The last few days have been devoted to crawling out from under the weight of a massive hack across all my websites. That is something that I dislike even writing, but it happened and that needs to be acknowledged. Somehow via a plugin somebody was able to get in and populate links to terrible cheap websites on every page and post within my entire WordPress ecosystem. Just that type of action alone would have been annoying enough to create extreme frustration, but somehow the folks who perpetrated the hack managed to break every website as well. Restoration required some extreme measures. I had to trigger on the backend a fall forward or fail backward WordPress version change. That just unpackaged a new set of clean files over the ones that had been corrupted. Part of the hack was actually dropped code on some core pages. I had to go back in and by hand remove those pages within the filesystem and replace them with the latest version from the WordPress GitHub. All of that took about 30 minutes per site and was frustrating.  

To end the year, I have switched over to writing within Microsoft Word Online instead of using Google Docs. At the moment, the new setup is working out well enough for me to get some writing done. Yesterday I spent so much time reading code and making updates to things. The one really good thing that came out of the whole debacle was that for the first time in year I reduced the number of domains that I own and operate. Some domains were literally just released into the wind and they are back in the pool of domains that people can buy. For this point forward, I am not going to camp out on any domains. I’m only going to work with active websites. Anything that is just sitting around and collecting digital dust is going to be combined into something else and deprecated. The rest of the day is going to be spent watching college football and relaxing. Tonight, on Fox the Kansas Jayhawks will be playing the Oklahoma Sooners. It may not be a very competitive game, but I plan on watching it via the over the air broadcast Fox provides me.