Hello dear readers, it’s been a while! The reason I’ve been absent from my blog is mainly that I’ve not been able to login to the back end of the site due to a serious hacking we experienced last year by a terrorist group.
Regular readers may remember some graphic and unpleasant video footage that took over my websites last year. Well, at the time we paid a considerable amount of money for the website to be cleaned, and for some time we thought everything was normal. However, this just wasn’t the case and combined with hosting problems we decided it was time to move hosts.
Well this has finally happened and I am back! I’ve been “blogging” in Google docs for yonks, waiting for the opportunity to post some stuff. There’s a backlog to cover, so apologies to any brands out there waiting for me to post a review or feature, it is coming I promise. Feel free to give me a nudge about anything pending! I prefer email, just because then I can come back to you in my own time 🙂 running two businesses as well as the blog means I am pretty full-on!
I did learn some valuable lessons whilst waiting for my blog to be turned back on:
- Patience; understandably not being able to blog for over three months has been incredibly frustrating. I’m not the most patient of people but I had to just wait till everything was sorted.
- Acceptance; accepting that no matter how much I wanted my sites back live and active, it takes time for web people to do their thing. Cleaning sites, moving sites and sorting security all take time. Technical things that I just can’t do.
- Getting social again; not being able to blog has meant I’ve been a bit more active on social media, and fallen in love with it again. That said, I did have a trolling for some of my automated shout-outs to people on Twitter. Having a considerable following on Twitter, most people are grateful of a shout-out, I know I always am for them from people with both large and small followings, and I truly believe us bloggers should stick together. For someone to kick up such a fuss about something so trivial, and someone I’ve met in person, well I figured that the best way forward was just to block. I have enough shit to deal with in my life without a troll.
- Loving writing again; without the self-inflicted deadlines for blog posts, I feel I’ve got my writing flair back. I’m also taking more time over blog posts and feel as a result the quality of my content has improved.
- Being in the moment; with the pressure off from having to update the blog on a regular basis, I found I was less preoccupied with my to-do list. As a result, I have taken a serious review of my work-life balance and am having a big shakeup. It’s kind of a new adventure, so let’s see where it goes!
If you’re wondering why on earth my blog and business website were hacked by terrorists, it’s because the server also hosts some rather interesting cryptocurrency websites that my other half works on. The hackers must have had a go at these sites first, but of course they have heightened security, and then turned their attention to my easily targeted sites!