Ok, so this is the quick version of what happened.
In the middle of moving house, I received an email from my hosting company saying my account was in violation of their Terms and Conditions.
It took ten days to get connected to the net at my new house, and by then my host had suspended my account and nothing was working.
Fortunately a good friend of mine allowed me to lug my iMac up to his house and use his internet for a day so I could sort out the mess – in short… I was using old versions of Wordpress that had vulnerabilities. A very bad idea as these vulnerabilities were being abused by someone or something which caused my T&C violation.
I had plained to return davinian to its previous state ASAP, but what with all the DIY and sorting out my new house I just haven’t had the time.
Anyway, I’m back and I think everything is sorted. I have sucessfuly moved house, and I’m now living in Dorset, not far from the coast and to be honest, enjoying having my own place again.
Sometimes you spot something that just reminds you of yourself…
… and several of my friends as well. Scary!
Man, what is it with silly pictures of monkeys and numpties who like to hot-link images?
I have just spent the last 2 hours sorting through my inbound links to this site trying to cross-reference genuine incoming inks against stupid hot-links.
Bizarrely, the image that every numskull seems to want to hot-link to is this – a montage of some funny monkey portraits (link to my original post).
Good old .htaccess to the rescue is all I can say. Basically I have used RewriteEngine/RewriteCond as describe here: How do I stop hotlinking and bandwidth theft? Which seems to work perfectly.
If you think you are being hot-linked, check your top inbound links first and check for your images on the site linking to you. If the site is a blog or forum, you may need to check previous pages/posts. If you suspect somebody is using your images on their site, then customising your .htaccess is probably the best solution for blocking them.
Note: I don’t use an alternative image, but the temptation to redirect to a rude alternative is very tempting at times – but that would then lower me to the thieving hot-linkers standards, and to be honest, I am above all that!
It has been one of those days for me today, I tried to write this morning, but kept finding myself being distracted by other things. When it happens it is damn hard to break out of it. If I catch myself free-falling early enough I can usually do something about it, but today wasn’t one of those times, so I decided to take a break and headed out of the house for the day.
On reflection it was probably the best thing I could have done, as I got thinking about Tumbled (my free Wordpress theme), and I think I should try and make it more Tumbleblog-like with separate styling for each category – links, photos, quotes, dialogues, and video being the obvious ones – what do you think? Should I make it more, dare I say it… Web 2.0 ish?
Well, I’m back! Miss me? Don’t answer that… It was fantastic weather in Wales (see above). And the break from the computer gave me some much needed time to think about some projects I have had in the back of my mind since I went travelling in Europe earlier this year. I also finished one book and started another that I had been carrying around for several weeks – so a good rest and catch up.
Right, notes, research and more notes… and strong coffee!!!
Posted in Fun, Ideas, News
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