Hiphopnerd

10 months after I bought this domain name and starting paying for webhosting, I'm up and running. The blog publishing software is installed, and better yet - it seems to be working. I'm hoping to make this site my main blog, but also to use it for a lot of additional content that you can't really do on a livejournal or blurty page. The majority of this will concern music.

Now, I suppose I should start reading the HTML/CSS book I bought over the summer in order to pretty this thing up...

Obviously, I've been lazy with the site. The layout & color scheme are the movable type default. There aren't any graphics of any sort to be found. I haven't added any non-blog content. But it struck me just now that I actually like this default layout and color scheme...the blue greys are kinda nice. So maybe that's the problem- i need to make my blog look horrific, something like orange & neon green, so then I'll want to work on fixing it up...

Sometime last week, this site was hacked. The style sheets had been edited to include links to spam sites, and to automatically download some malacious files. If you visited last week (not that anyone's been visiting, what with my uber-frequent posting), and saw the header read something like 'hiphopnerd cracked oshehm" instead of just plain "hiphopnerd", you should prob run a virus-scan on your computer. Hell even if you haven't visited, you should probably run one...it's something I know I do far too infrequently.

Now, hopefully that won't ever happen again.

But it wasn't my fault. Sure, I hadn't written anything since Halloween. But I was preparing a whole set of posts; there were a bunch of topics I wanted to write about. Yet when I tried to log onto the site on January 2nd, it wouldn't load. So I checked out my hosting company's site to see if there was some known server issues. Instead, I was greeted with the following text:

Dear Valued Clients!

We have been a hosting provider for the past 6 years in the industry, but the time has come and we will be closing our doors for ever.

Please note that as of January 1, 2007 we will stop the hosting service. We will be glade to issue refunds if you have paid for yearly or quarterly base packages at prorated price for the unused portion of the term. To get the refund please send an email. Please note no refund will be issued after January 1st.

Well awesome! So you deleted my site, didn't warn me you were going to do so, and charged me on December 28th for hosting in January? What a great deal! I sent them an email, and while they never responded, they did credit my card back the $8 monthly hosting fee I was paying.

Of course, that $8 didn't do much to gain my files back and I certainly hadn't bothered to backup any of my files. In the midst of my frustration I did come up with an idea- Google. Google cache specifically. I did a site specific search on, clicked on the cached versions of my various posts, and saved them on my hard drive. It should just be a matter of time (and cutting & pasting) before I fill the archives back up with what was there before. I'm hoping I can restore comments as well...you know, because this site was so insanely popular and attracted thousands of comments.

And all those topics I wanted to write about on the 2nd? I haven't forgotten them. They'll be appearing soon. If I have a resolution for '07, it's to write more regularly. And like all resolutions, it's something I've said before and I probably won't do.