deadpeasant

Thanks, it seems to have worked.

Thanks for the suggestion, but permalinks have the form:

http://www.englishspeechservices.com/blog/?p=1541

If I try to use that kind of file name, e.g. ending “blog/?p=1541”, it doesn’t work. No doubt something to do with how question marks are interpreted.

Any suggestions?

Good news: Followed your instructions and have got to my old dashboard, which looks like it used to: posts all listed etc. Phew, thank you.

Bad news: The hack seems to be more fundamental now than before, in that various actions just lead to blank pages. For instance, this link
http://www.englishspeechservices.com/blog/
leads to a blank page.

I can list my posts and edit them, but if I click view, I get a blank page again.

So it seems that I don’t have the ‘last resort’ option of just keeping the semi-functional hacked blog online so readers could at least read the old posts.

Now that my host has upgraded my server, should I try upgrading WP from my dashboard? Or will that just give me an upgraded hacked blog? Thanks for this help.

Many thanks for taking an interest.

I started another thread on my hacking problem but that’s gone cold, so may I ask you another question?

I backed up the hacked blog directory, deleted it on the server and used EasyWP Installer to install a newer version of WP (the reason I previously had an older version (I think it was 3.1.4) was that my host couldn’t handle the higher-level PHP, but when I told my host yesterday about the hacking they moved me to another server).

However I couldn’t get into my dashboard with the new version (wouldn’t accept my password), so I gave up, deleted the newer blog directory and re-uploaded my backed-up blog directory with the older WP version (better to have a partly-functional hacked blog than none at all). But then I couldn’t even get the login window. When I went to this link
http://www.englishspeechservices.com/blog/wp-login.php
I got “Error establishing a database connection”.

I have zero expectation of being able to de-hack the blog, so all I want now is to put the hacked blog back up and leave it there with commenting disabled (the hack manifested itself when readers tried to leave comments) so people can at least read the old posts. (If I build up the motivation to resume blogging, I may start again at wp.com or blogspot, but I never wanted to do that the first place since I wanted a blog within my website.)

PS It’s only now becoming clear to me that I have no idea how WP works. How I ran a blog for several months is beyond me. I don’t know what or where my database is, nor whether I can reconstruct my blog posts. Assuming that the blog is history, I would quite like to put the content on my website as non-blog articles. But I have no idea how to access the content.

This
http://ottopress.com/2009/hacked-wordpress-backdoors/
says that the problem is likely to be in the files I’ve uploaded myself. So, if I have to re-upload clean copies of all these files, how do I prevent the same thing happening again?

I guess the answer is in all the other stuff I can barely understand.

If I could go back 6 months I would tell myself that self-hosted WP blogs are only for professionals.

Many many thanks for your input. On the audio issue, I use 80kbps mp3s of speech clips, between a few KB and about 1MB, roughly 5-25 per post. If I find the motivation to keep blogging, I’ll explore Doug’s kind suggestions, and hopefully solve my feed/rss problem at the same time.

The hacking issue emerged during this thread and I should start a new thread when I can formulate a coherent question. Commenters are being led to a screenful of canadian viagra stuff and several hours have got me nowhere closer to knowing how to even begin to find a solution. How non-technical types run a self-hosted WP blog is beyond me!

Of course I wanted to embed my blog in my website. I also seem to recall that using audio clips (my main raison d’etre) required org rather than com – is that right?

Btw is com less hackable than org? Every solution I’ve read requires a special education to understand it and/or a full-time job to implement it. Frankly right now I just want to delete my entire blog.

Thanks for this. In the meantime, I’ve discovered some kind of hacking: when readers try to post comments, it goes to a page of Canadian viagra pharmacy stuff.

Do you think this is a coincidence, or connected to the subscribing issue?

Anyway, I’m even more at sea when it comes to resolving the hack than I was/am with the audio/rss problem! The FAQ on ‘my site was hacked’ begins with ‘stay calm’ and then goes on for screen after screen with stuff I don’t understand. Why did I start this blog? I’ll post another question when I can formulate one……………