Agro indeed!!!
Just a quick post to say sorry about the downtime and the blog is now back online! Yea… you can’t get rid of me that easily I’m afraid 😉
what happened?
This won’t be much of interests to most without their own blog I would imagine but here’s the lowdown:
- I had an email from my hosts compliance team saying some files got compromised, and they’d taken the site down due to security risks etc…
- As it was my birthday weekend I didn’t bother looking at it properly until Sunday evening
- I downloaded my whole site using free Filezilla software (I think I should have been doing this at least every month or so as back up… I wonder how many people actually do this though?) to check out the scanlog.txt file that told me what files I needed to delete
- I then procrastinated over what to do with the offending files for about a day
- I then realised that all of the naughty files were actually just total bollocks so it wouldn’t matter at all if I just deleted them.
- So I deleted them
- It then took 3 days of me pestering iPage to get them to rerun the file scan and get all web services reinstated
- Once back online change all passwords etc…
The final 3 days were a bit frustrating but overall it wasn’t the end of the world, and glad to be finally be back online. Whoop! 🙂
I follow with some random ramblings of what I’ve been up to and some other loose ends that are probably worth mentioning.
what did I do with my newfound time?
You’d have thought with no personal blogging activity possible I may have gotten productive with some other goals 1 instead but to be honest it was quite nice to just forget about that sort of thing for a while. I had fun reading and commenting on some other blogs I wanted to catch up on 2, doing some running and walking outdoors of all places, both with Mrs TFS, which was thoroughly enjoyable seeing as we had some nice evening weather. I even started reading another book! This is unheard of in recent months as I made a semi-conscious 3 decision to stop reading books and concentrate on reading and writing blog(s) instead. With limited time something had to give and reading books got the chop, which is a shame (this is the reason why the “currently reading” box on the right hand side of the page has remained the same for ~6 months!).
This whole time has been a bit of a preview to my proposed “switch it off” challenge and it’s been nice, so I am now motivated to give that a go very soon.
On Friday we had the afternoon off and walked along the Southbank in the expensive money pit that is London 😉
We did spend a bit but not too much, it was nice just walking through St James park in the sun and seeing everything get set up for the Queen’s birthday, followed by a stroll along Southbank with a few stop offs for beers.
The Mall leading up to Buck’s Palace, complete with some lovely large Union Jacks
The roof garden at Queen Elizabeth Hall is a bit of a hidden gem if you are ever down that way and want to escape the hoard down below, we went from being surrounded by 1000 tourists to sitting in the gardens with about 15 other people in the space of 1 minute. Fantastic! 🙂
The roof gardens at the South Bank Center
The weekend was finished off with another BBQ on Saturday where we cooked enough food for double the people that we invited (oops! 4) and then a round of golf on Sunday. Perfect way to finish off a birthday weekend!
I’ve gone a bit over the top on personal waffle there, apologies!
Moving on…
UK FI summer gathering in York
We decided to come to the summer gathering that is being organised by Huw at Financially Free By Forty!
We are all booked up and looking forward to meeting everyone. We’ll be there Friday and Saturday… if you are going let me know? If you haven’t heard about it yet check out Huw’s post I linked to above and see if you can make it, the more the merrier.
I think that’s it for now. I’ll get back onto posting some more useful/FI related stuff over the next few days and have a brilliant guest post from Free To Pursue to post on Monday (thanks for that F2P! 🙂 )
Once again glad to be back, hopefully that will be the last of my website woes for a long time to come 🙂
What have you guys been up to while I’ve been away!?
Notes:
- such as starting my tax return… fun!!!! ↩
- The Mini Millionaire being one – it’s really inspirational on what’s going on over there, with some really good entrepreneurial spirit being shown. Check this post out, for example! ↩
- Hmm. That made it sound like I made the decision while I was half asleep didn’t it!? That’s not quite what I meant. Hopefully you get the gist! ↩
- Don’t worry I’ve been slowly eating the rest of it for tea/lunch all week 😉 ↩
Discussion (18) ¬
Glad to see you back.. although I had imaged to myself that the absence was instead because you’d won the lottery or something and relocated the whole TFS family abroad for a life in the sun. Ah well, we will get there eventually!
Haha, well that would have been nice, but on the other hand we all know that things are much much sweeter if we have to work hard for them ourselves 😉
Great to see your site up and running and fabulous news that you will be at the Gathering in York – see you there!
Thanks weenie and yes I will see you there, looking forward to it!
Glad to see you’re back!
I spend quite a bit of time now and then on Southbank and have never come across the Queen Elizabeth Hall roof garden. Will have to check it out. Thanks for pushing our attention to it!
Thanks DD!
It’s kind of hidden but once you know it’s there it’s really obvious. The stairs up to it are painted bright yellow for example 🙂
I think it gets really busy post work chucking out time on sunny days but during the day it was totally empty so check it out in the afternoon if you can.
We certainly will. I had a deeper look and realise it is on the other side of the “IMAX” main road to the side we spend most of the time on. hence why we may have missed it before!
A new place to investigate is always good. I will look out for yellow stairs!
Glad to have you back. I’ve never felt as popular as when I looked at the date for the Summer Gathering and found out I’ve prior engagements – another event none the less. I’m disappointed this would have been a fantastic opportunity, however hopefully I’ll be able to make the next one.
Oh that’s a shame you can’t make it TMM… Hopefully see you next time. I’d really like to find out more about TrekPin, it sounds fascinating.
Welcome back and happy birthday!
For your site issues: I’ve had similar issues with a host provider I won’t name. Needless to say, a company that doesn’t have a problem with shutting my entire site down for several days, is not a company I want to work with. I would switch providers if I were you. Get a dedicated server, if that helps?
Thanks Stockbeard. Great pseudonym btw 🙂
Thanks for the tips! It did make me consider switching to be honest, although I have had around 2 years issue free hosting up till that point and they did highlight compromised files which I would rather them do that than leave the site up and open to attack.
I think I’m a long way from needing a dedicated server just yet 🙂 although that would be a fun project to set up and maintain if I ever got the time to have a crack at it!
Cheers!
Oh no – don’t tell everyone about the roof garden! that was my little secret lol.
Been hanging out up there with my kids for the last 3 years: lucky for me my house is a 20min train journey to Waterloo East & all the free stuff that happens along the South Bank.
The garden has got better & better each year as the plants have matured.
Ah sorry LCIL!
The good news is that this blog is not quite at MMM levels of popularity (and then some) and I would guess that only about 50 people from London probably read it and maybe even less this post… so I think our secret is safe… for now! Phew!
Nice to see that great minds think alike though 😉
Nice to see everything back to normal. That summer meet-up sounds like it could well turn into carnage… with a host of personal finance junkies rampaging across York in a frugal-style!
Haha, it will be a sight to behold! They won’t know what’s hit ’em!
If you are going to be there let us know?
Cheers!
Bad luck with the site issues, but like you say not too bad in the end.
How long did the back up take to run? Any chance you could automate it?
Took at least an hour, I got bored and went out! It kept going while I was out though so not really a big deal. Think I’ll try to do that once a month or maybe after I’ve installed any new plug ins and wotnot.