New site launched

What happened to the old site?

For years I've advised clients that off-the-shelf web site software is great, but that you need to absolutely stay on top of security updates or being hacked is a Google search away. For my personal web site, those rules never really applied - I barely had the time to update my blog let alone code a custom one.

Then a friend sent me those fatal words "for a professional web site programmer, it doesn't look good that your own site has been hacked ;-)" - lo and behold not only was my previous site down and a simple message 'w3 0wnz U' or something similarly childish, but they'd installed a 'rootkit' on my server.

Removing the rootkit wasn't too hard - a fair bit of searching and rebuilding on Gentoo worked a treat. I know the normal advice is to wipe the machine and start again, but to be honest this is only a test machine and hosts websites for a few friends. So then the only thing left was what to do about my site...

Update or build

Of course, given that my data was already in the right place and I had backups of my site from before the hack, the easiest answer was to restore, update the blog software and monitor it more closely in future.

That was the easiest option - but since I've been using Symfony at IPC Media Ltd I've wanted to custom-code my own blog site. This was the perfect opportunity.

Design inspiration

I'm not a designer. Anyone that's ever met me knows this!!! So when it came to a design for the site, I realistically had three choices:

• Buy something from one of the many sites dealing in HTML/CSS templates, e.g. TemplateMonster.com
• Design something completely new myself (I've been reading books like Principles of Beautiful Web Design recently)
• Take inspiration from other sites out there - not copying it exactly but taking some ideas

Fortunately I came across a great site - JeffCroft.com. I've basically made a simpler version of his design, borrowing greatly from his expertise in crafting a decent design and probably making mine ugly in the process. So a big thank you to Jeff (even though I didn't get his permission to take inspiration from his design).

For the record I copied none of the code (either the HTML/CSS nor hacked his site to get at the server-side code) of his site, just implemented a similar look and feel from scratch.

Ta-da!

Anyway, I hope you like the new site. I'll be adding new functionality over the coming months as this now gives me a great base to work from. For now there is no commenting functionality on the site, so if you have any feedback feel free to use my Contact details.