I wanted to keep a look out for the friendly Turkish hackers that attacked this blog back in March, since I had figured out how they found it in the first place.

The traffic flowing to and from websites today is analysed to the hilt and some software can be wonderfully sophisticated.

So let’s take a look at what’s happening with MIKEPADGETT.COM:

Oxfordshire is almost top of the visitors’ list by location

Some of my former colleagues at RM are clearly still enjoying being well rid of me, checking up regularly just to make sure I’ve gone for good.

A steady (but small) stream of visitors!

Visits are not exactly in the millions (!), but the stream is steady. Much more interesting is the range of location across the world from which these users originate.

All the world’s my way

Every continent is represented here. Even users from China have managed to find this blog, presumably without the help of Google. Note the little clump of Turkish folks, probably among whom were our friendly bunch of hackers.

Finally, here are a couple of bafflers:

Users in Walsall (a place I’ve never been) account for almost as many as in Oxfordshire (where I lived and got to know people for nearly four years). This must be something to do with centralised ISPs methinks.

This blog has also hosted several visitors from News International, which of course owns The Times and The Sun, amongst other rags. So what’s the scoop?

I had written a brief article before MikePadgett.com was so kindly hacked about the work I’d done on templates.

In common with most blog software, the idea is to separate content from presentation, so it’s just a matter of writing decent CSS.

Here are the two previous ‘skins’ that have graced these pages:

Japon – the first blog style I used in 2005

Woollen – a Norwegian sweater to keep the blog warm for winter

If anyone would like some help with their templates, let me know.

I’ve tended to take an ambivalent view towards hackers in the past.

Hackers can sometimes provide a beneficial service to organisations that need to constantly review and improve security. The better behaved ones don’t even steal your data.

I held to that view until this very afternoon, when I was showing my blog to a relative and bang, I found it had been hacked. For somebody who is non-technical, who does not work in the web business, this is proof of all those headlines writ large.

If certain individuals or groups have a particular axe to grind, then possessing and using the knowledge to grind it can be a powerful expedient to getting a message across. Hacking the work of a blogger who has no real beef with anyone strikes me as rather cynical.

Now I appreciate that hacking can be a hobby, done for its own sake, but targeting individuals who are peacefully making their way through the world with a bit of commentary is senseless.

I’ve read a lot of comments made recently about pointless blogs, how the timewasters should be rooted out and systematically ignored, and to some extent I agree with that, if you’re sifting through noise for a clear voice on some particular content. I had a think a while ago about whether my blog was redundant, but it seemed to me that if I enjoyed putting down thoughts about life and work, then I wasn’t doing anyone any harm.

And that’s the thing. I’m not doing anyone harm. There are items I’ve written about that others have told me they hadn’t heard about, just as I’ve come across some crucial answers to some of my crucial questions. It’s give and take, and that’s what communication is about.

So I find it disagreeable that I come online and find something very personal to me has been screwed around with by someone far away who doesn’t care for what I have to say. Ignore me, don’t hack me. And certainly don’t hack me just because you can.

Source: Wikimedia Commons

I’ve got the decorators in (well, myself anyway), so the Blog may have some issues over the next few days.

This is an upgrade to a new version and it’s proved a little more painful.

One thing I especially don’t like is the querystring stuff for old posts, but it’s either that, switch vendor or continue spending over 80 seconds publishing pages.

I’m not sure how long I’ll keep this system. I may change it eventually having decided it would be too painful to build my own.

Today was a classic British autumn day: unpredictable rain showers, short periods of pale sun and cold winds. In honour of that and the general decline in our nation’s weather, I decided to reskin the Blog for winter!

Lest it should catch a cold, I’ve decked the Blog in a lovely Norwegian wool jumper that should keep out even the most biting gusts.

Now there’s only J and I that still need to keep warm: atchoo!

By Tristan Nitot; source: Wikimedia Commons

Actually that’s inaccurate. I’ve had one since March, but my brother and his dj collective had until yesterday hijacked it to organise their next night in September.

It was up at the Media Hype Pixels domain, a PHP / flatfile effort based on PivotLog (www.pivotlog.net). PivotLog is a highly serviceable system under the GPL licence, but its configuration is a over complex to say the least.

The night before, it got trashed while I was (carefully) editing the templates! When I took a back up of the data it was illegible, coded in this horrid shorthand that I assume must be there just to speed up flatfile queries.

So I took it down and limped off resolved to find a better solution, preferably in VBScript, which is a bit easier for me to mod and maintain.

We’ll see how this ASP / Access effort goes. Thanks to betaparticle.com for a so far simple enough and enjoyable experience. Open source releases for Windows are so rare!