There was no Friday Date Night. No, Mr French and I did not have a spat, although he did abandon me for the weekend on yet another one of his numerous business trips.
Instead of writing about a yet another memorable meal, I caught a virus. Or rather my blog did. And I had NO IDEA! Those nasty hackers are now infecting sites, so that even the administrators, non, especially the admins are not aware of it. FORTUNATELY this virus will NOT infect you or your computer. Its sole purpose in life is to infect blogs for Google ratings to increase (in my virus’ case) Viagra sales! so YOU ARE 100%SAFE .
Fortunately YOU are a GREAT bunch of readers and several of you sent me an email letting me know your access was blocked. MILLE MERCIS for that. Sincerely!Now that I have become something of an expert, I’d like to share a little health ed with all my blogger friends out there. 1/ 80% of all blogs get infected because the blogger (in this case moi) did not upgrade to the latest version of Blogger/WordPress or whatever platform you are using. Stay with the times, my friends and update when ever possible.
2/ What to do if you do get infected? There are tons of articles available online that teach you how to back up your blog, rout out the bugs and get it up and running again. For a pro it takes just a few hours. Knowing myself, it would have taken me a few days. Non stop, around the clock and much of it angst ridden. I needed a Plan B, aka a hired gun. This is a scary concept because you have to give a total stranger access to your blog and your ftp code. I went into research mode and found Jim from HackRepair.com. His prices are somewhere in between the bargain basement folks working from far off outposts and the more local “studios”. For a bit more confidence in his legit-itude, I found some review on him and his work, then I called and we had a little chat. Once I’d paid for his service, he started sending me emails with regular updates of what was going on. This is usually a two hour process, but I was missing a key password and the GoDaddy server went down. He kept me calm throughout it all and within fours, it was done.
I verified that everything was clean using a Google service and UnmaskParsites.com. I then reached out to the readers who had warned me in the first place. They confirmed that all was well in my little world. So thank you Jim, and to all of you for your support, and your patience…. I’ll be back tomorrow and next Friday I promise a date to remember. A date night at one of the Top Ten Best Restaurants in the World. Yum!!!
