I recently set up a long-overdue resume site for myself. Still under construction, I’ve spent a great deal of time trying to tweak the bloody thing. It’s the same old gripe, just like tax filing. It is truly important and urgent, but the entire time you spend laboring over it you know those are hours you could be earning some cash instead of futzing around with codes–tax or CSS, it doesn’t matter.

I spent an inordinate amount of time today trying to fix a major problem that I didn’t see coming, and while I have an education about this now (a limited one, feh) I am QUITE irritated at the seedy underbelly of blogging I’ve discovered.

I am a HUGE fan of WordPress, and think many of the other blog platforms are inferior to it. Joomla? A clunky piece of crap by comparison. Drupal? Inflexible and a right pain to use. WordPress is the platform for me.

My problem with WordPress is one of aesthetics–most of the themes you encounter in the early stages are crap. I’ve hunted high and low for a theme that is visually pleasing and user-friendly, especially for potential editors or other people who may want to throw money at me.

When I FINALLY downloaded a WordPress theme that seemed to do the trick, I didn’t notice a nasty bit of code at the footer of the template that leads you to spam sites encouraging you to buy degrees and other such nonsense.

“No problem,” I thought, “I’ll just delete the offending links out of Footer.php and be done with it.”

Ahh, if it were only that easy. The footer was ENCRYPTED to prevent me from doing just that. I downloaded this theme (Charcoal) from a third-party WP themes site, but I am here to tell you that THOSE days are OVER. From now on I will only use themes from official sources or from sites I know are dead set against encryption in the footers.

WordPress bloggers, this might be old news to you, but for me it was a revelation. If you have downloaded a WP theme from a third-party site, double check your front page footers and other areas where spammy links can be snuck in. I read some horror stories about some of these third-party WP themes doing far worse than my merely craptacular outbound links to spam; some of these are apparently modified to attract spam to your comments section or other nefarious things. Blogger beware!

I am by no means an expert on this topic–I’m only passing along what I have learned so far, but if you are searching high and low for a WordPress theme that looks great, be very leery of these third party sites. I got burned and now have to put in another couple of hours researching the final removal process for the encryption before my page will feel right to me. Two hours I could be getting PAID….ugh.