The last week and a bit has been a mixture of triumph and disaster.

I was away in Aberdeen from Friday until Wednesday, staying in a castle with no mobile phone reception so I couldn't do a great deal which was a bit of a disaster, but quite nice.

However, just before I went away, 4 of our sites got hacked and it's cost us around £3000 in lost productivity trying to pin the vulnerability down and fix the sites.  These were quite old sites using a third party extension that allowed the hackers access to change the content of files and redirect visitors to some dodgy site in Mexico.  Luckily, there was a configuration setting on the server that we could change to stop them.  This setting is turned on by default on just about every server out there and is quite obscure.  If anyone is interested then they can contact me and I'll tell them what the problem is so that they can fix it.

We're not actually using this extension any more which is why we managed to limit the damage to just 4 out of over 300 sites.

Apart from that, we've had a couple of big projects that we've managed to push forward on, despite the resources we've had to allocate to the hacking problem.  I've just taken on 3 new developers to handle the workload we have on at the moment and get projects turned round much quicker.

The last disaster happened yesterday.  I left my laptop at home and my 3 year old daughter decided to have a play.  She deleted my main work directory and then emptied the recycle bin so everything is gone.  Luckily I have it all backed up in different places but it's a big inconvenience and a valuable lesson learned about backing up.

All in all, I can't complain.  And even if I did, nobody would listen.