Today’s blog post is a test of many things.
Most importantly were testing to make sure that the Martha Stewart sheets that we got for Christmas can past the Newfie test.
Does the 200 thread count matter?
Is buffalo plaid all the rage?
Will a Newfie curl up on flannel sheets?
The answer to all those questions is yes.
Kind of yes, thread count does matter, buffalo plaid is pretty cool and a Newfie will wear/lay on flannel sheets if someone is holding a treat and telling them to sit still for 5 seconds.
The second thing we’re testing today is to see if this blog still functions and if it does, is it functionally correctly.
I had BIG problems with this site over the weekend.
A bloggers worst nightmare if you will.
I was unable to gain access here and the fear of being hacked was very real.
Immediate panic set it and escalated when my hosting company agreed that at first glance, it sounded and looked like I had been hacked by Russia.
Seriously, they said Russia hacked my blog and gained access.
Panic suddenly set into hysterical sobs
This is it. This is how it ends.
Fast forward 7 hours of being on the phone and computer chat with 4 different people from my hosting company and no one could seem to help unless I gave them $200 to gain access back into the blog and $150/month to maintain security and access.
Even though I didn’t have a clear head, what they were saying wasn’t making sense. The blog was still there, I just needed someone to get me back into it. No one could do that though because my username and email, the one that I’ve been using for over 5 years, was not listed anywhere. It had never been used to log in with before. There was no record of it.
That’s when I decided that I needed someone smarter than my hosting company, another blogger.
You see, pet bloggers are a lot like Newfie people, they are always there for you when needed and they are a very caring group.
With the help of one amazing blogger who took time out of her Saturday to calmly help me, I was back into my blog within an hour.
The good news is that it doesn’t appear that the blog was hacked but something went wrong. On the front, what you see, looks fine. On the backend it’s like I haven’t been here in 5 years. While I still have no idea what exactly happened it seems like something got deleted, perhaps by a plugin update.
So I’m testing to make sure that this post makes it out into the interwebs, that people can still comment and that this blog still exists.
In the meantime, I’ll be taking a few days to work on cleaning up the backend, switching hosts and locking this site down to make sure it’s secure as possible. If everything goes smoothly, you won’t notice a thing.
The last thing that I’m testing is to see if YOU see this post in your Facebook feed. In case you haven’t heard, FB is making some changes to their algorithm and they are prioritizing family and friends, which is great, but that means that the posts that I share to our FB page might not be seen.
I’m probably not as worried as I should be about this. My thinking is that, while FB may not consider us family and friends, I do. We’ve been together for a long time, we’ve gone through a lot of shit together. We just need to keep doing what we’re doing.
So let’s see how this goes! Fingers, paws and toes crossed!
