Some time in the summer of 2014, my old site and most other sites under my hosting account were hacked.
I don’t know when exactly it happened. I didn’t know until a client called me saying their site had been hacked. They would have missed it, too, except that they’re a financial advisor, and their customers had called them, worried that their financial information was compromised.
It wasn’t. Their data was fine. The attack on my server seemed to be a simple defacement—one that wasn’t even particularly well-executed. The hacker(s) had simply replaced the homepage on each of my sites with some message about their hacking group.
But their own image links didn’t work. Like, if you’re going to deface a website, at least make sure your hack works, dummies.
Anyway. After I removed the offending files, quarantined them to a hidden directory and scanned for any viruses, I verified the customers’ databases were okay, and made sure their sites were up and running (with additional security measures in place). Their sites were safe and sound.
My own, however, I left to rot.
“A web designer,” you may ask, “who doesn’t recover his own website from a hack? What sort of web designer is that?”
And I may answer: one who puts it off to do other things, because reasons.
Actually, my site lay fallow for years before it had been hacked. I hadn’t updated it since, I think, 2009. My business wasn’t depending on it, and the looming task of a redesign seemed too much to fiddle with then.
And it needed a redesign. Whoo, boy. It was very much a 1.0 website, built as a portfolio in 200…8? I think? And not really touched very often after that.
I avoided rethinking my site, because rethinking my site meant rethinking what I wanted to be professionally, and man, lemme tell ya—that’s a tough question. Designing for yourself is super hard.
So my site lay dormant and I worked away at clients’ sites and other projects, and then when it was hacked, I really didn’t see much of a point in fixing it.
I’d worked up a redesign (the one this version is based on) two or three years ago, but never launched it. Instead, I got married, moved, bought a house, moved again, worked as a consultant for a big ole corp. Been busy! Just not busy making things.
That’s changing. It’s time to start making things, again. Too many fun toys to play with in the world of front-end design and development to just leave things be.
This site will be my home on the web, and I’m excited to be back online after so long.
I don’t expect to earn readers or attention, but I intend to keep making stuff, and keep publishing. Version 2.0 is built and I can start iterating.
Welcome back to the internet, me. Been too long.