I am proudly announcing valimaki.com is back online! I had the site offline for more than a year, which is a really long time on the Internet. Looking back I was only updating the blog section from time to time with mainly running and training related updates. When I started to run less, I posted less. The main page was static and the university stuff I had under org was out of date with no updates. At the same time, since 2014, I had started to tweet more, which was away from blogging. Then something happened and valimaki.com email forward didn’t work at some point in 2017. My old ISP had been sold to a new one and my old, free services were obviously over. I just set-up quickly an email forward elsewhere, reconfigured the name servers for the domain, and let the site go black for a while…
Now, after a bunch of new writing ideas had brewed in my mind for months, I finally took the time and started to get the blog data back together two nights ago. First I didn’t find the old database anywhere in my archives. Started to feel really nervous… Luckily the guys at TNnet helped out and I got a mysql dump of the blog how it looked like when last online. Turned out some malware had hacked into my old WordPress (version 3.1) installation and added all kind of viagra links to most of the posts. Dammit! Browsed options but looks like WordPress cleaning is a business and there are no easy solutions out there. Took me several hours to clean all that crap up with a long run of sql search and replace scripts. Maybe I could do a free service out of those? Well, the spam is gone for now.
The next step was to install a complete WordPress site locally with MAMP. Then figured out how to get the old data up again without another run of spamming. Found that the security hole was most probably in my old theme, which was immediately gone. Settled for the time being with one of the WordPress defaults. When it all looked to work again started the migration to the new ISP.
Decided to set up WordPress as the engine for the whole website. Manually added the most relevant twitter posts from the past few years into the blog so it doesn’t look totally dead. I am now looking at options for future Twitter integration, and looks like WP to Twitter is what I’m going to try next.