As you might have noticed, this blog’s gone into one of its quieter patches, mostly because I’m currently drowning in iOS games for my Tap! magazine duties. The good is that I get to play and write about cracking* iOS games. The bad is that I don’t really have time to do anything else for a few days. However, this also gives me a nice excuse to mention the spiffy new website for the publication, www.tapmag.co.uk, which will carry reviews, posts from editor Christopher Phin (and maybe some of us other contributors if he gives us the magic key), and handy links so you can subscribe.

Anyway, back to Dungeon Raid and Liqua Pop.

* As in “Cracking cheese, Gromit!”, not dodgy app piracy.

Because I was curious to see whether anyone was actually reading my rants on this website, I installed an exciting statistics doohickey two weekends ago, and it’s amusing to note that even on a blog such as this one, the usual suspects kick the face off of all other articles (in terms of traffic, rather than literal face-kickage).

I’m happy to report that even on days where I don’t write anything, Revert to Saved still has traffic, and that the stats aren’t swaying me in the slightest regarding any new content I’m going to write. They do, however, show how tempting it must be for a publisher to follow the AOL way and just churn out shit to appeal to search engines.

For example, I spent a few hours a couple of days ago writing a long, considered review of GarageBand for iPad. Even online on a typical tech blog, it’s the sort of thing I’d expect to have gotten around £150 for. By contrast, I also that day fired off a bitchy little rant about an Adobe video that pretty much went WAH WAH WAH APPLE COCOA WAH CS5 JOBS HATES US WAH WAH WAH. The Adobe piece got ten times as many visits as the GarageBand review.

Similarly, keywords in titles make a big difference. A two-year old article Steve Jobs is going to die! still gets lots of hits, no doubt fuelled by people eager to know that the CEO is about to pass. (How disappointed they must be to find an article essentially telling everyone to leave him be, that Apple will be fine without his daily involvement, and ending with “Get well soon, Steve”.) This knowledge won’t change anything on the site either, because I admit to ensuring titles are likely to be picked up by search engines and roving eyes, but then that’s been something I’ve done since first writing for magazines a decade ago. You write interesting titles for articles, or the subs rewrite them for you and get all grumpy at the extra work.

The only exception to not making changes due to statistics has come from the interview with Rob Janoff, which is still bringing in a lot of traffic—if only I’d had stats running the day that went live!—which has made me wonder whether I should reprint some other interviews I’ve done over the past year or two. I’m not sure any would have quite the same impact as the Apple logo designer, but the interest seems to be there. Some of these are uncut interviews with people like Tetris creator Alexey Pajitnov, which could be presented in a similar fashion to the Mike ‘Hellboy’ Mignola interview I posted a few years ago. Any feedback on this would be appreciated.

After a late night of cleaning up the blog, I hope everything’s back to normal now. As noted last night, my primary source regarding removing the hack the blog suffered was Personified. If you run a WordPress blog, I urge you to read through the linked post and check your blog’s database and files thoroughly, just in case. Pharma hacks can hang around for months before activation, and there’s still confusion regarding how they get in. (Note that shared hosting isn’t necessarily to blame—Pearson notes he was hacked while on an $800/month dedicated box.)

For the record, the hack here was pretty textbook: two plug-ins had compromised files with very sneaky names, and a new file showed up in the root. Since I lack encyclopaedic knowledge of the names of every file on my server, it took file-count comparisons with clean downloads to find the bad files. I also had several counts of malicious code in the database, along the lines of those outlined in Pearson’s piece.

iOS dev Bob Koon was also on hand last night, providing further helpful tips, and so Revert to Saved now has a seriously beefed up .htaccess, along with a slew of new plug-ins that lock down various elements of WordPress and inform me when any changes to files are made. (Obviously, I also changed all my passwords too.) CloakingDetector seems to think compromised pages are no longer seen any differently by users and GoogleBot, so I’m hopeful that over the coming weeks Google will respider the site and things will be back to normal.

Only time will tell if everything’s fine, though, because these hacks have a tendency to reappear at random if every little last bit hasn’t been cleaned out.

I don’t tend to look at Revert to Saved in search engines much, but perhaps I should have done more vanity searches, because it appears this site has been hacked, with some variant of the pharma hack. (Search for ‘reverttosaved’ on Google and you get lots of lovely bullshit about drugs being for sale here. Great.) I’m currently lucky in that the site’s not yet been blacklisted, but that luck may not last.

What the incident has done is utterly demolish the momentum I’d been building up posting as of the New Year (something regular visitors might have noticed/been shocked by); however, until I can figure out how to deal with the exploit and fix everything, RTS is on hold.

(Note: if anyone reading this is some kind of demon when it comes to cleaning up this kind of crap, please get in touch. Unless you hate me, in which case feel free to laugh heartily.)

UPDATE: Props to Chris Pearson for some tips that have got me some way to (I hope) fixing this mess.

I suspect the response to this will be a resounding silence, or “we don’t care”, or, if most of the Mac fans who showed up yesterday are still around, “you’re a shit designer and an moron who should die in a fire, so who cares?”, BUT! As a pun, I messed about with the blog’s style sheet yesterday, replacing the yellow with a subtle grey background.

The original red/yellow scheme was, as precisely one guy noted on a surprisingly lengthy discussion about yesterday’s article, inspired by classic communist propaganda graphic design. Those guys weren’t fluffy bunnies, but they knew great colour and design. But I also know at least one person found the contrast a struggle, despite me dialling down the yellow a few times.

So, did you like the yellow? Do you prefer the grey? DOES ANYONE CARE? Answers on a postcard (comment) to the usual address. Randomly chosen winner gets sent a kicked swan. ← This is a joke, people all over the internet who are now accusing me of being Evil Animal Cruelty Person.