It’s sad for me to say this, but my original website (arrasmith.net) has been hacked. I have no idea how long this has been going on, but during the process of rebuilding a copy of that site’s blog posts onto a new domain and a new server in my office, I realized that many of the posts had hacked material placed in the headers and footers. Also, many links were added to pages on my domain that I never built.
The purpose of that site really was for my own personal use in order to keep track of the various trips, adventures, and daily happenings over the years. It originally started back in 2006 when my family went on a trip to China and I had the idea of using it as a means of chronicling the days of our trip for our immediate family members in the USA. It turned out to be more difficult than I had planned because of the limitation of the internet within the walls of China, but I was able to get a lot of the pictures and stories uploaded in real-time while there. Over the years, I migrated and updated the site with the addition of The Lodge at Steinthal on my property and really needed a commercial presence on the internet for the property. Now that I am hoping to sell the place in the next few years, the need for a robust and bulky site is no longer necessary and I find myself striving to make a site that is simple to read and navigate. It will also be much easier for me to add posts to the new site.
Additionally, I will no longer need the processing power of a remote virtual private server as I had in the past at a cost of nearly $1000/year and I have decided to go back to the basics with the website and the server which is now going to be housed in my home office only costing the electricity needed to keep it powered up.
While I was planning on making the final transition to the new site towards the end of summer, the German hackers have forced me to speed up the process. All my posts and pictures are preserved which is all that I really care about and I have installed some security measures and backup regimens that will hopefully prevent this from happening again. At least I will be able to catch the threat shortly after it happens and can always revert to a back up of the site.
So here we go with the new site: www.peterburn.com. This is a play on our last names and we thought it was funny as at one point early in our relationship some people honestly thought that was our last name. We decided to embrace and here we are! The Peterburns!
