A couple things I noticed on this blog today, that are residual from the malware attack: the in-post images are broken, the contact form doesn’t work, and I can’t access the plugins page from the WordPress dashboard. I think my WordPress install is a little confused about where the files are located. All these things need to be straightened out. But I did figure out how to get the Page menu to show up. That’s a plus. Obviously, I can post, and that’s also good.
Other problems in my life include back steps that are falling in (I got an otherworldly estimate yesterday that is totally beyond my price range), and a furnace that is inoperable due to the foot of water I had in my basement in July. I applied for disaster aid and was accepted but I guess everybody is waiting on federal money. In the meantime, last night was pretty chilly. Not intolerably so, and we do have electric $paceheaters, but I’m starting to think the feline members of the household are going to have to cuddle up in our absence.
The Dubuque Novel Writers group has temporarily imploded. I just got another terrific book on writing groups in the mail yesterday, The Writing Group Book: Creating and Sustaining a Successful Writing Group by Lisa Rosenthal. I still have a couple writing prompt responses to post, that I wrote at meetings. Here’s one of them:
Describe a setting as if it were a character in a story.
A grungy blue dustpan lay straddled over a half-removed pile of dust and bat droppings, with a push broom thoughtlessly dropped nearby. The ceiling sagged with many years’ leaks, trailing fringes of gold insulation onto the attic floor. Wide seams between ancient floorboards gaped silently, awaiting the next rare footsteps. The whole noiseless attic wore an express of carelessness, waiting without impatience or expectation for what might enter next.
I noticed, starting about 2 weeks ago, that the Google Analytics traffic for this WordPress site had dropped dramatically. I finally realized that some hacker had gotten in and that my blog was being forced to redirect to an assortment of spammy sites. No wonder Analytics showed zero traffic – at the moment of the page loading, visitors were being redirected elsewhere. How annoying. The status bar at the bottom of the browser flashed with a slew of irrelevant websites. Whoever found my site was booted mysteriously toward some worthless SEO-exploiting junk in windows that they probably closed immediately, leaving my blog posts unread. I lay awake this morning trying to figure out what step I should take next.
