My blog has been down for a little while because it was infected by malware. It even came to the point that I had to freshly install WordPress. At first I was annoyed by the fact that my site had to be taken down but looking at it now I think it’s a great thing. It gives me the opportunity to look at every little detail of my blog and start the year fresh with a refreshing and cool layout. This totally motivated me to add as much cool content to my renewed blog as I possibly can.
I have never before had any problems with my blog and wasn’t really aware that a WordPress blog can sometimes be vulnerable. This all changed when a friend told me that his antivirus program came up with a message for my website and that strange things were happening. At first I thought that his internet provider just had a bad connection or something but when I experienced the same problems I knew something was wrong and had to fix it. It didn’t really help that I had no working virusscanner on my computer at the time.
After many attempts to fix the problem I came to the conclusion that I had to manually replace every post and build the entire site up from scratch. The good thing about this was, that it made me think about what I was doing with the blog. I looked very closely how every post was built up. It became clear to me that a while ago, I had a different approach to my posts then in the more recent ones. Because I am a perfectionist and like to create order in almost everything I do, I tried to get some kind of standard in my posts. This way I organised my entire blog better and this makes it much more fun to work on my blog.
Sometimes I think it’s a good thing to break down everything you have worked on for a long time and build it all up from scratch. By doing this you can use all your gained knowledge, to rebuild it even stronger. This doesn’t just apply to a blog or website, but could apply to almost anything you could work on or invest time in. It has certainly applied to me in other instances in my life. This goes back all the way to my childhood where I built lego structures or even a cardhouse, to later take it all down and built it back up from scratch.
While i was rebuilding my blog I came to realize that I actually like the process of creating something in the best way I possible can. That to me is probably more important then the end result. This applies to a lot of things in my life. To say it in a more abstract way, the road to get somewhere is often times more exciting to me then the actual destination. If you want to be even more philosophical you could say that life is just one big journey in which the destination doesn’t really matter.
In the end, having my blog infected by malware has made me gain more experience about rebuilding a strong blog. I also have better knowledge now about preventing it from happening in the future. Let’s just say it’s a refreshing way to start of 2012 and let’s hope my blog will be even stronger in 2013.