Pushaw, pushaw!

That’s short for “yeah, yeah, I hear you but I’m not sure I believe you or want to be bothered with making any changes at the moment.”

For some time now, I’ve read and heard about many of the horrors that might befall you if you don’t keep your anti-virus up-to-date or if you don’t install the latest version of WordPress or whatever else might have the tongues wagging.

I knew, though, they weren’t talking about me so I paid less than a little attention to the jabbering.

The following tale though is a testament to one of those sort of “hard lessons learned”; one that in the telling might help you to avoid an experience like the one I recently went through.

Keeping up with the Joneses

I did not!

With one of my blogs, in fact I was so far behind with updating the WP application it was almost like I was still driving a 1967 Chevy instead of having moved into a 2009 BMW.

And I paid for it in the end!

In time, and maybe a little bit of peace of mind!

I like the looks of my blog.

And because I do, I look at it often.

Which in this instance is a good thing because in doing so one morning I discovered my blog did not look good!

Now to me, “not look good” means when I viewed my blog with Firefox 3, a couple widgets in the sidebar had taken on extremely large print. And, when seen in IE 6, the widgets had been moved and relocated to the bottom of the blog page. This caused there to be no right-hand sidebar information at all!

Further, when I checked the Page View, Page Source code, there was html code that had nothing at all to do with the message of my blog.

I mean, how much does html code on Viagra and antihistamines at a foreign (Russia, to be exact) URL have to do with Internet Marketing or editing and proofreading?

Even Google was dismayed!

What also happened when I Googled the name of my business or my given name, I learned the description sometimes linked to URLs completely irrelevant to the focus of my blog.

This scenario went on almost every day and sometimes twice a day for several weeks. Although at times the front end of my blog would be even more off-kilter! And often the URLs in the html code would change.  I kept record of it all.

Finally, after a couple weeks of no response from my web host about how I might remedy the situation, I selected a new web host. DNS servered the domain name I’d purchased a year ago to them. They moved my blog to their service, installed it to the latest version of WP, and they searched for and found a culprit “malicious rogue html code”.

Now, I’ll pay more attention to the issues that can befall a blog or a computer if things are not updated as often as they ought to be.

I also intend to continue to look at the front end of my blog each day, not just because I like it but to help me know sooner if similar situations arise.

You can see my new and improved blog for yourself at www.kreativeramblings.com