Today I had 10 minutes of free time to do a much delayed upgrade to the Joomla core of my site. On 9 January 2009, the Joomla! development team released a new security patch for the Joomla! core which promises an increased security level and multiple bug fixing. Of course, keeping your site core updated is very important, since Joomla!, as most frameworks, has bugs and security risks which are often enough reported and fixed by the community.

Upgrading Joomla! is simple enough (takes about 2 minutes).
Visit the following page for more information: http://docs.joomla.org/Upgrading_1.5_from_an_existing_1.5x_version

I'll repeat the Joomla! dev team's advise, backup your site before upgrading! This is very important, because even if the upgrade process is very simple, errors can occur and they nearly always very hard to fix (trust me!) and sometimes data loss can occur as well.

I'll also advise you to visit http://www.joomla.org/download.html and enter your e-mail to get upgrade notifications.

The change log for this new version can be found here: http://www.joomla.org/announcements/release-news/5226-joomla-159-security-release-now-available.html

A couple of months ago my web site was "hacked" by someone who hasn't got much to do all day. The trouble was that my site had a small loophole because it was still in development and wasn't totally secured. I hope I can now say that it is... Anyway, I decided to get rid of the old posts because it would have meant losing a lot of time recovering them and to be honest, I'm not sure it was worth it.
The new posts will relate to more ... "professional" ... topics and some more interesting things I have encountered.

I will try to setup a more secure sharing system for my public projects to make sure this site stays the way it should and functionality is not perturbed every other day...

Also, just as a kind note... If you'll be trying to break my site down, I'm happy to tell you that I've built myself a new automated full recovery system which detects changes and restores them in a 10 minute time span, so... do your best, but I think you'll be smart enough to go have a beer instead .. (it will be much more productive). This will definitely keep me from repairing the web site over and over again...

Just as a thought ... what would be the point of trying to take down a harmless site ?! I made all my files public, didn't I? I'm pretty sure no one will get any financial benefits from taking down a site ... So what's the deal? I was always open... I have not censored anyone on my site... I just can't think of a reason to take such action, but anyway, that's just me...

Also... I have a couple of close friends that will assist in some of my projects. They'll be posting as much as possible (we all have very little time to spare... not that this is not important... it's just that a day has only so many hours in it and we are doing or best to accommodate all activities)

To make this post short, I will add as many things as possible from now on, the new projects download section will be more secure and will have a much better functionality (forbidding direct links and anonymous download due to traffic problems) and many new features will follow.

Hope you will enjoy my site and keep in mind that you're always welcome to visit and comment on any article you find interesting...

Cheers!