I admit it. I’ve pretty much ignored my website for, well . . .forever. If you spend just a few moments looking around this shell of a website, you can see that my first and only previous blog was nearly four years ago. Yes, life is busy, and there is always something more interesting, or more fun, or more necessary to spend time on. And it certainly didn’t help that I made the conscious decision years ago to build this site from “scratch” and teach myself some basic HTML and CSS coding. As if it’s not enough work just to simply come up with “content.”
Over the past couple years, I would occasionally take a peek at my website. Not for any good reason, simply to waste a few moments looking at my lame contribution to the interwebs, or perhaps to check whether it had magically transformed itself into something much more than what I could ever produce. Unfortunately, the latter is exactly what happended. Over the past eight months, someone had gained access to the server where my website is hosted and uploaded all kinds of things that . . . well let’s just say it wasn’t Grand Canyon tourism information. Until I discovered this, it had earned me quite the undesirable listing in Google.
The situation today is under control. Over the past two weeks, I’ve deleted everything from my website files, implemented a much more secure password that will be changed on a frequent basis, and I’ve started off with WordPress and all new files for this latest version of Canyon Eupho. Updates to WordPress software and plugins will be promptly adopted. Am I still vulnerable to hacking? Of course I am; I use a computer and author a website. Don’t do either if you want to stay secure. Hopefully, “next time” won’t happen, but I plan to be watching closer than ever. And who knows? I may even get in a blog or two during the course of the next Olympiad (or for soccer fans, before the next World Cup).
