On January 2, 2003, I became a blogger and do-it-yourself webmaster. While publishing my blog “semantics etc” and on-and-off some other websites, I taught myself the basics of (X)HTML, Apache, MYSQL, PHP, Perl, Movable Type, Wordpress, and many other tools. I enjoyed understanding and being able to manipulate the happenings behind the scenes. In the last couple of years, I haven’t been able to devote any significant time to this site (and other geeky pursuits), as my day job(s) have demanded more and more of my time.

Several times I have had to confront the seedier sides of the internet, when dealing with waves of spam comments and trackbacks, or hacking attacks, for example, when Russian (?) hackers defaced our department newsletter. That was not the funnest part of being a DIYer.

Yesterday morning, I was alerted to the fact that my website had become infested with spam ads. It turned out that these ads were well-hidden from the casual eye and were only visible to the Googlebot, so that as far as Google was concerned I was a purveyor not of thoughts about meaning but of male supplements and designer handbags. When I finally had the time to look carefully at the contents of my server, I found that it had been hacked quite a while ago and that the infestation was everywhere, including old directories that hadn’t been visited by humans for ages. I found somewhat vague instructions on the net for how to deal with such an infestation. I came away feeling sullied by the dirt I had to clean up and vaguely disturbed by the violation of my space.

I have decided that I don’t have the time and energy to be a DIYer anymore. It was fun while it lasted, but it’s time to move to a walled garden, where someone else is in charge of the innards and I can concentrate on writing and sharing. Some pundits denigrate the success that companies like Facebook and Apple have had with creating environments where the end user has little or no control over the inner workings of the infrastructure. But I have to say that the thought that hackers and spammers are now the problem of someone I’m paying for their expertise is comforting.

So, this site is now hosted by wordpress.com and I will slowly repopulate it with content.

Update: After a year of hosting the site on wordpress.com, I have now moved to using Octopress and am fully a DIYer again. But with a twist: the site as served to the internet is a static site without user login or an exposed backend; so unless someone compromises the server itself, I should not have to worry about hackers and spammers. More on the move here.