A week ago I received an email from my hosting provider informing me that my blog had been suspended due to a malware infection.  I didn’t check it out immediately. Let’s be honest, I haven’t been regularly blogging for quite some time.

When I did investigate, I discovered it was a pretty bad hack.  The blog was locked down. It was a mess.  My hosting provider’s only support option was forcing me to talk to a third party security vendor who wanted extravagant payment for solving the problem. I couldn’t justify the cost.

I wasn’t concerned. It’s all in the cloud you see. I’ll just redeploy it.

To cut a long story short, my assumption that I’d just restore it from back-ups was incorrect. (Note: Make sure you regularly and formally back-up and download your blog content from the administrator dashboard). What followed was many hours re-learning the various skills required to meddle with server-side blogging software.

Thankfully I have been able to rescue most of the posts that stretch back to March 2002 (my exciting first post on my Radio Userland blog is below).  I’ve lost some formatting and images, old links are all broken, but it’s better than nothing.

On a positive note, I’ve ditched my hosting provider and my next project is trying to import the blog comments from the past sixteen years (there was a time people used to converse in the blog comment area).

It’s been interesting to review some of the old posts, to see how much things have changed in the past sixteen years. Who knows, perhaps I’ll blog a little more often.

At least the ever wonderful Way Back Machine has a cache of the old posts.