And we’re back!

After many weeks of faffing and disillusionment with the whole blogging thing I seem finally to be back after the blog getting hacked last year. I’m still unsure on the actual cause. I suspect that while working on my website I tried to link to data in the blog and possibly left something vulnerable there. Either way some hacker from Turkey managed to inject loads of malware throughout the blog. Every post, page, media item was infected and despite numerous attempts to clean things it just wouldn’t go away. This kind of put me off blogging for a while as I really thought I’d lost 11 years of recording my hobby!

However, after a bit of research I finally sat down a few days ago to sort it all out. The basic process was…

1. Export ALL posts and pages and use a decent text editor to remove all the spam links from the generated XML file
2. Wipe the entire subdomain the blog sat in and recreate the subdomain as a separate website to the main one.
3. Install a clean copy of WordPress and all the assorted plugins I need to keep it clean.
4. Import the old blog.
5. Scan the hell out of it both locally and remotely – it seems to come up clean

There are still a few issues with the media library but that is only related to old posts so I’m not too bothered and may fix it later… And some of the pages that used a multi-column formatting plugin no longer work so they will either need reformatting or moving to the new website when I get round to it…

In the meantime, to get my mojo moving again, I’ve been sorting through my Cold War microarmour and using a lot of the older WarPac kit to start off a small Polish force. I posted this on Facebook before Christmas but thought I’d drop the images in here just for completeness!

I’ve got a load more done and ready to upload but they can sit in their own new post. I’m also working on various bits of Soviet kit: ferries, bridging, dozers etc. and a pile more tanks as you can never have too many!

Fingers crossed this stays clean

And Happy New Year!