It’s good to be back…

It’s a great feeling to have my blog back up and running again! It was a bit scary there at one point as I thought I’d lost everything and I also noticed that my site was no longer being indexed by Google. In fact it was because of that I noticed that something was wrong.

I first noticed that the number of hits on my site had gone down considerably. So I decided to search for my site on Google and noticed I could not see it. I asked a few friends what my be wrong with my site and why that might happen? No one seemed too sure but they had some ideas and one of my friends spotted that I had and immense amount of spam code embedded within my blog. It was hardly surprising considering that I was still running version 1.5 of wordpress. I did attempt to upgrade my blog a few months ago and was unsuccessful. When I asked for help through wordpress no one responded to my messages on the forum so I decided to leave it again until I had more time.

This though though the situation was incredibly desperate. So I backed up everything and deleted my blog directory on my server and decided to start from scratch. This time I enlisted the help of a friend who was a lot more web savvy than I and he did the upgrade for me but it still didn’t work. Finally, thanks to his suggestion I got a setting rectified by my web host. That was supposed to fix it but for some reason it still wasn’t working! After nearly working on my site for 24 hours straight I finally managed to fix it and get it all running. I looked around for a nice theme and found the one you see before you now. I will be making minor changes at some point but for now this is a nice clean design with some good features.

My site is still not showing up on Google search however I think that for some reason Google had a cached version of a robots.txt file that was set to disallow crawling. I manually changed that and now I believe that will get my site indexed once again…fingers crossed!

I learned a very important lesson that if I’m going to continue to maintain my own blog then to keep the software up to date and change the passwords regularly. If, like me, you’re not so web savvy, then a good plugin to get is the WordPress Automatic Update Plugin which pretty much does the upgrades to wordpress for you with the simple click of a button. My gratitude goes out to the creator of that plugin as I know it’s going to make the maintenance of this blog that much easier!

This experience has been a great lesson in personal development and the power of choice because, ultimately, I know that these problems occurred through the choices I made. It wasn’t a bad or a good thing specifically but I learned valuable lessons and web skills through it so I see the good that’s come out of this whilst also knowing that it wasn’t the best approach. However it’s done now so I’ll remember the lessons and try my best to implement them into the future.

Now comes the easy bit of writing blog posts! 😆