New and Improved

Earlier this summer, all my former websites (portfolio, blog, To Japan with Love charitable site and my teaching blog) were all hacked by a group of people who asked for money to restore my site. Which forced me to delete and start over (no I didn’t have a back up, painful lesson learned). However, I am trying to look at the bright side, it forced me to re-design my site and merge my blog into my portfolio site.

I was lucky to have some down time during my month off on vacation and used that time very wisely to set up my new site, create an infographic resume and a origami font for my new logo.

My advice to anyone who has to experienced anything similar is:

• Make sure your back ups are turned on on your hosting admin site (mine were defaulted to be turned off, hence the no back up issue)
• Always have examples of your work on a third party site like Behance, Flickr or Cargo Collective to redirect users to while you are sorting out your website issue. As well as your up-to-date professional information on Linkedin.
• If you are using WordPress (like I was) make sure your version of the WordPress is current.
• Add additional security plugins to your WordPress site.
• For extra security, set up your WordPress admin to only recognize specific IP addresses that you use.
• Please make sure you don’t use the same login and password information that you use for all your sites/email accounts. Also make sure it’s not an easy password to figure out either (no birth dates or nick names).
• *UPDATE: There is a great article on Smashing Magazine about how to secure your site.

Whenever things like this happen, it is a real nussance and even more horrible when you realize that the people who did it were doing it for profit. As a result a charitable site and a teaching blog when down, resulting in more than just myself being affected by it. I hope that this does not happen to anyone and please take the measures to protect your websites.