Man, I do not know what got past the shields yesterday, but I was laid low by that 24 hour bug. Feeling much better today, hi, how are you? That one day’s worth of illness has thrown me off, as stuff I wanted to mention yesterday gets pushed to today, and my heads up on who will be where at NYCC gets pushed to tomorrow by which time the show will already be open, and due to a combination of work and my niece’s wedding (love you, Heather!), I’ll only be at the show on Friday. Was that a sentence? It feels kind of disorganized as a sentence, and big disorganized thoughts still make my head somewhat swimmy, so let’s dive in.

• But before we jump into stuff that got pushed, something very timely: there appears to be a concerted attempt to reset passwords on WordPress sites. I first became aware of it when I saw the warning on Twitter from Phil “Frumph” Hofer, Word Press expert-for-hire and ComicPress/Comic Easel developer. Since Hofer has helped a lot of people, he got about 30 password reset-attempt emails and raised the alarm. It turned out not to be limited to Hofer, as many people were experiencing the same thing; I noticed an attempt on we at Fleen occurred about 5:00am.

  As Hofer says, you need to secure administrative access to your WordPress site:

  Important as it is, you NEED to set people back to subscriber after they’re done helping you out, the only person who should ever have consistent administrator access is YOU, no one else. (unless in the case of those people who have a site administrator helping them out, but you get the idea … no 3rd party people)

  Embarrassing as it is to say, I wasn’t fully secure; I had long since killed the privileges on former contributors to this site, but I hadn’t disabled Hofer’s account from when he helped me with a hosting migration a year back. Worse, there’s only one account that ever posts on this site these days — which made it a clear target — and I was using it both to post and for administrative operations.

  Please note that I said was, as I’ve changed that. If you’re using WordPress, take the five minutes to demote your main account to “editor” and shift admin duties to an arbitrary account with a non-obvious name and an obnoxiously long password, then never use it except for admin purposes. You’ll be happy you did.

• Evan Dahm’s illustrated edition of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz has launched its Kickstarter, and is about halfway to goal one day in. This is going to be a gorgeous book, and with the assistance of Make That Thing on fulfillment, it should arrive with no hiccups. I’ve just ordered two copies — one to keep, one to present to my youngest niece-and-nephew pair.
• When you talk about old school webcomics, it’s harder to get older than original Blank Label (the site isn’t even parked anymore) member Steve Troop and the venerable webcomic/puppet show known as Melonpool. It’s been off-and-on for years now (to be perfectly honest, mostly off) while Troop has worked towards a movie version, but Melonpool has returned to webcomics with a reboot. Daily updates so far (and a promise of color Sundays), and we’ll have to see what all the old characters get up to.

We’ll do the full roundup of NYCC exhibitors of interest tomorrow, but how about a list of people that won’t be off at their own tables?

• Cameron Stewart will be riding the excitement of his new Batgirl ongoing (with Babs Tarr on art) via signings and panels on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday.
• Ananth Panagariya will be signing in support of Buzz! with Tessa Stone at the Oni Booth on Friday and Sunday, and in support of Candy Capers with Yuko Ota and Ian McGinty at the BOOM! booth on Sunday.
• Randall Munroe will be signing in support of What If? on Friday, then have a spotlight panel on Saturday with Bill Freakin’ Nye, dang.
• Kate Leth will be signing in support of Bravest Warriors and Adventure Time OGN Seeing Red, Natasha Allegri in support of Bee and Puppycat, and Noelle Stevenson in support of Lumberjanes, all at the BOOM! booth (check at the booth for times).
• Andrew Bell will have several new toys debuting at the show via the My Plastic Heart booth — there will be a collection of previously-released designs in stylish, slimming black, and his newest take on the Dealmaker.

Spam of the day:

I have found that the key to running a popular website is making sure the visitors you are getting are interested in your subject matter.

Wow, never would have guess that the secret to having a popular website is to have a topic people are interested in. It’s like rocket science!