrontPage Extensions, you lose ALL support for the site's FrontPage "Navigation Structure" and everything that depends on it. If you have a lot of FrontPage-generated link bars and buttons, whose generation is based on the nav structure, the job of replacing them with another method could make all the other issues look insignificant by comparison. I wrote a separate article about replacing those; the article where you've been reading about replacing the includes should have a link to it at the top of the page.

When I realized how time consuming replacing my various FP-generated link bars would be, I first wrote the HTML for my own global navigation bar (eventually simplifying it to just plain text links), and added a PHP script to "calculate" a link in the bar that I wanted to keep ("Up" goes different places depending on where you currently are)... and then I reviewed all my other link bars, decided they were useless (especially in view of the work involved), and got rid of almost all of them, except a couple that I kept as examples, converting them to plain HTML as described in my article.

So, if you can manage to part with them, getting rid of features that aren't absolutely necessary can make the going easier.

Right now in Frontpage, I just move files where I want them in the Navigation screen.

Yes, that method won't be available anymore. I'm not sure, but I don't think either DW or EW have any sort of navigation hierarchy database that replaces the functionality of the FP Navigation Structure.

With all these files it would be a nightmare if suddenly the subsites when from being hxxp://example.com/blog/ to hxxp://blog.example.com/ because of all the references on the Internet in the search engines and where other sites have linked to my site.

Did you really mean from hxxp://example.com/blog/ to hxxp://blog.example.com/, or the other way around? The subdomain notation is hxxp://blog.example.com/. If the currently existing references really are to hxxp://example.com/blog/, then they're not really being referenced as subdomains currently.

If none of your references and backlinks actually use the subdomain notation, then it opens the possibility that maybe you don't even need to provide that alternative anymore, especially if you never really wanted it to begin with and your use of it was just to accommodate FrontPage's quirks.