Dispatches from Blogblivion

This is pretty much here for archival purposes. Practically forget it exists. No fingers lifted, right? Until you’re hacked! So now we’re on a newer version of PHP, which supports the newest version of WordPress and kills the old Expression Engine version of the earlier Blogblivion content once and for all barring special measures (manually adding posts here or finagling a site together of the static pages – 150 of them – I saved to have it in viewable form, not just database entries and memories.

Everything in WP was hacked. Even the lone clog that was already on the latest version after being hacked a couple weeks back without all this company. Unless the hosting has completely gone south, it seems that it’s some combinations of PHP version, WP version, updating themes and plugins, and finally figuring WTF it was on about with refusing to use HTTPS to load the blogs. You have to set the URL to that in the WP settings! Done across the board. I’ll update every password for everything for good measure along the way. This is the second blog with shiny new WP today. The third one on the hosting worked after changing PHP. I deleted a handful of specialty blogs. Easy to fix on the one hand, but more things to deal with on the other. Only a single one is completely cleaned of the crud – mostly hidden links in the posts. This one has almost 700 posts. It’s either go through every post and edit the ones affected, or do the same basic thing through MySQL. It appears that the stuff trails off by around halfway through, or did in a blog with a fraction of this number of posts. Posts near the beginning are more likely to contain more than one. Easy but tedious and slow. I’m hiring one of the kids to help with some of it. Deb’s old crochet blog was affected, for instance.

I really didn’t want to take the whole thing down. Even the places I took down may see content placed elsewhere or may return in the end. This is the early years of the kids. That’s why I carefully saved and organized 150 web pages worth of the early Blogblivion content that I knew I couldn’t keep from crashing when PHP was updated.

Anyway, until one of us goes through it, you should be able to see the weirdness the hack caused if you pay any attention at all to some of the subsequent posts.

At the very least, WordPress being updated might make things snappier and avoid errors that might ultimately make this as unreadable as an old Expression Engine blog that’s been obsoleted by version changes to PHP on the server. Kind of hard to be archival if it can’t be read, eh?

I’ve spent a lot of years having but not much posting on a bunch of blogs, starting with the one that this replaced eons ago despite my better judgement. This may be changing.

Here we go again. Updated WordPress to the latest I know our database can support. Updated our theme to this awesome new one. Managed to lose my Sitemeter in the process, and don’t even know what e-mail address I don’t get any more they have for that account. Plan to start posting here extensively, so stay tuned. There’s a backlog, but time is often limited.