Introducing ClothesOn

A Tech article with View Comments posted 12 December 2008.
Tags: clotheson, hacker, spam, wordpress

This summer I experienced a sudden, inexplicable drop in visits to my website. I later found that it was due to a spammer hacking my site and changing my Wordpress template to include spammy links. I cleared that up (see “Does your website sell Viagra too?“) and moved on with life. But I began thinking: it has taken me months to recover from the lost traffic. How can I prevent this in the future.

Well, the first step is obvious – keep up to date on the latest Wordpress releases will prevent a lot of these problems. My site’s defacement could have been prevented.

Nevertheless, seeing the opportunity to procrastinate on my end-of-semester studies (I’m looking at you, Lutheran Confessions paper) I decided to code up a quick, simple keyword scanner that will check any webpage you want, once per day, and email you if something is amiss. I call it ClothesOn.

Give it a shot and let me know what you think in the comments.

Update 29 Dec 2009: Well, turns out that only two people ever tried this out, so I shut it down. Oh well.

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5. Done with the semester