Publetariat staff are off the rest of this week to celebrate the Thanksgiving holiday.
We will resume our normal posting schedule on the evening of Sunday, 11/30/14.
A safe and happy holiday to all of those who will be celebrating, and a peaceful, productive weekend to the rest!
Nominations are now being accepted for the Saroyan International Prize for Writing, which awards $5000 each to a fiction winner and nonfiction winner. Deadline for nominations is 1/31/14. From the Stanford University Libraries site:
The Stanford University Libraries and the William Saroyan Foundation jointly award the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing, a biennial competition for newly-published books.
The prize commemorates the life, legacy and intentions of William Saroyan – author, artist, dramatist, composer – and is intended to encourage new or emerging writers, rather than to recognize established literary figures.
Entries are now being accepted for the 2014 Prize and must be received by January 31, 2014. Please view the FAQ page for further information.
Funding sponsored in part by Stanford Associates.
Publetariat staff are off today, 12/31 and the day of 1/1 in honor of the New Year’s Day holiday. No new content will be posted until 6pm PST on 1/1/14.
Here’s wishing our readership a safe and happy New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day, and that all your writing and publishing dreams for 2014 come true!
Publetariat staff are off on December 24 and 25th in observance of the Christmas holiday. The site will remain online and available, but no new content will be posted until we resume our regular posting schedule at 6pm PST the night of the 25th, in order for new content to be in place for the Thursday the 26th.
Here’s wishing our readers a safe, happy, inspiring and fun holiday!
Publetariat staff are off in observance of Thanksgiving. We will resume our normal editorial posting schedule on Sunday, 11/30/13, at 6pm PST.
Here’s wishing best of luck to everyone who’s working hard to get those NaNoWriMo manuscripts finished, a happy and safe Thanksgiving to all our American visitors, and a joyous and memorable Hannukah to all our Jewish friends. See you Sunday!
– April L. Hamilton
Publetariat founder and Editor in Chief
Hi group! Founder and Editor in Chief April L. Hamilton here. It’s been a VERY long time coming, but at long last I’m ready to resurrect Publetariat for real, with a regular schedule for posting new content and everything! We’re kicking off with a post intended to help keep you NaNoWriMo’ers going.
Why’d It Take So Long?
Anyone who doesn’t know the full story, check out this post: Why, And How, Publetariat Was Hacked.
The first couple of months after Publetariat was destroyed by hackers were spent in recovery and rebuild mode. With the very generous, pro-bono help of developer and author services provider Shawn E. Bell, the majority of site content was salvaged from the decimated Drupal site and ported to the new, WordPress site you’re viewing now.
But that wasn’t the end of the story.
Since Publetariat had already been on hackers’ radar for many months, they weren’t about to give up just because the new Publetariat is on a new platform.
First came many weeks of tinkering with various site features, to try and figure out where and how hackers could still attempt to hijack the site, and disable any and all features that had the potential to serve as backdoor portals for hackers. Hence, no more interactive site features (like commenting) and no more site membership features. This was followed by many more weeks of trial and error in trying various “plug-ins” to keep the site secure without breaking other site features.
Next came several months of “trapping” incoming traffic from hackers so they could be blocked from the site going forward. There’s hardly a thing in this world as persistent and single-minded as a hacker web bot: those automated terrors just keep coming, through slightly altered avenues and with slightly different approaches. I didn’t want to start officially welcoming site visitors back until I was sure it was totally secure, and stable.
What Else I’ve Been Up To
During this time I’ve kept busy with my day job managing the Kindle Fire on Kindle Nation Daily site and writing content for the site, and I’ve also launched a brand-new site of my own: Digital Media Mom. The creation of this site was inspired by my own mom’s call one day, to ask me, “How come my iPad only works at home?”
She didn’t understand that many of the things she liked to do on the iPad required Wi-Fi connectivity, didn’t understand how Wi-Fi works, and had no idea how to get Wi-Fi connectivity outside of her home. I did a little hunting around online for a plain-English tech site for the ultra-non-tech-savvy like Mom, but came up empty.
Since I have both tech and communication skills, and a real passion for digital media and tech stuff, it seemed an ideal project for me to take on. And just like that, the Digital Media Mom site was born. I’ve been helping folks like my mom cope with tech one daily article at a time ever since.
Just about a week ago, I released the first compilation book from the site: The Digital Media Mom’s Guide To High Tech In Plain English, and I hope to keep releasing new volumes in the series each year. I also released my divorce / breast cancer / job loss / home loss memoir, To Hell and (Hopefully) Back, a few months ago.
What Now?
Publetariat will now resume its usual editorial schedule of posting two new articles each weeknight from Sunday through Thursday evenings. This schedule ensures new content will be there Monday – Friday mornings for site visitors from most time zones.
Cross posts and reprints from some of your favorite past Publetariat contributors will be back, along with some new stuff from new contributors.
I’ll be tweeting links to the new posts each weekday under my personal Twitter account, so feel free to follow me there if you want to be sure you’re alerted to new posts.
WELCOME BACK, AND THANKS FOR YOUR SUPPORT!
Thanks to the pro-bono efforts of the very generous Shawn E. Bell, Publetariat is back online and all of the original site posts were preserved. However, while the “bones” of the site and its content are here, most of the recovered content has yet to be properly categorized into the various Departments (e.g., Sell, Write, Design, etc.). I figured it was important to get all the existing content back online and available to site visitors as quickly as possible, so that has been my priority. You can use the site’s search function (in the right-hand sidebar) to locate specific articles while categorization and cleanup work continues behind the scenes.
Note that while the site’s main web address is still www.Publetariat.com, the URLs for every piece of site content have changed. If you’ve linked to specific Publetariat content in the past, those links are now broken. I’m very sorry about the inconvenience, but it really couldn’t be helped. Frankly, we were lucky to recover the site’s content at all.
Thanks for your patience and support. Publetariat may not resume its usual editorial posting schedule for a few more weeks, but I’m very happy to be able to make the site and its content available to all of you once again.
– April L. Hamilton
Publetariat Founder & Editor in Chief
Many people have asked me why Publetariat has been repeatedly targeted by hackers, if this could be some kind of publishing establishment attack on indie authors in general, or if I feel I am being personally attacked.
Let me reassure everyone: I have no reason to believe the recent problems were any kind of attack on indie authors, or myself in particular. Publetariat was targeted for three reasons, none of which have anything to do with me, the subject area of the site, or the site’s posted content.
First, Publetariat has become a very popular site, and it gets a lot of traffic. Hackers know they have a better chance of spreading their malware far and wide if they can sneak it onto a heavily-trafficked site.
Second, Publetariat was originally built on a software platform called “Drupal”, an open source content management system (CMS) .
“Open source” means available to the general public for free. Using Drupal makes it easy for a developer with a little know-how to get a full-featured website up and running quickly, but hackers can learn all they need to know about the latest version of Drupal simply by downloading a copy of the software and studying its files. So every time a new release comes out, interested hackers grab a copy and get to work, searching for possible security holes and methods for manipulating or commandeering the software. There’s been a HUGE surge in this type of hacker activity over the past six months or so, not only on Drupal sites but on WordPress sites as well—Wordpress is also an open source CMS.
Finally, the original Publetariat site had interactive features like member accounts, member blogs and commenting. The hackers got in by registering bogus user accounts and manipulating the user blogging and commenting functions so they posted hidden, malicious scripts instead of blog posts or comments. Any Drupal or WordPress site with registered user accounts and these types of interactive functions is an attractive target to hackers, which is why I won’t be offering those features here on the newly re-launched, WordPress site.
Hackers keep track of sites where their hacks have found vulnerabilities in the past, so once you’re on the hackers’ radar they keep coming back. This is why I’ve migrated the site off of Drupal and onto WordPress. WordPress has its vulnerabilities too, but turning off all interactive site features severely limits the possibility of attacks, and merely changing from Drupal to WordPress ensures the Drupal hacks of the past can’t come back.
Fortunately, no site visitors or registered members were impacted.
Publetariat’s hosting company places limits on server activity, and sudden, unacceptable spikes in activity will automatically trip a safeguard system that takes the site offline. Each time an attack was launched on Publetariat the safeguard was tripped in less than five minutes, before the malicious script even finished copying itself to all the server-side folders and files.
I don’t want to bore you with all the technical mumbo-jumbo here, but following each attack I carefully studied the server activity logs to see exactly what was done and when. No legitimate user accounts were ever compromised, and no site visitors were ever exposed to copies of the hacker scripts since the first, site-wide copying step was never completed.
IMPORTANT: Your site may already have been hacked, and you just don’t know about it yet.
As a web developer I have special tools turned on in my browser at all times to alert me to web page errors, to alert me to any problems on my sites and blogs right away. Since malicious scripts tend to result in certain specific, minor page errors, I can tell that MANY sites I visit have been hacked: not just small-potatoes author sites and blogs, but some of the majors, too.
If you don’t have these special error reporting tools turned on, you’d have no way of knowing you’ve been hacked until after the damage is done, and it’s typical for the malicious scripts to be installed and left lying in wait for optimal server conditions before they launch their attacks. It can be days, or even weeks, between the time the hacker first gains access and the time the trap is sprung. When I see such an error on a site that I know has decent tech support or a tech-savvy site owner I’ll alert them, but unfortunately I’m seeing a lot of this on the sites and blogs of non-tech-savvy indie authors, too.
The only advice I can give is this:
If you’re not tech-savvy, keep offline copies of all your site/blog content, just in case you need to re-create it online following a hacker attack. I usually author my blog posts offline in MS Word anyway, then copy them to my blog, and you might consider doing the same thing.
If you ARE tech-savvy, turn on your browser’s error reporting function and pay particular attention to any error pop-ups regarding Jscript (.js) files. These are a favorite hacker vehicle for injecting and spreading malicious scripts. Periodically check the date and time stamps on the server-side files, because if anything has been copied or injected at least some of the files will have date and time stamps that don’t match the rest of your install. Back up religiously, and keep the most recent TWO backups, at the minimum. This gives you a better chance of having a clean copy in case you need to recover from an attack. Remember, there may not be any apparent symptoms of a hack until after it’s too late, so even your most recent backup, created before you became aware of a hack, may have malicious content you don’t know about.
– April L. Hamilton
Publetariat Founder & Editor in Chief
Publetariat staff are off this week in observation of Christmas. We will resume our regular posting schedule the evening of Sunday, 12/28/14. In the meantime, in what has become a holiday tradition here at Publetariat, we again reprint this contribution from Publetariat founder and Editor in Chief April L. Hamilton.
‘Twas the night before Christmas and all through my draft
Were examples of my inattention to craft
My characters all hung about without care,
In hopes that a plot point soon would be there.
My family were nestled all snug in their beds,
While visions of red herrings danced in my head.
The dog on its blanket, and the cat in my lap
Had just settled themselves for a long winter’s nap.
When on my computer there showed a blue screen!
(And if you use a PC, then you know what that means.)
Away to the cell phone I flew like a flash;
I dialed tech support and broke out in a rash.
The sales pitch that played while on hold I waited
Ensured my tech guy would be roundly berated.
That is, if he ever should come on the line.
And for this, per minute, it’s one-ninety-nine!
“Good evening,” he said, in a Punjab accent,
“I am happy to help you, and my name is Kent.”
More rapid than the Concorde was his troubleshoot,
I was back up and running, after one last reboot!
“Now Gaiman! Now, Atwood! Now, Cheever and Austen!
Salinger! O’Connor! Shakespeare and Augusten (Burroughs)!
Don’t withhold your wisdom! Upon me, bestow it!
Inspire me! Show me how best not to blow it!”
To their books I turned for some worthy advice;
I was pumped to return to my work in a trice.
So across clacking keyboard my fingers they flew,
With a speed and a passion—and no typos, too.
Hour after hour, the prose kept on flowing,
Though I had no idea where my story was going.
“But write it, I must!” I decided right then.
I resolved to see this project through to the end.
At one a.m. the second act came together,
At two I knew this book was better than ever!
My hero had purpose, my plot had no slack.
I cut my “B” story and never looked back!
I got up to make coffee at quarter to three;
Curses! My spouse left no Starbucks for me!
With instant crystals I’d have to make do.
Cripes! He used all of the half and half, too!
“I could add some Kahlua,” I told myself.
“There’s a big, honking bottle right there on the shelf.”
So I added a splash. And then a splash more.
At five, I finally came to on the floor.
With more Kahlua than coffee in the cup nearby,
An idea for the third act I wanted to try.
Werewolves! In high school! And vampires, as well!
It worked for that Meyer chick, my book’s a sure sell!
I tied up the plot in a neat little a bow,
With the arrival of aliens, and giant worms from below.
Defeated were foes of the Earth and the sky,
And thousands of townsfolk did not have to die.
With the Kahlua bottle all but drained,
I turned to do the last bit of work that remained.
To this one tradition, I was happy to bend.
Two carriage returns, all in caps: THE END.
To Facebook I sprang, to announce I was through.
From thence, on to Twitter, and MySpace too.
But lo, I exclaimed as my face met the sun,
“Twenty-four days late, my NaNoWriMo is done!”