This year in August was 10 years since my first blog got hacked and deleted.
The road to this website
I’ve been creating my own personal websites since high school and in one part of my life I even created websites professionally for customers.
In the beginning when I was still learning I made some quite simple websites with basic html code but I loved making different designs in Photoshop.
Animated Flash websites
Next years in my high school I learned about Adobe Flash (former Macromedia Flash) and I became obsessed with animated flash content for websites. This animated websites were very popular in that time and many large companies had either whole flash websites or much of the content. Even the first version of YouTube was made with flash. I loved making animated flash websites. But one of the biggest problems of flash websites was bad SEO (search engine optimization) as Google couldn’t detect the content of the site. I spent a lot of time perfecting the balance between html and flash to improve local search traffic and I improved it a lot on my websites. My site was found on search engines without a problem and I even made my college diploma about creating and optimizing flash websites.
Even though I loved using flash I was learning about HTML and CSS at the same time. I am really glad now that I was learning CSS as Flash content slowly faded away and even reached end of life in 2020. This CSS knowledge still comes in handy with designing WordPress sites today.
First blog
I made my account on WordPress and created a blog at the end of 2008 which I incorporated into my website. I was posting photographs of everything I took and everywhere I went. I also posted some tips and tricks about photography and some guides. I even posted photographs of many events and concerts I attended. Views quickly gathered and I was getting thousands of views. This might seem like nothing today but it was a lot back then.
I was really proud of my blog but unfortunately I was still a beginner with WordPress so I was using primary login site and even used “admin” as my username which is really bad. I also didn’t have any backups of my content.
The hackening
On August in 2013 I woke up one day and when I opened my blog I was greeted with “hacked by”. Everything was gone. Every post, everything I wrote, all gone. All that was left were photographs that I still had on my hard drive. In retrospect I probably should wait it out and my hosting provider maybe could restore the site from previous state but as I was kind of stupid I reinstalled everything.
I tried to start from beginning but I wasn’t getting same views and I gave up with a blog in next years. A big part of my life was gone in a moment. In 2014 I created my personal website using WordPress as a whole but didn’t even bother having a blog. With every redesign I knew more and more about WordPress until I bought my first paid theme which was Divi by Elegant Themes which I still use. In 2020 I kind of gave up with having a WordPress website and paying for hosting so I switched to Adobe Portfolio and I had just a simple gallery on there. But it wasn’t the same.
New beginning
In last few years I started thinking about blog more and more until I decided to just buy hosting and try again. This year in March I bought server hosting and installed WordPress. This website was in the making for almost six months as I decided to have my whole portfolio on it with SEO optimized descriptions of my photographs to improve organic traffic. It took some time to get back into WordPress and figure out the design and what to do. Then I started preparing all that I had to do and made a list. As I am not a writer I was struggling with writing long artistic descriptions for my photographs. I wanted to have at least 300 words for better SEO and it was hard writing so long descriptions. Luckily we had an explosion of AI in this year that I used to expand my around 100 words long descriptions into 300+, which I later corrected before using.
Looking forward
I already have some posts in my head that I will start writing in next weeks.
