As many of you know by now, the TLN Blog was hacked into this past weekend and was down for over 24 hours. Why would some cyberpunk from Algeria target us, you may ask? He didn’t – we were one of hundreds of blogs that were hacked into and messed with. And why did he do it? Simple: Because he could. He was showing off. We’re not taking it personally, but it sure would be nice if he’d cough up the dough to pay for time spent recovering.
Here’s what I’ve learned this week, and if you do any sort of online work, please pay attention:
- If you have a blog, website, etc., set it to back up every day, preferably in more than one place (the TLN Blog was set for weekly backup, so we lost the three last posts, including two that took several hours to create. Thankfully, we did have enough content saved to rebuild them);
- Always back up text and images on your own hard drive (as a Word document, etc.) so that when some nasty punk comes along and wipes out your online work for no apparent reason, you have the original content;
- Have good tech support for when things go wrong (thank you, Randy Caruso!);
- Have enough money in the budget to pay for that tech support.
The silver lining is that people have been generous with verbal and financial support to help us keep smiling and to defray costs. Perhaps it took this sort of debacle to remind people that the Therapeutic Landscapes Network website and blog require a tremendous amount of time and energy to run. As Joni Mitchell said, “Don’t it always seem to go that you don’t know what you’ve got ’till it’s gone.” Donations to the Therapeutic Landscapes Network are always welcome. You can contribute online or with a check to P.O. Box 728, Beacon, NY, 12508.
Thank you!
Naomi Sachs, ASLA
Founder & Director, Therapeutic Landscapes Network