Greek to me
Greek to me
It’s been an eventful couple of weeks here at RobertRaymond.com.
I’ve never been comfortable with the site’s lack of backup. After initiating it a few years back, I never found a backup system that seemed to work (you know the drill – you install something, follow the instructions, and suddenly you are at a screen that doesn’t match the instructions; Monopoly on a Ouija board.
So I’ve been meaning to do that. It was my intention. Blah blah.
Then a few weeks ago, I started getting a lot of registration activity on my board. Yay, me! Every hour, another registrant. Then I noticed that they were all really names with FIRST.SEONDXX with the XX as digits. And all were to disposable gmail accounts. It looked fishy. Really fishy. It looked… bottish.
I deleted the lot of them, shut down the registration, and got my bottom over to elance to hire a web coder to work on backup and security issues. Got about 20 responses, most of them pretty good. Went to San Diego (more on that on the Train Blog shortly) with the thought of picking a jobber when I got back.
When I did get back, I had a couple of emails from GoDaddy (my host). Turns out someone had compromised my site (not bad, but had slipped a couple of files in) which allowed them to use my site to attack other sites. The host had nuked the files and gave me a warning. Things were moving much too fast. I shut the site down (thanks to all those who inquired) and hired a contractor.
Picked Stergios K, a nice guy from Greece, very competent and very reasonable. He dove in and tinkered away, cleaning up a number of issues I’ve had since day one. He also upgraded the site and provided backup functionality. In the end, everything was purring like a watch (or clicking like a kitten, or something). I was very satisfied with his extra effort and turnaround time. If anyone needs web work, look him up on elance. He gets the five-star Raymond review.
I’ll mentioned this in closing: I got about 20 responses from my posting with only one American. Yes, I’d hoped to support state-side but truthfully the guy came in desperately low, had no listed qualifications, no listed experience, no prior jobs, just a “desire to work with me”. Remember all those stories about tech-savvy kiddies changing the world? Remember how they’d be like the Borg? Well, they can twitter and tweet, but really, what’s good that in a global marketplace? If you can’t show that you have more in your pocket than a couple of classes at community college, how can you compete. Me? Hell, I wrote a computer game before going to get my BS in computers.
That’s just my take-it-or-leave-it observation. Grandpappy is going to lean back in his rocker and go back to sleep.