Wow. What a day I’ve had today. I lost so much valuable time today, not only with my family but also blogging, compliments of stupid hackers. GRRR!!!
Yesterday (Wednesday) someone told me that my RSS feed looked a bit off. When I checked it out, sure enough there was a garbled mess. I couldn’t see a thing but others told me my feed looked OK. This made no sense. I tried in vain last night to figure out the problem but finally gave up.
This morning I noticed the no one (to my knowledge) who subscribes via e-mail received anything. It should have arrived around 7:00 AM (EST). I subscribe via e-mail and RSS to my own blog to keep an eye on things. If not I wouldn’t have realized that there was a problem with the feed still.
I did everything I possibly could to figure out what the problem was, to the point I was in near tears. The only people I knew would understand are other bloggers, so I posted about it on a blogger forum I am a member of. All the members who commented could certainly feel my pain, and some have even experienced problems too so they could relate.
One blogger, Alison, from BeingAlison.com, jumped in to help save the day. Alison worked for HOURS to help try and figure out the problem then by the grace of God was able to fix it. For that I am VERY thankful and grateful for all her help. Thank you Alison!
Later on this evening my friend Alicia, my webmaster, from Valentine-Web-Creations.com, went in and took care of the rest of the stuff to make sure those evil hackers don’t get in again. Thank you SO MUCH Alicia!
Turns out some not-so-lovely hackers found a way into my site, not so much to reap havoc but more so to steal my site’s traffic (at least that is what I’m assuming they were doing). I’m glad they didn’t mess up my site. It was a foreign porn site too. I would have been devastated!
I don’t think there was ever any “danger” to anyone, whether it was a site visitor or subscriber. They weren’t trying to mess up my site. They were essentially “stealing” my site stats to boost their site on Alexa to increase their site’s ranking. Another words, if their site only received 100 visitors per day, their Alexa rank wouldn’t be so good. But using my site’s stat of around 1,000 visitors per day, that would help their site move up the Alexa ranking quickly. Do you know what I mean? So it wasn’t a virus or anything like that but rather they found a way to embed their Alexa code on my site.
It was NOT a virus. It was simply someone’s Alexa code put on my site. Thankfully Feedburner picked up on it and that is why my feed got messed up.
Ugh! People! Learn to do it the right way. No need to steal other people’s stuff. Grr!
Because my feed was all messed up no on who subscribes via e-mail received anything today. So what I did was go back and change the dates of yesterday’s post (most of them anyway) to today’s date. That way they SHOULD be sent out to you first thing Friday morning. You MIGHT get a dozen posts in one e-mail. I’m sorry about that. You have to keep in mind that it’s two days worth of posting. I hope that doesn’t cause any inconvenience.
I’m sorry for the mixed up feed. Hopefully its fine now but if you notice any problems PLEASE drop me a line or leave me a comment and let me know. I would appreciate that very much.
Kimberly
I just wanted to tell you that you are welcome. And I’m glad I had even an ounce of the skill needed to fix it for you! Just goes to show that I know a lot more about FTP and code than I even thought I did.
If you ever need anything again Kim I’m here to help!
Wow, total drag that your blog was hit by the jerks.
When I didn’t even have a blog someone was doing this thing called Piggy Backing off my email address to send out a bunch of their junky emails. Anyways that’s what a higher up tech told me. They stopped the problem though.
Wow…I had no idea someone would feel a need to do that. So, can you find out WHO did this? Shameful! Alison gets the good friend
friend from afar award! That’s Ace!