6/1/2009

I broke the Internet, but then I fixed it.

Filed under: — Aprille @ 2:38 pm

This blog has been rife with technical issues lately.  I recently got an email from my hosting service saying my account had been deactivated.  There were no further details provided.

The first thing Denny asked me was whether I had any naked photos of Miles posted (I don’t think so—I generally only allow that sort of thing under private status on Flickr).  That was a horrifying thought, that I might be accused of being a child pornographer.  Then my mind flitted to some possibly copyrighted material I might have hanging around, Greta Garbo photos and stuff.  Still, I would have expected a cease and desist (to which I would have gladly complied) rather than a complete and abrupt shut-off.

As it turns out, my site got pwned (or it might have actually been Denny’s site, which runs off my same hosting account, since he was running an older version of WordPress).  I got more details out of my host, and they said there’s an exploit in older versions of WordPress that can wreak havoc.

Anyway, I deleted the offending file and Denny upgraded the site to the latest version, so I think we’re good now.  However, those of you who subscribe to my RSS feed may need to update.

Whenever this sort of thing happens to other sites I visit, it takes me months to get the new feed, because I just think the person is lazy and hasn’t been posting, since I almost never visit blogs using a regular old browser.  We’ll see if my readership goes down from this.

Mostly I was worried that the site would still be down on the 7th for Miles’s 17 month birthday post.  I hope nothing rude happens between now and then.

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