Tuesday, December 6, 2011

Malaware = Digital Immigrant

Recently I came to my blog and received a malaware warning. This warning served to show me that I am definitely a digital immigrant!
The warning directed me to a page which told me some detail of the suspected malaware and a link to information on what I should do to clean up my site. Well, after perusing the information, I found the first step was to verify the ownership of my blog. I was stuck, I could see the html code but I couldn't alter it (not that I know too much about what to do there. The most I've done with html is changed the size of something!).Verification took me the good part of a day and was only successful after some help from a digital native (Thanks Peter! I am definitely NOT above asking for help in regards to all things digital).  Even with this help, the next stage of getting the tracking code on my blog home page for Google Analytics  took another couple of hours.
Finally, success!! My blog was verified. However, I now had to remove the malaware. I removed a gadget, which it turns out had nothing to do with the malaware, and it made no change to the warning. I didn't really need the gadget anyway, so no big loss there and I kept searching for answers. By this stage I was close to giving up, and no amount of trolling through the help forum was producing any suitable answers. My feelings of inadequacy were increasing.
I finally posted a cry for help to the Google Webmaster tools help forum and received a reply to check out a previously viewed page. So naturally, I decided that my blog was lost forever and thought of a name for a new one...other people then answered my plea and one kind soul even found the code that was causing the flag. I could have tried removing the code but hey, how much quicker to just chop the entire gadget?
Now my blog roll is gone but my blog is clean.

Why this post?
1 To show that a digital immigrant can get there eventually, with a lot of help from friends.
2 So I have a quick link to the help forum (sometimes I can't remember how I found sites \o/)
3 To celebrate my clean blog :-)

Now on to the final year of my BLM. What an exciting year this will be!

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