My fiancé pokes fun at me for having redesigned this site so many times; it seems I can’t let more than six months pass without switching themes, rearranging the layout, etc.. I play with the site because it’s fun and, until a few months ago, I hadn’t found a theme that met both my needs and aesthetic tastes. Several months ago, though, I switched to WooThemes’ Simplicity and managed to let things be for a while save for some minor tweaks.
Return visitors to the site may have noticed things have changed once again. This redesign hasn’t been as much fun as earlier ones, though, because I am doing the work after getting hacked. While I did have a recent backup, I decided against using any of those files to avoid uploading any lingering malicious code.
All things considered, it could have been a lot worse. Lest anyone is reading this post because they went Googling after experiencing something similar, I do have a couple of suggestions.
- One, access a cache of your site as soon as possible, before it gets indexed again. There are lots of different ways to do this; I used Google’s cache: operator to track down my home page then searched for individual subpage URLs. I copied the results into both a Notepad++ file and a Word document. I typically avoid pasting from Word into an HTML editor, but I was pleasantly surprised to discover most of the links and formatting survived the Google>Word>WordPress journey.
- Two, and this suggestion may not be as helpful post-hack: subscribe to your own RSS feed. When the WordPress RSS import option and viewing the XML in FeedBurner failed me, I was able to retrieve post content from my Google Reader subscription. This allowed me to avoid rewriting posts (particularly those related to my conference presentations, which contain lots of links and annotations) and recreate the original URLs.
Things have moved around a bit, and I elected not to republish everything. Let me know if you’re looking for something in particular, and thanks for visiting. I can’t promise not to rearrange the furniture after you leave.