Okay, here’s my plan for this site. I’m going to abandon dynamically generated content altogether and go old-school. The site will have more or less the same stuff as now (blog entries, categories, etc.) but will be built with just plain ol’ HTML. I’ll build it on local machines and then sync it to the server. I’m looking into various ways and means of doing this in an automated manner; obviously I need something that’s quick and easy to use because if it’s not quick and easy I won’t use it.
So, I have to either find a suitable set of tools or build them myself, build a new site with them, figure out how to move all of the content of the current site into the new one, and then make the switch. I’ve been looking at Blosxom, which at first glance appears to be nearly ideal but upon further examination reveals myriad problems when used in the manner I desire. I’ll try pyBlosxom next, which seems to be a variant of Blosxom that is somewhat more actively maintained. They’re both open-source freeware so I should be able to bend them to my will. Trouble is that Blosxom is written in perl, a language with which I have very little experience and some amount of contempt; and pyBlosxom is written in Python, a language with which I have no experience. However, it’s probably more sensible to start with one or the other than to start from scratch.
If the current site gets hacked again before I replace it, there’s a really good chance that I’ll just take the whole thing down rather than trying to repair it again. The official word from the authors of WordPress regarding the exploit used recently on my site (and many other WP sites, it seems) boils down to “we don’t know how it’s happening, and since we don’t know how it’s happening, we can’t fix it.”
I’m sorry that some jerk is messing up your excellent site, and sorry that you have to go to so much bother to build a whole new one. It’s a pain in the butt for you but this reader, for one, really appreciates it. I would really miss your blog.