Oh dear the title reads as though someone had tried to eat me and vomited me back up again. Sorry about the imagery!
Overly attentive readers may have noticed that for a number of hours yesterday the website was down, or at least running on a severely limited interface, a bit like the view from Pendle on a misty day – not a great deal to see! This was owing to yet another hack. Essentially what appeared to have happened was that I had seemingly installed one or two many Word Press plugins over the months and subsequently had forgotten what worked and didn’t affect the site in a negative way – versus what did not work and affected the site in an adverse way. In this case it was all down to mis/re direction. In a nutshell if you get the domain part of my website correctly entered in your browser’s address bar then it should load up the desired page, if not then you should get redirected to a page which will tell you that the page for which you were looking does not exist.
Yesterday (and probably for a good number of days prior to my noticing this) this was just not happening, a user could enter (for example) http://fatgoatwalks.co.uk/bigblackdog and be redirected to a website that had been so maliciously designed as to warrant a Google “Reported Attack Page” alert and failure of the browser to load the said page. Obviously this was not something with which I wanted to be associated, so after an exchange (or several) with my web host’s technical support team it was decided (note the passive voice there!) to wipe the blog database and files from their web server. Fortunately I do (often) practice what I preach and had a number of daily backups from which I could restore the posts etc once the wipe and re-installation was complete. As you observe this has now been done.
I have lost a great deal of the connectivity that was afforded to me via the plugins, it may yet prove to be that a lot of these where superfluous. The best plugin that I had was “GeotagPhoto” which has simply stopped working and no matter how many times I try to re-install it still fails to ‘do’ what it once ‘did’. This is indeed a shame. I will be adding the Facebook, Twitter, Photo Bucket and FlickR plugins once more but I will have researched more deeply than before; the histories, progresses and origins of each plugin that is to be installed from here on in.