Three of my biggest sites got hacked this weekend - what I took to be a simple database issue was actually something far more serious, so I've killed the blog databases for the moment.
You might wonder what that has to do with writing?
Well, for a start, I didn't keep ANY of my blog articles anywhere other than these blogs. More fool me. So I'm now backing up more often than before (daily instead of weekly) and writing my blog posts offline, instead of on the fly, and in the blog sites themselves.
This is teaching me a really nice habit though - before I'd forget to trigger my spellchecker before posting - now, before I upload it I spell AND grammar check about six times, mainly because I have to. Once in Word, once in notepad (to strip out all of the code that office adds and is completely pointless in blogs) and a final time when I put it live.
This gap of a couple of hours between writing and posting also does me the world of good, because I'm now seeing where my posts do and don't make perfect sense.
Life wise, I've been garnering 70% marks for hand in essay style assignments, so life is good on the University front. On the family front, things are tough - my youngest is special needs, and hard work, but she's also SO worth it, so we're weathering that little storm as best we can. 'Work' wise (read that novels and my own blogs), I'm doing ok. They tend to be the last thing I pay attention to, and most of my sites are just languishing now, so I'm trying to decide what to do with them. Its amazing how things change over a year.
I'm curious though - have you found anything 'different' - any challenges you're up against that you didn't expect - any successes or learning spots (note, NOT failures) that you've encountered?
Sunday, February 3, 2008
Hacking, writing and life
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4 comments:
I love your writing style! I enjoyed reading you.
How did you know you were hacked? What happened? I am a very new blogger and I want to learn, learn, learn.
Kai, so sorry that happened to you! But I know what you mean about writing offline first, then re-reading before posting. This helps me too (even though I haven't done it every time).
Saundra - there's various ways of seeing you're hacked - with blogger, its usually a password issue - its been 'hijacked'.
Wordpress - usually there's something on the front page that says the site has been hacked - the passwords get changed - its messy.
If you ever need a hand with blogging though, you can email me at donnakaiwilson at gmail.com (that's this id :))
Carolyn - see, I knew I was doing something wrong. I'm always in such a rush to hand off on the things I do that I skip steps. I'm training myself not to now ;)
Thank you so much. I will take you up on that!
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