Rook's Comics and Games

This the the first official post of the new blog. Please click on the READ MORE button below to read the whole post. As you all probably know, the website and blog were hacked. It has been down for a while now because I transferred to a new hosting company and am using Drupal instead of Joomla. As for the old blog posts - I probably won't be able to get them back. There is a chance that they are still somewhere on the hosting account we were using before but things aren't looking good. So, if anybody has any old posts saved for any reason, I would really like to have them. There are still some kinks being worked out with the e-mail system of the new host but I should have rook@rookscomicsandgames.com working within the next day or so.

So, what did I learn for this experience? One, I really need to keep backups of the site. It would have been much easier if I could have just restored a copy of the site from a week ago. The blog is the only thing that really needs to change on a weekly basis so a new backup every week would have worked great. Second, keeping all the modules etc of the site up to date is important. Hackers are continually evaluating code to try and find pieces they can exploit. I highly doubt that we were targeted purposefully. Whoever hacked the site probably just saw some exploitable code and went for it. I am guessing that a site like this is always going to be more prone to hacking because it is made up of many different modules. These modules are all open source so exploits are easy to look for. The more modules a site has, the more points of attack there are. I am guessing there will be problems again in the future but hopefully I am better prepared for them this time.

So, what are some new features of the new site?
- We have a Cafe Press module in the right column. If you click on the picture of the item it will take you directly to our Cafe Press store. If you click on the 'more' link it will take you to a page showing everything we have available at the Cafe Press store. You can then click on a picture and you will be taken to Cafe Press to purchase the item.
- We have a newsletter signup at the top left. The code for this is giving me some problems so there is no fancy box around it at this point. Hopefully in the future I can get that worked out. For now it just takes you to the Constant Contact signup pages so that you can receive our awesome newsletter.
- We have one picture gallery right now. I have to do some more work to enable multiple galleries. I can also give permissions easily to users so if there is anybody that might want to be able to upload pictures we can talk about that.
- The Google calendar shows up pretty well in the website.

If there are any more features that you might find useful let me know. I do want to think about a forum again and possibly a classified ad section. Also, I need to do a little work on allowing comments for these types of posts so you may not be able to add a comment on this post.

Thanks for sticking with us and hopefully nothing bad happens in the future.