I feel so violated. A couple of days before the third anniversary of truthalyzer.com, I received an email entitled “WEB HOSTING ACCOUNT DEACTIVATED.” And thus began my week of blogging hell.

Sure enough, when I checked the website, there was a generic takedown notice. Visitors were probably thinking I hadn’t paid my bills. Somewhere a #%@*ing demented geek was having a laugh at my expense.  His (or her) “SQL injection attack,” as the technical support guy described it, had corrupted my database and worse, the guy said it had attacked other websites, so my site was quarantined. My files could not be disinfected. It was necessary to exterminate them.

Why would someone do such a thing to truthalyzer? Select one of the following reasons:

1. My writing offended them. That hurts. Oh, I know, the content’s bad enough, but the STYLE. And from a former English teacher. Unforgivable. Irredeemable.

2. A mindless web bot stumbled onto truthalyzer.com and simply executed its program. That’s easier to take. Nothing personal. Just wanton destruction.

3. A disgruntled employee of my web host, maybe the support tech I talked to, took out his anger about lousy pay, no dental coverage, sexual harassment, or whatever on ME. (If he had only communicated his grievances to me, I might have written a sympathetic post. But now, #%@* him!)

Odds are, it’s number 2. The most appropriate number for this $%!#* experience.

You’re thinking, “Didn’t he back up his blog?” Yes, there was a backup, and we tinkered around for days deleting files and resetting options to default and attempting to upgrade WordPress to the latest version before failing to restore that database. Suffice to say, we could have continued our ministrations, but I finally called a halt and disposed of the corpse.

Actually, I had been planning to upgrade the blogging software and change the theme and otherwise spiff up the website for months. There always seemed to be more important priorities. Now, some predatory sociopath sitting in front of a computer monitor in Moscow, Russia or maybe Moscow, Idaho has moved truthalyzer.com to the top of my list. And it’s nobody’s fault but mine that two years into truthalyzer I had not upgraded WordPress to take advantage of security enhancements that might have prevented the SQL injection attack from succeeding.

So, out with the old and in with the NEW, IMPROVED truthalyzer.com. This time around I’ve chosen a WordPress theme called “The mirror or the painter.” That will make more sense if you click the link and see the original photo of a gorgeous model in a diaphanous gown floating across the header. I have replaced that with a gloomy picture of storm clouds over Edmonton, Alberta. Never been there. Just liked the photo, and it sort of symbolizes my funk over what’s happening out there . . . economic crisis, destruction of the environment, endless wars, peak oil, peak everything, and worst of all the endless growth of our species and our greedy consumption of every resource on our little planet.

But I’m not despairing, so don’t you. Maybe our civilization and our planet needed to be hacked, and just like truthalyzer, it’ll all work out.  Out with the old and in with the new.  Yeah, that’s the ticket.