Here's the latest on the ill health of this site. As you may recall, a hacker secretly installed two other sites within mine last November — one which sold counterfeit designer purses and one which sold little pills that make one's johnson less flexible. The all-knowing, all-seeing spider-people of Google delisted my site because from their point-o'-view, all that stuff was on my blog.
I purged the site of it all…which took a while as some of it was embedded deep within other files. I kept thinking I'd found it all, then I'd discover it elsewhere. As of last week, enough of it was out that one wing of Google relisted me. On parts of Google though, I still remain a site that sells medications to combat erectile dysfunction. This is largely because other sites infected with the same computer hacks still have links to the viagra-vending pages I removed from this site. There seems to be nothing I can do about that except to wait for those dead links to go away.
Meanwhile, my last problem (I hope my last) was with Google Reader, which many folks use to read this site. My Google Reader "feed" was full of spam so Google Reader would not read all that I post here. Where said spam was coming from was a mystery but after an investigation worthy of Ellery Queen, I found it and nuked it and now I think Google Reader will work.
I believe the hacker got into my site because I was then running a very old version of Movable Type. The MT people had long since stopped updating and supporting that version so as new security holes turned up in it, they were not patched or closed. I had not upgraded Movable Type because I was too busy, I didn't like the new pricing structure and I'd decided that I wanted to dump Movable Type anyway and switch to WordPress when I had the time. Everything that went wrong here seems to have been implanted before I did switch over to WordPress on New Year's Eve even though I didn't discover it all until after the change.
The management of this blog (i.e., me) apologizes for any inconvenience…and the fact that some systems still see the ghosts of the penis pill pages on Google and block access here. That should go away. Thanks also to those who wrote to offer suggestions and sympathy, especially Glenn Hauman.