Earlier this month, my personal website, MikeDaub.com, got hacked.  This was likely due to a security flaw in one of the web applications I tinkered with, along with my own failure to keep the applications up-to-date.  The hacker deleted everything and installed their own malicious phishing code.  My web hosting provider inf0rmed me of the trouble (and deactivated my account.)  I logged in, deleted every file, replaced with some out-of-date backups (also due to my own failure to keep my backups up-to-date), and got my web hosting account re-activated.  And my personal website was back up and running.

I have maintained a personal website for about 15 years.  And I have owned my own domain name since the year 2000.  And during that entire span, I wrote every bit of HTML, XHTML, CSS, JavaScript, XML, RDF, and PHP on the main part of the site.  It was a hobby of mine.  I was self-taught.  The HTML standards were openly available back when I started.  And nowadays there exist excellent tutorial sites for learning all of these web languages on your own.  (I recommend the sites Opera Web Standards Curriculum and W3Schools.)  And this was adequate for my own personal space.

I tinkered with several web application packages to test them out and see how they worked.  (WordPress, Gallery, Moodle, PhpGedView, Drupal, Joomla, Tiki, MediaWiki, PhpBB, StatusNet, and others.)  Some are quite functional and painless.  So, I planned to eventually switch my personal website from a self-written one to one of these web applications.  And, when my website got hacked, I figured that now is a good time to switch.

I originally planned to use Tiki Wiki CMS Groupware for my website.  It is an open-source content management system with wikis, blogs, galleries, forums, and many other features already integrated into it.  So there is no need to install any other third-party modules.   And if I ever create a website for another organization, Tiki is probably where I will start.  But, I determined that, for a small personal website, I would not use most of the features Tiki included.

Thus, I decided to use WordPress for my new and improved personal website.  I had tinkered with this application a bit previously, to create an erratic, uninteresting blog.  I quickly transferred the important pages of my site into WordPress Pages.  And the site is up and running again.

Just for kicks, I will leave the standard WordPress auto-created first post here as a block-quote:

Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!