Should I Or Should I Not Let My Blogs Die?

My 2 dot com blogs died again!! Apparently, some Inode issues cropped up... yet again!  So pissed off with the technical staff at the website host.  They are suggesting that I pay several thousands to upgrade my Inode.  And mind you, I had just paid RM800 in November last year to renew the domain for 2 years! WTF!

Thankfully I still have my faithful  and super user-friendly Blogspot blog. This is my very first baby you know?  When I first started blogging in April 2007, I started with a free blog host, speaking of which, I just remembered that this blog is 8 years old this month!!!  I started to blog way before Cass was born.  This blog journals the moment I conceived Cass to when the gynae broke the bad news to me that Cass had a dilated right kidney, to the day she was born to the day she was operated on. And it pens down lots of happy moments and sad ones too. Oh, how I love my first baby blog!   It was only months later that I purchased my own domain.

If all avenues to save my dot com blogs fail, I may have to let them die *SOBS*  Honestly, do you think that it is feasible for me to pay a few  thousand Ringgit each year to save the 2 blogs?   Sometimes I wonder why I am paying so much to maintain 2 extra blogs.  It's not like I can earn thousands of USD  from the blogs like I used to way back in 2007.   Or  that I am a super star blogger garnering millions of readers each month, though I must say that I get tens of thousands of visitors each month to each blog :D

Decisions decisions to make now!  No wonder my right eye lid has been twitching the past few days. Each time danger, sickness or problem looms, my right eye lid would twitch on end for days as a sign of premonition to me. Pretty creepy eh?

So, wish Health Freak Mommy a very happy 8th birthday!  And honestly, do you think that I should  pay my website host to save my 2 dot com blogs?

Lighting Does Strike Twice At The Same Place

I cannot believe that my www.healthfreakmommy.com blog has been injected with malware again, barely 3 days after it was whitelisted by Google and cleaned of infection!!  I thought lightning does not strike twice at the same place?  It is not true. It does strike many times at the same place and same person too!  Bugger!!

I have done all the preventive measures like changing passwords to really strong ones and getting my blog host to scan my domain but still??  Fulat!  I really don't know what to say except to accept that this year is just not a good year for me. I am under attack from top, bottom, left and right in every aspect of my life. Shit!

I really have no time to waste to fire-fight issues like the ones affecting my blogs. Communicating with some of the domain host technical staff is stressful.  They have a pool of technical staff (mostly foreigners) and different staff looks at my problem throughout the day. Some are plain lazy and annoying while some of them would go all out to help me.

As I am typing this post now, the Indon workers are clearing up debris and the mess from our kitchen. The renovation is finally over.    Our kitchen is in a very, very dusty condition now. Every single freaking item has to be wiped.  I don't think we can cook in the kitchen by today. We have been eating out for the past 5 days - twice a day and I am so sick of outside food now.

So yeah, it is back to square one now.  All my time and effort to salvage my blogs have been thrown out of the window.  My babies are down-and-out again. It will take another 3 days at least for them to be resuscitated *BAWL and PULL HAIR* :( :(

Resuscitated and Alive Again!

I hope you are just as happy and thrilled as I am that you can finally see white and not red in this blog!   Finally.... after 3 days!  Though it is only 3 days, it felt like 3 months to me!   I was on tenterhooks for the period my blogs were dead, feeling darn anxious on the fate of my 2 'babies'.   I did not know if I would lose them forever or get back only parts of them and lose parts of them.  I was hopeful of getting them back safely in one piece. I prayed fervently and PTL, I got my 'babies' back.   Yeehaw, Health Freak Mommy is out of the woods finally (singing to the tune of Out Of The Woods by Taylor Swift!) :D

My blog will now be white since I am now whitelisted by Google. I had to rid the old purple colored theme anyway.  According to the 3 'doctors' who treated my domain, the virus stemmed from the blog theme.   Words cannot describe how happy I am to have my 'babies' back and in one piece, albeit the domain host did some modification and upgrading.  Thank you to the 3 fantastic guys at Exabytes  who have so kindly helped me recover my blogs by removing the virus, did some procedures on them and then helped me to submit my blogs to Google for verification and whitelisting.

Thank you to all my blog readers  who took the trouble  and time to send me messages and emails to inform me that my blogs had been infected by virus.  Thank you for coming back after all these years to read the crap I write.

Cass is sending a flying kiss as a gesture of appreciation to the 3 guys who helped me resuscitate the blogs and to everyone who likes to read her stories :)

Back But Not Out Of The Woods Yet

Hey peeps, healthfreakmommy.com is back after being in the pits for 2 days!   But she is not 100% out of the woods yet. My domain host has already cleaned my blogs of virus. So the blogs are safe to visit now.  However, my site is still flagged by Google as my host has just only cleaned my site yesterday.  We have already notified Google to whitelist the site but this will take several days for Google to review and to whitelist the sites. When you hop to my blog, you will still see the red Malware notice, as shown below. Click on details and click on 'Visit this unsafe site'. No doubt it says unsafe, but it is now clear of virus.  It seems that the virus stemmed from the blog theme which we have now removed.

  

SIGH!!  This is the umpteenth time since late last year that my blogs have been injected with spam, virus, malware and possibly hacked.  I cannot even recall how many times my blogs had been compromised. Enough of  my blogs being hacked.  See my kitchen below.  It was hacked today!  Hacking continues tomorrow. We have to engage a contractor to hack down all the kitchen wall tiles as the tiles are starting to bulge out from the wall, no thanks to the contractor who did a very shoddy renovation job to our unit 6 years ago.  Everything done by the contractor had to be redone by us at our own expenses now from the bathrooms and now the kitchen.  If we do not do anything about the tiles now,  the tiles will one day collapse onto someone unlucky who is in the kitchen. We definitely do not want that to happen.  And I. Hate. Renovations!  Our kitchens are in a mess and very, very dusty now.

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So yup, my situation is one of messy now.   Blogs are in a mess. House is in a mess.  And my mind is in a mass of mess with too many issues to straighten out.   My non-stop emails with the domain host (my mind is boggled reading so many IT jargons!), messages to customers and suppliers, cleaning up the mess in the house and groping in the dark in the kitchen as the light switches are all yanked out too.  But I am certain that this low point is just a passing phase.  Life is a roller coaster.  I will surely reach the top again, soon :)

Just Because of A Darn Teeny Weeny Misplacement

Nothing can be more frustrating than having to do something that you are not hands-on with. I started this blog, which is my maiden blog 5 years ago. I was just a si-lai then. Yes I have knowledge on how to operate the PC and know Excel, Words, Power Point and surf the net but totally zilch knowledge on computer codes. But I was very determined to create a blog for dual purposes. First as an eDiary to pen down my journey with my girls and secondly to earn some moolah from it. After many, many late nights, I finally learned a great deal on computer codes, how to upload pictures into my blogs, learned that pictures are made up of nothing but a huge chunk of codes which the computer recognizes and all that jazz.

Anyway, the purpose of this blog post is to rant that I had spent almost half the afternoon on my other blog trying to add in a link to my side bar in return for some moolah in USD. I just didn't understand why my entire blog layout would go distorted the moment I added the text with link to the widget for my side bar. Then I copied the whole damn link and compared it with the codes from other links and bingo! I found where the error was that caused the distortion. It was just one very minor misplacement of the code as below...

Instead of ending one of the codes contained within the link with
/a
I ended it like this
a/

The problem was with a mere misplacement of the / which had caused me so much misery for months!

Actually this problem persisted for many months and I just did not have the time to do a post mortem on it, until today where I had no choice coz of the USD100 haha! Damn frustrating but very satisfied with my little 'achievement'!

Unable To Upload Pix In My Blogspot Blog

Darn it, I have been unable to upload pix from my blogspot since a few hours ago. Each time I tried uploading pix, I get a message stating that I have exceeded my free total photo upload limit in my Blogger account. Fyi, images and photos that are uploaded through Blogger get stored in our Picasa Web Albums, which are part of our Google Account. The number of images we can upload is therefore dependent on the amount of space we are using on Picasa Web Albums. I now have to purchase more storage space so that I can continue uploading pix in my blogspot. Eeeessshhhh, this is really frustrating!

How Was Your Saturday?

Mine didn't start off too well. I woke up late today as Alycia didn't have to go to school. Tried to log on to my dot com blog but couldn't. I then called Streamyx and after about 20 mins on the line with the customer service officer, I was informed that the problem could be due to my host's server. I was also told by Montessorimum and Miche that they could not access my blog. I then called my host in Penang and spent more than half an hour on the phone with the technical assistant. I bet the phone bill will cost a bomb. I tried umpteen times trying to ping my blog but all I got was a 'request timed out' reply. Also tried to log in using my IP address and a temp URL but nothing seemed to work. I had also rebooted my PC many times but still couldn't log in to my blog, the cPanel or view the statistics. Geez, I tell you that was really frustrating. I was also told to download the latest Firefox Mozilla as my browser and to log in to my blog using Firefox but that also did not help. Finally, I decided to hang up as I was really worried of the escalating phone bill for the outstation call made to Penang. I then rebooted my PC again and voila, this time I could log in to my blog. Really don't know what exactly happened.

We were supposed to have dinner with my brother and SIL who came from Singapore but was later informed by hubby that the roads in KL will be closed for the F1 GP celebration, so plan cancelled. I have just taught my maid how to make homemade chicken nuggets and lamb chop. My maid has very shallow culinary skills and sometimes I get really pissed off with her when she tries to do things her way without asking me and spoils the entire dish. She also tends to forget what I've asked her to cook and how to cook them. I think Chinese and Western cooking are completely alien to her. I have since taken over cooking from her, which is really time consuming. She's unlike my previous maid who knows exactly what to do after teaching her only once.

Advertlets Widget Acting Up

Today I encountered a strange thing with my blog and I must thank Barb for highlighting it to me. Each time I tried to access both my blogs, after the homepage is downloaded, the page will be directed to the Advertlets website by default. I immediately removed the Advertlets widget from my blog and voila, the problem was solved. I have emailed Advertlets to inform them of this problem but I had received a failed delivery return message in my email. I think there must be a serious system error at Advertlets. For those of you with the Advertlets widget in your blog, did you encounter this problem too today?

Unable To Recover Lost Posts

I am really disappointed and dissatisfied with my host. They are unable to recover a single post that were lost from my blog. I have spent the last few days counting how many posts I have lost and so far, more than 30 posts were lost (I think there are more) and most were unapproved and unpaid paid posts. So you go figure how much money I'm going to loose all because this incapable and lousy host did not back up my posts. My head is really throbbing today and each time I discover another paid post that's lost, my head and heart hurt even more. In order to save my money from going down the drain, I think I now have to re-write and re-submit all those posts that were lost, but tell me, where on earth am I going to find the time in such a short time? What the fun.... doing double work and wasting all my time and energy. If someone had hacked my blog, all I can say is 'you wait and see, what comes around goes around'.

If you're looking for a good website that can help you back-up your blog posts for free, check out BlogBackUpOnline.com. Thank God they managed to recover the lost posts from my Blogspot blog. The person handling my case even offered to call me but in the end, we just communicated via Google chat. They are very professional and prompt in handling my case. I'd like to give them a big thumbs up.

Lost Posts

I discovered that some of the posts from both my blogs have disappeared out of the blue a few days ago. I realized they had vanished when the number of posts in my blogspot blog showed only 900+ when it should be around 1,050. When I checked the posts, they have indeed vanished from my blog. Has anyone experience this before? Could this be my computer has been invaded by some malicious virus? Gosh, this is scary. I really want to recover my lost posts, over 100 of them. Can someone tell me what's wrong?