Unfortunately my answer to this is ‘Yes’ — one of my many WordPress sites had been infiltrated by a nefarious individual. I only became aware of it because I attended a briefing at the Manchester WordPress User Group session in September where Mike Little gave us a good briefing on the subject.

I’m not convinced I solved my problem yet — and am now in the middle of transferring content onto a new installation to make sure — so my first ‘insight’ would be to say — keep your WordPress install relatively up to date. I didn’t and I’m now regretting it.

How can I spot it?

This was fairly easy — I simply looked at the users screen within wp-admin and saw I had one more administrator user than I should have. What is interesting is the nefarious user includes a small piece of code in their username that then hides their line in the users table.

What did you do next?

I actually spotted this issue when I spotted a user kept vanishing as I refreshed my user screen (thanks, Firefox for not being too fast). I used this to my advantage and, after a few attempts managed to select this user and delete them.

Did this solve the problem?

Dunno — I’m getting around it by migrating the fairly minimally populted site to a new server (something I’d planned to do anyhow).

I’m sure this is far from a full explanation on the subject — but I thought it was worth documenting!

Yesterday I attended Photocamp Edinburgh 1 — not only the first in the city, but the first to be borne from the events we’ve run in West Yorkshire. A sibling, as it were.

Whilst there were differences – it was certainly more intimate – there were lots of similarities. The engaged, responsive audience and wonderful speakers made the event great to attend. And the buzz in the bar when we all went to lunch was obvious. Photocamps do get the audience excited an animated and friendships (if only fleeting) rapidly made.

I bit the bullet and decided to run an impromptu session. Having no access to WiFi (my only real grumble at hosts – The University of Edinburgh) I got on and came up with a quick creative session. I was very surprised to see everyone’s readiness in this single strand format to take part in my craziness and, whilst I’ve not seen the photographic responses), the visible response was quite exciting.

Edinburgh was brought together incredibly quickly – in August organiser Darren (JudyCabbages) met past photocampers John and Louise at the Edinburgh Festival. A few weeks later Darren attended Photocamp Bradord {2009}. I’m not sure if this is the case, but rumour goes that the Edinburgh venue was booked whilst he was in Bradford. The website and booking went live a couple of days later. All this means the event, including marketing, was brought together in less than 30 days.

I’m not going to review the event itself – as that is for the organisers and the attendees but here are my thoughts on the differences; and how this might impact on future events;

• The size (capacity: 45) was perfect for a first event. In retrospect eighty for the first Leeds event set expectations very high and didn’t allow us to experience how amazing a smaller-scale event could be.

• Edinburgh managed to pull off ’unconference’ a lot more effectively than we have in West Yorkshire. Whilst some attendees proposed sessions ahead of time the actual running order was pulled together on the day. I strongly believed this changed the attitudes of those attending. You felt more forgiving of speakers, over-runs seemed less invasive and all-ways round it seemed more barcamp-y; but also it felt like more people became involved in the conference – taking ownership of the day.

• Interestingly the organisers did the same thing I had; trying to deliver more ‘add-ons’ than they had time/capacity to prepare for. I’m coming to the conclusions that initiatives should be limited to one before and one during an event.

• The main ‘on the day’ initiative was similar to the one we ran at the first Leeds event – with delegates photographing another based on name badges; this seemed again to go down well.

Anyway the long and short of this is Edinburgh Photocamp 1 was, in my eyes and reflecting on others’ reactions, an absolute success – and I wish Darren and his team every best with planning future events.