Let me set the scene. It’s 8pm on a Sunday night, and I decide that I’m going to be productive and draft up a little blog post for the coming week. I write it all up in Word, go to Safari to access my blog’s dashboard and nothing.
I got redirected to this weird site I’d never even heard of. Me being the complete naïve drip I am, tries again and again until Ben Googles the website I’m being redirected to and utters the words ‘you’ve been hacked’. Before he had even finished his sentence I burst into tears as Ben’s scanning articles of what’s happened to try and comfort me.
Flashback to when everyone was wetting themselves that they weren’t going to be GDPR compliant, I downloaded the WP GDPR widget for my self-hosted site. As y’know I’m lazy and it says it’ll make everything better. LOL JK the latest version was as diseased as going in the Thames with an open wound.
So as Ben reads deeper into what’s happened and I softly wail, I can’t access my blog, potentially losing nearly 200 posts and hundreds of hours of work. I have to cancel my debit card because it’s connected to this probably corrupted site. And my phone and laptop are likely going to blowup as the rouge site was accessed on them both.
FAN-FUCKING-TASTIC.
Luckily for me my hosting site are magnificent creatures and managed to deactivate the widget and get me back in. But it got me thinking, if I had lost my blog it would have set me back from my goals by a hell of a long way.
I’ve made it no secret that eventually I would like to be a content creator in one fashion or another. However, a lot of the opportunities that are presented to me at the moment are blog based. The brands want a blog post, they want a link, they want photos and exposure which is all totally acceptable and fine. But what would I have to offer if I had no blog?
As I struggled to get to sleep thinking about it all, I started thinking about how I might have to start my blog again from scratch. How I would have to grow my following again, how I would have to get back my readership. Not to mention the time it would take to get all my posts back up, and my DA score back to where it is.
If my blog dies, it essentially takes my dream with it. Or at least it delays me for a hell of a long time. And it made me realise just how far I’ve come in the last 20 months. We all get so caught up looking forward, that we don’t actually take the time to look and see how far we’ve come.
I never thought anyone would read my posts. I never thought I had anything interesting enough to say. And I definitely didn’t think I was confident enough to put myself out there on the internet. Well, the best part of 2 years later and I wouldn’t recognise myself.
So this is your formal reminder to have a think. To reflect. To look back on your own journey and see just how far you’ve traveled without even realising. Life is busy, and people are always stressed but we can only appreciate how much we’ve grown by looking how far we are off the ground.
Wow that must have been so scary, I am so happy that everything is back to normal!
I can’t even begin to imagine how this experience has made you feel. Things like this make us feel so grateful when they turn out all good in the end. I hope this event hasn’t made you feel like giving up in any way. You’ve worked so hard for this and showed those hackers what’s what. I both enjoyed and didn’t enjoy reading this post because of the story this contained. I’m so happy for you that you managed to get your blog back. Thank you so much for sharing your tragic story and showing your honesty.
Love, Jennifer