My website is back!

I have a bunch of things to fix. I’ve updated to a new theme, and it needs to have fewer serifs and more green. I have to reinstate all my old uploaded photos. And I want to play with various plugin settings for comments and stats and crossposts and stuff.

So what happened to my site? The short version is it got hacked, probably ages ago but I just noticed last week, and when I tried to fix it by installing an all new WordPress, something went wrong. Something which I’m pretty sure is my fault although I don’t know what I did wrong.

Dreamhost’s customer support was very fast and thorough, though, and all seems to be well now. Dreamhost is great, btw. And they don’t have sexist commercials (and if you use that other company I do actually think a little less of you).

I’d been rethinking my blog strategy lately, and when I thought I’d be starting from scratch I came up with some new plans. You probably haven’t noticed this, but for the last two years I’ve kept up a pretty regular schedule–writing posts on Wednesdays, and Monday posts that cycle through a certain set of topics. It helped me start blogging regularly, but the problem is sometimes I don’t have time to make a good post, but I feel obliged to post anyway. Plus my writing group set up a group blog, and three posts a week is a lot.

So I’ve decided to ditch the schedule and just post when I feel like it. Even more than the schedule, it was setting aside a specific time of the week to blog that made it possible to post regularly. I lost that regular time ages ago, but I decided a few weeks ago to use Friday lunches.

Which is not to say that blogging is a chore. I like blabbing my thoughts all over the Internet. I just have a habit of a) writing posts in my head instead of in pixels and b) being too busy to do things just because I think they’re fun (this is why “read” now has a slot on my daily calendar).