A 'lil HooHaa

Messing with the blogging world since 2005

help me

It’s the most wonderf… cough, cough, hack…

This year is ending with a “blah,” that’s for sure.

Before I get into the Year in Blogging, allow me to say that I was supposed to have had a few other “Year in Review” posts already. Alas, I started feeling a little under the weather before Christmas. It was just a sore throat though and I figured it was from all the yelling I did at the final three 2CW shows.

Christmas night it seemed to really hit.

I don’t remember much of the 26th as I slept most of it away.

The 27th was shaky, though a bit better. I had originally been scheduled to go geocaching for the day with a few people, but the weather mixed with how I was feeling canned that.

I thought I was on the up on the 28th, but that was just a reprieve. The 29th was awful – so much so that I called to get a doctor’s appointment for the 30th.

And despite me back-dating this post for the 29th (I only like publishing one post per day), it’ll be up for a while on the 30th until I finish a Year in Review post.

I was all excited about this little break, too. There weren’t supposed to be a lot of bad weather days and I opted for some vacation time to give myself 11 straight days off.

I’ve taken advantage of none of it.

As it stands, I’ll be in today. And probably tomorrow. Maybe by the weekend I’ll actually be able to get out and do something.

This has been pretty crappy though. I feel like some of these coughs come with shards of glass in them. My normal winter colds usually take a pattern. This one hasn’t followed that pattern one bit. I’m sure once I visit the doctor today, I’ll be told it’s just a bad cold. Rest, fluids etc.

If it’s anything different, I’ll make sure to come back here and update this.

On the one hand, though, I didn’t really plan on doing much over this vacation besides relax, catch up on some sleep and things like that. So I’m getting to do that without a doubt, though I’d rather be doing it on my terms and not hacking my head off and feeling like I’m strapped to the couch.

Anyway, the reason for this post …

So I messed up many of the dates of my Year in Review. And with the 20 Days of Chill Writing Challenge coming up (I have no idea how many people will be participating), I am going to have to sprinkle in some of the Year in Review posts on weekends and such.

My Year in Photos was supposed to be earlier this week, but I need to remake the video as the songs I used – YouTube won’t allow it to be watched in most countries. So I had to find some generic music.

I hope all of you are having a much healthier holiday season!

Feel free to leave a comment, or e-mail P.J. at hoohaablog [at] gmail.com. Also, please “Like” HooHaa Blog on Facebook!

Blog down, blog down!

Sometimes, I wonder what the heck is going on.

After having my site offline for a few hours after what appears to be some kind of attack or hack, I’m back on. But that doesn’t come without issues. The company I host with was able to use a full backup from two days ago.

Unfortunately, that meant I lost items I have posted (and comments).

Thankfully, I can get the posts back via Google’s cache, so I will be able to replace them. And all comments come to me via e-mail, so I was able to replace them, too.

I also see some interesting things on the cached pages, that being links to stuff. So I guess I know what screwed up my site.

That doesn’t take away from the issue at hand.

How did this happen?

Unfortunately, the host wasn’t able to tell me what happened. All I got when I first e-mailed was this:

“Hello,

As far as we can see your website has been compromised and malicious code was inserted to several of your PHP files:

(I clipped many lines of website stuff here as it made NO sense).

In order to resolve this problem you need to

  • remove malicious code from your PHP files
  • update all your sites’ scripts to the latest versions available with needed security patches and keep them up-to-date
  • change all your passwords and always keep them in a safe place

Please let us know if you need any additional information.”

Yes, I need additional information.

HUH???

How in the name of holy hell am I supposed to fix this? I basically asked that, but in a nicer way, of course!

So all I was told was that they had a full backup from two days ago. And after looking to make sure I had the blog entries and I could quickly replace them when the site came back up, I told them to do what they had to do because I needed and wanted the site back up.

So, while I wait for them to use the backup, I’m writing this post. Hopefully things will get back up soon so I can then do what I need to do in regard to replacing posts/comments and letting the site get back to normal.

I’m now going to change all my passwords, get rid of a few things that seemed to be nailed with this attack and see if anything needs to be updated. Also, I’m going to do a backup now so it’s up to date!

They have given me a few things to do, but one includes using only WP themes. The theme I use is not a WordPress “official” theme as most of them are boring. I’m going to make sure, however, that all my stuff is up to date and I’m going to delete any themes I’m not using in hopes that it will help as well.

Hopefully this will be the only time this happens!

Feel free to leave a comment, or e-mail P.J. at hoohaablog [at] gmail.com. Also, please “Like” HooHaa Blog on Facebook by clicking the button on the right side of the page!