Archive for October, 2008

I wanted to take a moment today and pay tribute to a true hero, Nurse William Mann. William had wanted to be a helicopter nurse since the age of 12, when he had the chance to see the inside of Loyola University’s Lifestar helicopter.

Nurse William Mann was one of the victims of the latest medical helicopter crashes which happened in the suburbs of Chicago. It seems like there have been way too many of these types of tragedies lately, including this medical helicopter crash in my neck of the woods.

My thoughts and prayers go out to William’s family, as well as to the other victims of this crash, including paramedic Ron Battiato, pilot Delbert Waugh and Baby Kirstin Blockinger, who was being transported.

The courageous people who fly in these helicopters to transport the sick and the wounded have my deepest respect and admiration. I’m grateful that there are nurses, doctors, paramedics, EMTs, and pilots who bravely call this their job. And of course each time I hear about one of these crashes, I think of our Crzegrl, and hope that she stays safe.

(”Ghosts in the Sky,” image courtesy of Mayr’s photostream on Flickr.)

Recently at the BlogHer DC conference I had a great time hanging out with Dr. Val. In case you didn’t know, she’s left her old post as medical director for Revolution Health and has ventured out on her own at Getting Better with Dr. Val. This is an excellent health care site, with great content, design, and navigation (the triumvirate of great web publishing, IMHO!) Dr. Val is very prolific so you can always count on having something new to read on her site.

I love Dr. Val’s approach to creating content. She features lots of interviews, like this one of a 32 year old who had a stroke. Did you know she’s also an artist? Yes, she also creates comics, and will feature a new one every Friday. I like this one, which will be part of her “fanstasy” series, to illustrate what health care professionals *wish* they could do:

Subscribe, add her to your medical blogroll, or if just too darn lazy for all of that, you can always follow her on Twitter: twitter.com/drval. I do!

There’s been a lot of recent discussion about nursing salaries and the nursing shortage.

I wanted to chime in because (a) I love to over-simplify things, and (b) I am on the verge of becoming one of those nurses they refer to - the kind who works 2-3 years after school and then quits.

The reasons aren’t complicated. Here’s why I’ll probably end up quitting:

• The money sucks.
• It takes its toll on you physically.
• I don’t want to work nights, weekends, or holidays.

Sure there are many peripheral issues - nurses dumping on each other, lack of autonomy, lack of time and resources to get the job done right. But other than that it’s a personally rewarding, and (at times) intellectually challenging job. It feels good to help people when they are sick. I love being the voice of calm in a storm. I love working as a team and saving lives (sometimes.)

I just don’t love it enough to get over the three points that I listed above.

It’s that simple. If I became a nurse when I was 22 I might have gotten a few more good years in, but sadly, I didn’t. So if there’s any constructive advice springing from this negative view of nursing it would be this: Get ‘em in while they’re young. The earlier you start your nursing career, the later your burnout will be.

On Monday I attended BlogHer DC, put on by the good folks at Blogher. This was an excellent event. I’ll admit, I went there with skepticism. This whole google wordpress drama has kind of put me into a existential tailspin with regards to blogging, plus I never really got the whole “BlogHer” thing. Really the only reason I wanted to go was to get to meet Mother Jones, RN in person and to hang out with the guys from JNJ to talk about social media.

As it turns out, the event itself was great. The best part of the day was getting to meet so many other bloggers and to hear about the wonderfully creative things they are doing. (Hmm… Did that sentence make me sound like a high school art teacher? Perhaps I need a couple of drinks.)

I had a blast hanging out with MJ! I taught her all about Twitter and now she’s one of the regular *medtweeps.* It was also great to see Dr. Val. She has a great new site, and I’ll be blogging about it very soon.

I also met a very technically savvy blogger named Roni who blogs about weight loss, food, and healthy living. She gave me some great technical help with wordpress that’s going to enable me to improve OrientedX3 and take it to the next level.

I also enjoyed hanging out with Rob and Marc from Johnson & Johnson. It’s interesting to see what they are doing with social media. Some have been very distrustful when they see corporations like JNJ entering the social arena and I think they are missing the point. Expect a big blog post on that later in the week.

And finally, in case you missed it, I wrote a summary of my trip to Blog World Expo and the future of healthcare blogging over at TravelNursingBlogs.com

So what have I learned from all of this? First of all, here are three steps to keeping your website from getting hacked:

1. Use Google Webmaster Tools - if I had been using them they may have helped me diagnose the problem much earlier.
2. Change your password often and make it a good one! I HATE keeping track of passwords as much as the next person. But guess what I hate even more - Getting my blog hacked.
3. If you are running a self-hosted wordpress blog, you have to be diligent about updating to the latest version. Updates aren’t just about the latest bells and whistles  - they are about security.

If you know what you’re doing updating to the latest version shouldn’t take more than 15 minutes. If you don’t know what you’re doing, take a minute to read the instructions on wordpress.org. It’s not that hard and if you do it once, it will be in your brain.

I never thought hackers would bother with my site in the first place.

I have a simple little wordpress blog with a modest audience. Why would someone want to hack into it? Because there are millions of “simple little wordpress blogs” out there. The hackers figure out how to break into one, and then they can break in to all of them.

Do I have second thoughts about using Wordpress?

I did at first, but then I realized that no matter what platform you use, there will be vulnerabilities. Wordpress is obviously going to be vulnerable because so many people use it. On the other hand, so many people use it because it rocks! It’s so easy to install. It’s built for blogging and yet it can also be used as a simple content management system. It’s also easy to customize for a “casual” web designer like myself, and there is a great community of theme builders behind it. I will continue to use Wordpress.

Bottom line - if you are hosting a site on your own domain, then it’s up to you to be a responsible webmaster. Use the three steps that I outlined above.

Last week I was tearing my hair out and suffering from a blogger existential crisis, this week I am triumphant. I found a problem, diagnosed it, and fixed it all by myself, and now I am that much more tech savvy. It’s a good feeling.

One thing I have had second thoughts on is whether or not I want to encourage other bloggers to host their own domain, particularly those of you who are strictly blogging for the sake of blogging, and have no use for the technical end of it. If that describes you, then I would recommend sticking with wordpress.com, or blogspot.

On the other hand, if you find all of this technical stuff kind of interesting, then I heartily recommend moving forward and using your own domain with a host. There is something so cool about having your own little place on the web that is not part of some larger system. To me it’s like the difference between owning a house on a little piece of land, and renting an apartment in a multi-level building.

I know I said last word on Google, but guess what? I lied. This is too important not to share with you.

So to recap, you know the story of how I lost my google traffic, and then how I tried to figure out why I lost my google traffic.

A couple days later, on a whim, I decided to revisit google’s cached pages of PixelRN.com. I wanted to be sure I wasn’t missing anything. So I clicked on one of the cached pages, did a “view source” to see the HTML, and low and behold I scrolled all the way to the bottom and found this:

So now I realized that someone had hacked into my wordpress blog and flooded it with hidden spam. This completely freaked me out. I mean, who would want to hack into my lil’ old blog? But at last I had found out exactly why I lost my search engine traffic: Google thought I was a spammer.

After reading about similar situations, I realized that my site was hacked because of a vulnerability in earlier versions of Wordpress (2.1 - 2.3). Previously I hadn’t been in any hurry to upgrade to the latest version of Wordpress, because I was afraid I might screw something up. I eventually got over this fear, and upgraded, but by that time it was too late.

So meanwhile, I changed my wordpress password, and upgraded to Wordpress 2.6.2.

I then became completely unable to log onto my wordpress admin page, meaning, I couldn’t update Pixelrn at all.

I spent some time on the Wordpress forums. I fooled around with Google Webmaster Tools. I fooled around with phpMyAdmin. I learned how to add a new user, and change the password manually. I learned about MD5 hash. I also fooled around with the wp-config file. I even tried an emergency wordpress password reset script. Nothing worked, and no one could give me any answers on the Wordpress forums.

Finally, I resigned myself to the fact that I would have to export my database, delete all the files from PixelRN, reinstall wordpress, and import the parts of the database that I was pretty sure were okay.

Not looking forward to any of this, I procrastinated.

While I was procrastinating, Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s webspam team, was alerted to the problems I was having and wrote a blog post about it. While it thrilled me to no end that someone from Google was actually paying attention, I was still S.O.L. as far as getting onto my wordpress admin page. Maybe it would have been better if someone had alerted the other Matt, Matt Mullenweg (the creator of wordress.) As it turned out, I was supposed to attend WordCamp NYC on Sunday, where Matt was speaking. I opted to instead stay home. I was way too down on Wordpress to attend, and besides, I needed to actually spend time fixing the problem.

So that’s how I spent my Sunday afternoon: fixing PixelRN.com. As you can see, it worked, because here I am blogging again!

Tomorrow: I’ll blog about what I learned from this experience. I’m hoping I can save others from having the same experience.