The physical kind!
I am attributing my silence here to a crazy spell of work + moving.
We’re almost moved into our new apartment, and I can’t wait to show you photos!
Tons of love,
- Leah
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I want to be more present on this blog, but there’s the constant conundrum of what to write about. What to share with you. So, while I try to figure this out, I’m just going to experiment. I’m going to share what I feel like sharing and not worry so much about rules and boundaries and guidelines and all of that.
And today, on this very snowy Tuesday, I feel very triumphant!
The other day, I canceled my WeightWatchers membership and have started tracking my food using Sparkpeople. I like it. It’s going well. But that’s not really why I’m feeling triumphant.
I’m feeling triumphant because I identified something that was making me feel bad, and eliminated it. I hated playing the WeightWatchers game. Not so much the counting points, but the stress of trying to lose a certain amount of weight by weigh-in day, and the annoyance of sitting in the meeting listening to these people talk about things that are either obvious or over-the-top cheesy. I didn’t like it. It was making this whole “get healthier” process seem like a total chore.
And it cost $40/month.
Really! So here I was, throwing away $40/month to stress myself out and in the end, not lose any weight anyway.
So, that’s what I’m celebrate. Making a change just because I felt good about it.
Please do tell me what you’re feeling triumphant about this week, beautiful.
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» Filed Under personal
Saturday was my halfiversary of self-employment! Already! Remember when I quit my job and it was super scary?! That was half a year ago!
I’m happy to tell you that things are going well. Better than well. Things are going great! Soon (once I get through this dreaded Tax Season) I will even begin looking into attaining the elusive health insurance!
Of course it’s still scary at times, but overall, it’s much easier. A lot of that is because I’ve taken a crash-course in running a business — a learning-by-doing/sink-or-swim crash course, that is. (So far I’m passing.)
I’ve learned when to say, “No, I’m sorry, but I don’t think we should work together.” I’ve learned when to give potential clients time to think things over and when to nudge them to get started because they’re ready, just nervous. I’ve learned when, “I don’t have much money” is going to mean “I don’t have much money so I’m really, really grateful that you’re giving me such a great deal” and when it’s going to mean, “I don’t have much money so I’m going to undervalue you and what you’re providing for me” and make decisions accordingly. I’ve also learned that just because you can’t afford me doesn’t mean I’m charging too much and to let go of the guilt that I can’t help everyone.
A couple of weeks ago I learned the lesson of “If they sound like they’re going to flake, they’re probably going to flake, so don’t count on ever seeing that money.” I’ve also recently learned (thanks to a suggestion from Melissa) that my offers need to come with expiration dates, so that’s a new thing I’ll be doing going forward.
There’s still a lot that I’m learning, of course. OF COURSE. Like, how to make it through tax season – specifically, how to make it through tax season when your accountant is your friend and still have her for a friend when all is said and done because, oops, remember that time you told me to save all of my receipts? I didn’t do that.
Within the next few weeks, I will be unveiling my new offer – consulting services! I hear all the time, “I want to work with you, but I don’t know where to begin! I just need to sort myself out, and then I’ll be in touch again.” But wait, I say! That’s just silly! I’m the professional, remember? I can help you sort everything out! It’s all part of the process! Take me along for the ride!
Those packages are coming. If you just can’t wait, email me and I’ll put a special offer together just for you.
Six months and I’m not homeless yet!
Six months and the $1600 I started out with in my savings account is still there!
Six months!
Self-employment gets easier. I want to sing it. I PROMIIIIISE IT WILL NOTTT ALWAYYYYS BE SO SCARRYYYY. (No, I can’t sing in real life, either.)
For those of you friends that are just starting out – It’s worth it, I promise. Let me know if you need someone to help you celebrate your small victories.
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» Filed Under Uncategorized, personal
A younger sister is someone to use as a guinea-pig in trying sledges and experimental go-carts. Someone to send on messages to Mum. But someone who needs you – who comes to you with bumped heads, grazed knees, tales of persecution. Someone who trusts you to defend her. Someone who thinks you know the answers to almost everything. -Pam Brown
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» Filed Under personal
Over the weekend, some crazy-ass hackers got their paws on my hosting account and wreaked havoc for a little bit. I’ve been creating websites for just over ten years and I’ve never had anything like this happen to me before. (Happy new year!)
HOW. RUDE.
I always thought of hackers as one of those “it couldn’t happen to me” deals. I was wrong. And I’m a professional! So, let’s talk about how to co-exist in a world with these menaces.
First things first, you need to submit a ticket to your hosting provider. They will be able to tell you if the attack was on the server or to your website specifically. If they’re a good hosting provider, they will also have clean backups of your files and databases so that they can clean out the bad stuff and replace it with an earlier version that hasn’t been tarnished.
This is one of those times you’ll really appreciate having a good hosting provider instead of a cheap fly-by-night pseudo-solution. If you’ve never had to submit a ticket to your hosting account, I’d do it just for fun. Just make something up. Submit a ticket saying you need to know how to change your billing information and see how long it takes them to get back to you. If you haven’t heard back in an hour, you need to consider changing providers. I’m serious. Your website is serious business and they should be treating it as such. If you decide to change, Noah and I use and recommend Super Green Hosting and Blue Host. (Feel free to e-mail me if you have any concerns about your provider and want an opinion.)
You should keep regular backups of your files and content as well. If you’re using a CMS, I would recommend periodically doing an export of your content — that way, worst case scenario, at least you haven’t lost your entire blog.
Friendly tip: Compose your entries outside of your CMS so that you always have an up-to-date backup of everything you’ve written.
Friendlier tip: Use Google Docs. It auto-saves every ten seconds and you can access it anywhere. I write almost everything in either a GMail draft or a Google Doc. (I learned this trick about halfway through my first semester back to college. Hey, it sucks when you lose half a research paper because your computer decides to poop a puppy.)
Okay, once your site is fixed (or in the process of being fixed), change your passwords. All of them. Hosting, FTP, mySQL, your CMS, everything. And pick a great password. You probably already know that ‘password’ isn’t a good password. Neither is “ilovekittens” or “tomatosoup123″. You probably also already know that you shouldn’t be using any dictionary words, and you SHOULD be using a combination of numbers and both uppercase & lowercase letters.
It may not be a terrible idea to just uninstall and re-install everything. I resorted to this yesterday. I first uninstalled all of my WP plugins and downloaded new, updated versions… but things still seemed a little wonky to me, and I just wasn’t comfortable with that. Clean slate for me, yes please.
One more thing – have your anti-virus software of choice do a scan of your computer to make sure that nothing was downloaded to your local machine. Yeah, they can do that too, those little whippersnappers.
Not being attacked in the first place is preferable over cleaning up after a mess, right?
You already know that good passwords are important. It’s also important that your site is up to date. This means keeping up with upgrades to your CMS and to any plugins or modules your sites may be running. If you’re using a blog site (like blogspot or wordpress.com), these updates happen automatically. If you’re running a self-hosted version, though, you’ll need to do these updates yourself (or pay someone to do them). Never fear, however. This isn’t as difficult or time-consuming as it sounds. If you’re running a self-hosted wordpress.org install, you should check out the Auto Upgrade plugin.
You should also make sure that all of your files are set to their appropriate permissions. These vary depending on the file and folder, but as a rule, you should never have anything set to 777. Just don’t do it. If a plugin requires that it be set to 777 to work, find a different plugin.
So, keep your stuff up to date, set your permissions appropriately, what else? Lastly, don’t allow anonymous comments on your blog. SQL injection can occur this way, and it’s dangerous. You can either set all comments to require approval or (as I do), require that the first comment by an author be approved before they can leave comments freely.
Forgive the dry boringness of this post. I promise it’s worth it. I can’t tell you how frustrating it was to deal with hackers over the weekend — this site is my business, and when people load it and see an image like the one above, it’s bad for my reputation. The reality is that it can happen to anybody (those hacker kids – they are smart), but the other reality is that I was a bit lax in keeping my stuff up to date, and I paid the price.
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» Filed Under cyberculture
