Case Study

Fighting Through an Open Redirect Compromise

In mid November of 2025, a web property I manage had the distinction of being compromised. Locking this site down had been difficult because of how many had permission over the installation. Too many things change, too often. None of these things I could control, but when it broke, they came to me for the fix. In I.T., this is usually not a position we want to be in, but sometimes I relish this kind of challenge.

How-To
NS Featured Posts Code

Customize a Plugin to Control Your WordPress Theme’s Featured Posts

Wordpress. Incredibly customizable, but often incredibly frustrating. One such specific case is where themes can feature posts in a widget, but don’t always offer a way to set each post to do so. In my current theme’s case, it’s based on Orca and the theme has a “Featured Posts” widget, but there doesn’t appear to be an easy way to set a post as featured. I’ll show you how to modify a publicly available plugin to make this possible in Wordpress’ admin interface.