Shifting Priorities

If you visited my site last night around 10:30 p.m. Pacific Daylight Time, you would have found an entirely blank site as I was in the middle of trying to update my site after reading that the previous version of WordPress had been compromised and spammers were inserting nearly invisible links into people’s blogs.

Having been hacked at least once before by pornographers, I wasn’t taking any chances, even though this is a less than ideal time to update my site. As I’ve mentioned before, I’m largely self-taught on this blogging thing; which is to say that there’s a lot more that I don’t understand than I do understand. Even though I’ve updated my site several times now, I’ve always run into some kind of complications, and last night was no exception. Apparently the latest version of WordPress didn’t like something about my old theme and wouldn’t recognize it at all at first, leaving the page blank. With a little fiddling I was able to get it recognized and restart all my old plug-ins, and as far as I can tell everything is working fine (feel free to email me if you find something that’s not working right). I’ve decided to let the problems of updating my template, and particularly updating the links in the sidebar, wait until I’ve addressed other priorities.

Like Theresa, I still haven’t finished my taxes, not that I’m in any particular rush to pay whatever it is I still owe. But obviously that’s my next priority. I promise I’ll quit playing Heroes of Might and Magic V long enough to finish the taxes and have them mailed by the 15th of the month.

My number one priority, though, remains trying to fully recover from my recent bout with the flu and pneumonia. My lungs actually feel good, but my digestive system still hasn’t recovered from the antibiotics and the prednisone. As a result, I still haven’t been able to return to my full regime at the YMCA. I’ve had to skip at least some classes each week, and taking Skye for his daily walk has become more of a burden than a pleasure.

Of course, if the sun would just come out for an extended period, I’d chuck it all in order to get back outside for a whole day. I’d planned on doing that today since I don’t go to the Y on Wednesdays, but, despite previous forecasts and some tempting breaks in the clouds, I don’t think I could get in a long walk with getting drenched.

As you can tell, this blog IS a priority, or I wouldn’t bother filling up space like this, but it may be a while before I can get back to e.e. cummings’ Complete Poems 1904-1962.

10 thoughts on “Shifting Priorities”

  1. Loren, good luck with the taxes. I am dreading it. It’s just not my thing. I hope you are in tip top shape very very soon.

  2. I think I dread web site updates the way you dread doing taxes. I just don’t know as much as I’d like to know. I still don’t understand permissions, and they always seem to end up biting me in the butt.

    Since I worked as a tax preparer for five years after retiring from teaching, I don’t dread doing taxes, especially with a computer program, but I don’t look forward to owing more taxes every year.

    As it turned out, I stayed home today and finished the taxes, Theresa. We owe the least amount we’ve owed since I started drawing Social Security a few years ago, $58. I can live with that.

    Healthwise, I think it’s just going to take some time to build up my strength again and to let everything settle down, but I am looking forward to being outside in some sunshine soon.

  3. Yes, I went to your site last night and saw the blank page. I was hoping you didn’t close down your site and glad that you are back.

    I did my tax but it was pretty painful. πŸ™

  4. Sorry, Sue, but I did it at 10:30 or later PST.

    Shouldn’t you have been in bed by then?

    Sorry about those taxes. I always felt lucky I had money in the bank to pay the taxes I owed. When I prepared taxes there was always a few people nearly in tears because they hadn’t saved a thing all year β€” no matter how much money they’d brought home.

  5. Did you update to 2.3.3, or 2.5? The latter has some pretty impressive-sounding security measures; I don’t pretend to understand them: “secure cookie management, salted passwords and prepared SQL querying functions.”

    Security is a big issue for me, too, my blog having recently been hacked.

  6. Until I read your post it never occurred to me that someone would hack into a blog, or that they’d be able to insert links to porn. Is blogspot also vulnerable? I am very new to blogging, and spend my time on posts, not code.

  7. I upgraded to 2.5, Dave.

    I’m not sure about Blogspot, Rae, but since every major software maker upgrades for “security” reasons, I would suspect that all sites are somewhat vulnerable, though the hackers seem to go after the major providers, like WordPress and Movable Type, first because there’s more benefit for the effort.

    The more popular your site, the more apt you are to be hacked, too.

  8. Umm, good question Loren, yes, I should have been, like right now. πŸ™‚
    My tax was not bad in the sense that I owed any; it is just that too much paper work. πŸ™

    I hope you feel better soon, Loren.

  9. Sorry to hear you’ve been sick – but glad you are on the mend. I’m sure you’re doing it already, but if not, eat lots of real yogurt with live cultures to counteract those antibiotics!

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