Nels Lindahl — Functional Journal

A weblog created by Dr. Nels Lindahl featuring writings and thoughts…

Rethinking the weblog after getting hacked

Over the years my weblog has seen a reasonable amount of technical problems. Some of them were caused by intrusions into the website. Some of them were probably self-inflicted coding errors. It has been some time since something like that has happened. This time around it appears they came in via the help of a plugin which has since been removed. It was a plugin designed to help reduce SPAM. Instead it allowed somebody to tag a link at the end over every single one of my posts. I had to get really deep into the code remove some plugins, do a reinstallation of WordPress, and find/replace a link that had been embedded on every single page I had ever written. Seriously, somebody bothered to hack every post on my entire weblog. Exactly why somebody thought that merited their time I have no idea.

You can imagine my first thought was to back up my data and start over with a clean installation. That was probably a good first thought. However, that seemed like a lot of work. Instead of taking that path it seemed easier to remove the offending code and clean up my database. All of that is now done. Two hours of my time were spent cleaning up something done for malicious reasons. My efforts to write and produce prose are really for my own satisfaction. Most of the time my writing is simply done to fulfill the act of writing. For me purposes WordPress is a platform for creation. It is a means to an end and really should not be talking up so much of my time. Maybe the time has come to switch over and use some other writing forum, but at this point that seems like a lot of work without any real payoff.  


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