Warning: this post contains a little ranting, some raving, and a whole lot of self pity.

At the end of last year I was filled with excitement about what 2007 held for Veggie Friendly. I had grand plans for refreshing the look, entering more food events, exploring lesser known veggie restaurants around Australia and even inaugurating a regular Day of Cooking where I’d try recipes that were too much trouble to make at normal times.

Little did I realise that the 06/07 period would see Veggie Friendly engaged in a Darwinian struggle for survival.

On 29 December my Wordpress blog was hit by a big spam attack. The losers spammers managed to find an unsecured file and spray messages about viagra throughout the main page of my blog. The only problem with this nifty strategy was that they injected so much spam that my site crashed. I thought even parasites understood that you need to keep the host alive to profit from them, not cause them to crumble in an anarchic heap. But there again, I guess spam is not about the message afterall.

Anyhow, on the 29th of December I happened to be holidaying on North Stradbroke Island. By some strange fluke the only day I had Internet access was the 30th of December. After some desperate calls to my hosting provider we figured out what had happened and reloaded the Index page. Goodbye loser spammers from hell!

I was a bit shaken by this attack. It’s unpleasant to realise that something you’ve spent a year building up can be suddenly and silently obliterated by an unseen, uncaring spammer. But I also thought it was a salutory lesson about keeping my blog software up-to-date and remembering to back-up stuff.

Glowing with newfound awareness I returned to Sydney. Unfortunately, there soon followed a catastrophic collision between my clumsiness and my computer.

In a post-holiday stupour I tripped over the power cord of my computer which was connected to my laptop on my kitchen table. I picked up the cord and saw that, annoyingly, the jack at the end had bent 90 degrees and was now useless (anyone who has a Mac knows that this sux because you have to replace the entire power cord and this sets you back quite a bit). Also, there was the small matter of no longer being able to charge my laptop or ipod.

It was just as I was examining this cord that Andy started to make a small cough, in a kind of tea and sympathy way, and quietly said “You better come and look at this.” I turned around to see that the bottom part of my trusty laptop screen had split apart. It was like a wound, only rather than revealing blood, or bones, or internal organs, there were neat rows of circuitry with lots of extremely delicate looking bit and pieces protruding from it. I sensed immediately that we had moved from annoying, to bad.

Vale little laptop. You served me well from 2001 - 2007. I suspect you can still be held together with gaffer tape, but it seems that the time has come for you to retire gracefully to greener pastures (that means my spare room, by the way. It’s not a metaphor for euthanasia).

OK, so 06/07 not going so well on the blogging front. But Veggie Friendly had survived the spam attack, and Andy also had a laptop. Even if his Internet Explorer program doesn’t let me edit my blog at all, and even using Firefox I can’t edit in html, and despite the fact that my supposedly PC compatible camera software doesn’t seem to work on his laptop and I can’t download any photos (which, as you will hopefully see in coming months, is a shame because I need them for a couple of posts). No, despite these travails the Veggie Friendly upper lip was stiff and the chin was resolute.

Until last Thursday, when a second extraordinary spam attack occurred.

This time the spammer attacked my hosting provider. From what I can tell they hacked a number of accounts, riddled them with spam, and generally caused a lot of agony. The effect on Veggie Friendly was that the main page, and admin, continued to work, but a file controlling all of my other pages was knocked out of action.

This meant that from Thursday until Tuesday you could not access my Google map, my archives links, nor any of the navigation pages helping you to find restaurants by suburb, name etc. This is when I transitioned from the ‘bad’ to ‘extremely angry’ stage. Particularly when my hosting provider initially said that the latest complete back-up they had was from July last year, and yes, restoring it would probably mean that I would lose half a year’s work.

But no matter. Because my site is now working again (turned out the most recent back-up was on the other server), and a new computer is ordered, and I have a new and valuable appreciation for the fragilty of online content. And (all extremeties crossed) within a couple of weeks Veggie Friendly will flying smoothly along and back on track to realise all of my New Year’s resolutions.

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