The link to my main Skymania site has been out of action since mid December thanks to hackers who exploited a security weakness in WebsiteBaker, the content management system I used to build and maintain it.
They managed to get in and destroy all the page files I had in my database – I naively thought I had kept a backup but discovered that these were merely php pages that drew their actual content from the database.
My hosting service offered to provide me with a backup of the database for a fee of £35 plus VAT which is probably good value for a small company with much data.
I had only produced a few pages so far and so I was reluctant to pay – but it turned out I didn’t have to, thanks to Google.
I found each individual page by searching using the term “Skymania” and a keyword or two from the page title. Then by selecting the cache option when the results came up, I was able to retrieve every word of every page. Luckily Google had last saved my pages to cache a few days before the hackers struck. Thank you, Google!
This near disaster also gave me the chance to look at a few other content management systems – there is a great list of them with demos to try here. I experimented with a fair few and eventually stumbled across the amazing CMSimple. It is remarkably easy to use once set up and does not require a database! The content is kept separate from the template and stylesheet and is all held in a single html text file. An H1, H2 or H3 title begins a new page with H1 being for the main pages, H2 for child pages of an H1 page and H3 being for children of H2 pages.
You can see the results by clicking here. And yes, it is very much still a work in progress!