While Away The Hackers Will Play…

By Stephen Dean | Published December 11, 2008

I stepped away from the computer for the last month and change.  Needed a break.  And just about everything that could go wrong did go wrong.

The credit card I had on file had expired and wasn’t rebilling.  I lost a pretty important domain in my business.  I’d been planning on ditching the domain soon, but it would have been nice to use it to redirect!

I also lost three blogs, including this one.  It was obvious that my website, not just my blog had been “hacked” to some degree.  A ton of spam links started showing up on my pages.  And after talking to my host they informed me the database where all my blog posts are kept… was corrupted.

I lost around 400 posts and a lot of google love.  This also happened to my sister’s blog and a hobby blog that was pretty important to me on a personal level.

Aye carumba.

In any case, it’s time to start again.  I just finished uploading as many useful posts to this blog that I could find in Google’s cache, so this will be the 60th post.

More posts will follow.  It’s good to be back.

(And thanks Jim Sansi for welcoming me back to the blogosphere.)

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  • Jim

    You can register domains for several years at a time…

    -Jim

  • http://www.ryanhealy.com Ryan Healy

    Oh, man. That’s rough. Sorry to hear about all the “chaos” you’ve had to deal with.

    I can certainly relate to wanting to take a break. Generally speaking, I only ignore things for 24-48 hours when I’m feeling burnt out.

    And even then, I only ignore those things that can be ignored. After all… I’ve got a family to feed. ;-)

  • http:// Stephen Dean

    @Jim - Sigh, yeah.

    @Ryan - Ya, my break was pretty extreme. Some soul searching. Typically I wouldn’t be able to take that long off either, but the timing was right. Feels good to be back.

    And I think I just found all the posts to my personal blog in Google’s cache, so I’m dang happy about that.

  • http://annieandersonblog.com Annie Anderson

    Stephen,

    That’s awful! But I’m glad you’ve found some of your stuff.

    If you’re running WordPress, there is a plugin that will send you a back up of your site. It can be set up to send it daily, weekly, etc. Might think about doing that.

    I also use a blogging software just for this very reason. I’m on a Mac, so I use MarsEdit but if you’re on a Windows machine, there are programs available. At least then you have the majority of your stuff should something happen again.

    Ed Dale uses Scrivener, I believe, to write his emails and posts, etc. I have it as well but don’t usually use it for blog writing, though that is where I do all of my other writing.

    Glad to see you’re back! I was wondering what was up with you. And thanks for stopping by my blog this weekend. I appreciate it. ;-)

    ~ Annie

  • http:// Stephen Dean

    Thanks Annie I had forgotten about that plugin. I’ll make sure to install it on all my blogs this time.

    Thanks for stopping by.

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