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This site was hacked...

June 4, 2013

...and I was not amused

A few weeks ago, this site got hacked. Someone injected some extra footer content on the pages. At first, I wasn't really amused. It meant extra work, cleaning the stuff up. It requires time, a resource that is very precious to me.

Why do people bother hacking a totally harmless site? For fun? I can't imagine the hacker rolling on the floor laughing. There is no real achievement in hacking a site.

Worse

But it got worse. While restoring the site, I decided that it'd be a good thing to update the Wordpress kit and the theme kit. This seemed a good idea at first, but it turned out that the theme had changed considerably, resulting in a totally cluttered layout with colors that made me sick on the spot.

Minimize it to the bare essence

Some of the good things I've learnt as an engineer are some basic principles. One of them is: KISS. Stated simply: if something doesn't work as you'd like: simplify it. Minimize it to the very bare essence.

Pondering my options w.r.t. my site, I decided the only things I needed were:

  • an easily accessible site (for my site visitors)
  • that is easy to add content to (for myself)
  • tat requires little maintainance (no unwanted kit updates)
  • that can be easily retrieved from backup (in case I get hacked again)

Now, a few years ago the conclusion of this process was to go with Wordpress. However, being a few years older, having gained a few grey hairs, now leads me to another conclusion: get rid of the database, get rid of the PHP, get rid of the Wordpress kit and stick to:

  • HTML5
  • CSS
  • files

Result

So, that's what I did. Overnight, I selected a decent CSS-theme (see footer for more info), I wrote a little content mangement system (CMS) based on these principles, and here we are with brand-new site.

I hope you like it. At least, it fulfills my requirements.

(Note: this information is no longer accurate. The current version of the site uses mkdocs with the material theme. The self-written content-management system was nice, though.)