Broken!

Okay, it was hacked. Yes, my site was hacked so I spent some time getting it fixed.

When I first started doing this website, it was for educational purposes and it still is for educational purposes. I figured that someday I was going to have to deal with a hacked site and the day came about 2 weeks ago. I got an email from my hosting service provider that the site would be shut down due to malware.

Shock, anxiety, fear ensued. I had to wait a couple of days to think about my approach. Do I spend some money to get someone to completely clean up my site? But then I wouldn’t learn anything. I kind of wanted to learn how to dig in and figure it out; having someone else do it for me would do away with the learning process.

So, I decided to initially do some digging myself, just so I can learn more about website, programming and security, up to the point where I could no longer do anything and then bring in the big guys.

The whole point of this site was to use it for exploration and experimentation. I was curious as to how much work it was to keep up with the blogging and how to keep punching out new posts on your chosen topics. I understand why people give up after so much time – I just read something along the lines of 3 months – because it is hard to dream up a new post and to keep churning them out. I was also wondering how people were getting their images. When I first started, I was afraid to use “free” images from unsplash or pixabay so I decided to create my own images.

But creating my own images is very time-consuming (oh boy!) and the work topics that I was generally writing about did not lend to nice images. Because of the time-consuming aspect of the image making, I had to limit my posting to a max of 3 times a week, but more likely twice a week with a minimum of once a week. Due to work, two times a week was the most I could realistically do and those posts tended to be during the weekend.

To think up articles to write, I had to do a lot of reading for ideas.

So, between the drawing/image making, reading, and writing, the whole blogging thing took up time.

The other part I wanted to learn was the programming side, mainly the visuals on the page, specifically learning html and css to do layouts of images and learning the workings of the blogging program I’m using. I was also exploring Gimp to develop images. Any time I did unusual layouts on the posts (unusual for me), the whole process usually took me hours – if not a whole day – to get some sort of visual layout to come close to what I envisioned. That was time consuming.

I also used this site as a form of discipline: to somehow keep posting regularly.

The hacking was just another opportunity to learn more about the programming aspect since I was generally focused on the visual communication side rather than the hard-core programming.

But I don’t want to do this too often. I’ve had my fun for now.