OMG.

That’s all I can think right now. OMG.

Our website is dead. Finito. End of life. Sigh.

It appears that someone with too much time on his hands hacked the website and deleted our database. But that’s okay, because we had a backup system installed, and we have a fairly current backup of the database. Whew!

The only problem is, the backup is corrupt.

I guess it’s not enough to keep one backup these days. You need to have a month’s worth of daily backups at all times, because you’ll never know how good any of them are until you need them.

It’s heartbreaking right now. Just when I was feeling that VT was finally getting into a groove and churning books out with predictable regularity, we have to drop everything and rebuild the website from scratch. Right at the start of tax season, too. Aagh!

We knew we would have to do it eventually. Joomla 1.0 reached end of life two years ago, and some of our modules had stopped functioning. But the upgrade to Joomla 1.5 requires a lot of work. We’d need a new template, for starters, and that’s a lot of artwork customization. Virtuemart would need to be upgraded, too. And the data integration is manual, not automatic, so it would be a painstaking process.

That’s why we kept putting it off… and now, we have no choice. Joomla 1.5 it is!

I found a good template, and we’ve got it installed. My partners are champs, pure and simple. Some of them are combing through the Google caches, looking for pieces of our content to screen-scrape for text so we can restore our history. I’m working on the artwork sizing and my other partner is customizing Virtuemart. I’ll start tackling the menu structure this afternoon, after I pickup our annual box of Cushman Honeybells from the Post Office.

Considering the freezing weather in Florida (and my luck in general lately), I’m curious about the quality of the oranges. Still, I am hopeful. In years past, they have been outstanding. There is simply nothing like a sweet Florida orange. Maybe it’s because I grew up as an East Coast girl, but California oranges are nothing to Florida’s.

So, with a plate of Honeybells and a large pot of Harney’s tea at my desk, I will plug ahead and see if we can restore our website presense this weekend. Because the first rule in Marketing 101 says ”Get a website,” and right now, it looks like we’re out of business, even though we’re not.

Sheri

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