Jennerosity

Some of you may have been wondering about my lack of presence in the blog world lately.  Rest assured that I haven’t given up on blogging!  For some of you, this brief reassurance will be enough of an answer.  But, for those of you who want more details on what happened and where all my old posts went to, please read on.

It came to my attention some time ago that my blog had been hacked.  Readers were getting warning messages as was I when navigating to certain pages on my blog.*1 If wishing and worrying could have fixed it, I would have been back online in no time.  However, that really isn’t how it goes.  Long-story short . . . since I have no clue how to find or delete malicious code, and since I didn’t know when it happened*2 I couldn’t be sure which of my database backups would have the same malicious code in it.  So, I decided that the easiest thing for me to do was to start over again with a clean slate and I just deleted the whole thing.

I just know that some of you are reading this and are gasping at the thought of deleting all those posts.  But, I have to say . . . it wasn’t that hard.  I hadn’t been running this blog for too long yet, so there were only a few months of posts and nothing that really stood out as super-wonderful.  I wasn’t really sad to see it go because I know I can still produce even better content than I had before.  It’s a another new start (and hopefully my last for a while).  Besides . . . it kind of fits in with one of my favourite sayings “go big or go home.”*3

Please feel assured that I did learn some things in the process and I’m doing everything I can to make sure this is a safe site to visit.  First of all, I’m rolling things out slowly.  Instead of going crazy with a whole bunch of plugins, I’ve only installed a few that I’m certain are really worth it.  As time progresses, I’m sure I’ll install some more, but I’m starting with just the basics.  I’ve also done a lot more to beef up the security of my site to prevent it from being hacked again and am going to be paying a lot more attention to the security side of things on my blog from now on.  I’d like this to be a safe, fun*4 and geeky place to hang out.

Anyone else have a blog or website hacked before?  How did you handle it?  Got any good tips/links for me?

*1 From what I can see, no one actually had their computers infected or any other negative thing happen.  But, it still really pisses me off that it could have.

*2 nor can I read or understand my server logs to get an idea of when it happened

*3 I also can’t help but think of the advice that Vezzini always gave to Inigo “go back to the beginning.”  So here I am at the beginning again.

*4 I’m going to try to make it a more visually pleasing experience with pictures and things as well (like the wordle in this post).

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