For anyone who’s been following my site updates, you’ll probably recognize that you’ve seen update #50 before. My website was hacked a few days ago, which has been a bit of a stressful experience. Thankfully, other than them creating a bunch of admin accounts, uploading a questionable exe file and secretly injecting weird code snippets into my site, everything was still intact. To err on the side of caution, I’ve resorted to restoring a backup that I know hasn’t been compromised from March, and it was the latest backup I had so even if I didn’t want to lose 2 months of updates I didn’t really have much choice. I’m just thankful it’s only 2 months of work lost instead of losing everything. And yes, before anyone asks, I’ve changed all of my passwords.
This experience has ultimately lead to me returning back to dedicated hosting again. Previously I was self hosting my website, but I’ve realized I really don’t know enough about website security (and even less about server security) to prevent something like this from happening again on my home server. I still don’t know how they got in. Dedicated hosting just adds an extra layer of protection. I’ve been a long time customer of my hosting provider and trust them wholly with my website projects. They’ve gone above and beyond for me when things have gone wrong so many times.
Anyhow, this is the end of an era. I have a lot of things I need to fix and a lot of work I need to redo on my webrings that was lost. The Library is going to have to be moved back over again to my primary domain, the improvements I made on all my webrings are all going to have to be done again. A lot of things are still broken as well until I’ll have time to fix them.
Below are updates I already had drafted in March. Everything that was implemented after that in April and this month will need to be redone.
Theme Polishing & Tweaks
I’ve done a lot of aesthetic polishing, mostly motivated by my own anticipation for Spring. I just wanted a lot more color and the previous imagery was not really doing my site any favors. Though, I really love the look of dithering so I’m utilizing that a lot now for my site’s imagery. It gives really retro, 80s-90s video game vibes, I’m obsessed.
I’ve also added page fade transitions and my cozy cat logo as a loading animation and a bright yellow transition background which I think feels very Spring.
The navigation bar for my Town and Cottage areas has a javascript rainbow effect. It kind of reminds me of holographic pokemon cards. More nostalgia vibes. I’ve tried to incorporate this rainbow effect to various elements across my site too for consistency. My landing page has a bit of it.
Lastly, I’ve tweaked the layout and colors for my Front Page, Cottage, and various parts of my Town.
Fixed Webring Ships
Not sure what happened but all of my webring ships I previously had disappeared. I replaced them with different images but I might change it again later. I don’t really like how these new ships look, but they’ll do for now until I get around to replacing them with something else.
Moved my YourWorldOfText iframe
It is now located on my landing page of my primary domain at the very bottom. One thing that really irks me though about it that I can’t seem to fix is when typing inside the iframe, the page scrolls up. I’ve somewhat remedied this with javascript, locking the page and making the page scroll back down when it scrolls up but it’s still extremely annoying. It is what it is though. It isn’t perfect and I’m content with it for now. Maybe I’ll try and find another solution for it later.
Fixed broken images
I had several broken images on my primary domain and Sovereign Web subdomain since I’ve merged the cottage and town. Those should all be fixed now, unless there’s something I’ve missed.
Polished Residents page
I’ve made some polishes to my Residents page in the Town portion of my primary domain. I’ve made all the houses into cute little mushroom houses to better match my site theme. Also re-added the notification form, and added a cute little mailbox graphic above it.
Added wall images to my Cottage section
This section of the page will act as hyperlinked points to my various shrines; one for my dog, one for my tamagotchi collection, one for gaming, one for reading, one for nostalgic music, and maybe other things down the road.
Interactive Comment Garden added
I’ve had this idea in my head for awhile for a comments section that is connected to an interactive garden, and I’ve finally created it! Towards the bottom of the Town page, you’ll see some tilled dirt, and under that is a comment section. Every time someone comments with a unique username, it plants either a seed, or grows a weed, depending on the nature of the comment if it’s perceived to be more positive/neutral, or negative. Negative comments/weeds will grow and spread quickly, they don’t have growth stages like flowers do. Neutral/positive comments take a bit longer to grow but look a lot prettier. Plants are connected to commenter’s name, so if someone comes back to leave a neutral/nice comment more than once, their unique seedling will continue to grow. There a 3 stages of plant growth; 1 comment = seedling, 2 comments = growth, 3 comments = bloom. When you hover over the plant, it will also increase in size slightly while hovering to highlight it, and hovering will also display who the plant belongs to, and how many comments they’ve left. So, everyone can see who has planted flowers and who has planted weeds. Granted, I don’t know how often or if I’ll ever approve weed comments. I just added the functionality for it. I really love this interactive idea and I think it’s a really unique feature to my site! Check it out!
Hope ya’ll have had a better week than I’ve had! I’m just thankful I have to deal with a minor setback verses the alternative of losing everything. This is why it’s important to take regular backups!