During piano camp this summer (one of the busiest weeks of the year in our studio!), I woke up one morning to discover that the home page on my studio website looked like this:
Since I am not in the business of providing shelving for the Asian market I was more than a little concerned. Panicked, I quickly clicked through here to Music Matters Blog only to discover that it was completely down. Several other connected websites were also down, with only error messages showing up. I quickly sent out an SOS to my family asking them to pray for some kind of quick resolution to this website nightmare. It became obvious that my sites had been hacked and untold numbers of files were corrupted. The exact number remained unknown, but I faced the prospect of losing 20+ years of time and work invested in this site and hundreds of hours of development in the various connected sites.
The problem was so extensive that I had no idea where to start, plus I had a week full of energetic little kiddos to teach, so nowhere near the time I would need to begin to unravel the mess. I reached out to my good friend and web designer, Tiffany, of Tiffany J Design, and asked if she was available to help me. For the next several weeks she poured her time and energy into resolving this issue (which was more like a hundred layers of issues!). We met on several virtual calls to weed through old files and email addresses together, and she spent countless hours cleaning up everything in the backend, adding new levels of security, updating or deleting sites as needed, and lots more technical stuff that I’m sure I don’t even know.
Anyway, as we get ready to launch into a new year of teaching and sharing here on Music Matters Blog, I realized that I’ve just pressed on as if nothing happened when in reality I could have lost over 20 years of work here on the blog, so I wanted to publicly offer a thank you to God for answering my desperate prayers and to Tiffany for her investment in the preservation and ongoing work of encouraging and providing resources for music teachers around the world. I feel so incredibly blessed! Also, I want to put the word out there for anyone who is looking for a highly competent and trustworthy web designer – either for a new site you’ve been wanting to develop or an existing one that needs some updating – I wholeheartedly recommend Tiffany J Design! Thanks, Tiffany, for so many years of faithful service behind-the-scenes here at Music Matters Blog! I truly could not do it without you!
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