Starting a month or so ago, a handful of eagle-eyed readers mentioned that some older links on this site were redirecting to the now long-defunct self-aggrandizement.com domain.  I assumed that was just due to laziness on my part – I’d fallen off of daily blogging, and hadn’t updated the design or code of this site for years and years, so I figured there were likely hard-coded links, or misconfigured files, or something to that effect that was hosing those entries.

Turns out, it was nothing so benign.  Instead, the German spammers who had bought the old domain name, and who had set it up as a link farm, had somehow used that domain to hack into the server hosting this site.  And, slowly and surreptitiously, they were putting in 301 redirects – hundreds and hundreds of them – to automatically forward my traffic their way.

As they apparently started from the oldest pages, I only discovered as much myself when I tried to add a post, went to see that it had gone up correctly, and instead ended up reading about “Tipps zur Anwendung von Pheromonen.”

Fortunately, after a brief stretch of sheer panick, I managed to get the underlying issue resolved with Bluehost, the super nice hosting company that I use. Getting everything working again, however, took about a week. Which leads me to right now.

At this point, I believe all should again be well on this site. If not, definitely let me know. Fortuitously, I had already been intending to get back to blogging much more regularly and informally anyway, so this seems like as good a cue as any.

Back to it!