You may (or may not!) have noticed that I failed rather spectacularly at Holidailies this year, but this time I actually had a reason!
A year or so ago I noticed I was getting all these weird ads popping up all over my site. Richard dug around in the code, found the problem, removed it (took a couple times to make it ‘stick’) and installed a new plug-in that would hopefully prevent this from happening again. But we are now wondering if maybe we missed something because last month, Norton started popping up giant warning signs, and yeah, turns out the site got hacked.
So over the past few weeks Richard’s cleared out code, and then there’d be another problem, and then he’d go digging and find yet *more* code, and then we got our host company involved, and they dug out even *more* corrupted files, and then we decided to install SSL certificates or whatever they’re called to hopefully prevent this from happening again (we applied those to all the domains we host, because why not!) but meanwhile Google Chrome keeps insisting that my site is dangerous (even though all the other browsers now seem happy with it, as well as Norton) so hopefully that’s just because their system holds on to suspicious URLs for a bit and that’ll eventually clear out, and not because there’s something still lurking.
But I guess in the grand scheme of things, after running this thing for holy crap 18 years now, getting hacked only once isn’t so surprising.
So! I’m back (I hope, fingers crossed!) and I’ll be playing a little bit of catch-up over the next couple weeks on some stuff that’s happened the last month or two, and also meanwhile I hope whoever wrote the bot that messed things up develops an incurable itch in their private parts that NEVER, EVER goes away.