Back on blogger

Hi everyone. On Wednesday as we traveled back from Marquard, I received a Whatsapp from Penny (Snap That blog) saying when she logs onto my blog, she's redirected to a strange domain. I logged on in the car and also arrived at this weird site called "pftails.com"  Then Gattina from Writers Cramps e-mailed me and said she'd also been redirected to this site. Later Sandra from Madsnapper said she'd visited my blog and was redirected to this strange site! 

Gattina's husband, Mr G sent me a link of free spyware to clean up my computer. Penny sent me encouraging texts via Whatsapp and said she'd pray that my blog issue would be resolved.  My son, Angus logged onto my notebook via Teamviewer and cleaned up as far as he could. However, he's not au fait with blogger and couldn't actually understand what my problem was. I phoned the technicians from my previous server company, Ntelekom, and spoke to Gerry, who'd resolved a blog issue for me before. He couldn't shed any light on my present problem and said I'd probably been hacked. 

Eeek, this is exactly what I was concerned about.

Meanwhile, via e-mail, Sandra suggested I go to Blogger help to the left of the post page and click on the forums page. She said I could state my problem there and someone was sure to have dealt with a similar issue or perhaps an expert would see my query and be able to help. I did this last thing, on Thursday night and turned off my laptop.

On Friday morning I logged onto the forum (even though I'd tried to log onto my blog post, I was still being redirected to "piftails.com" and immediately saw that there was a reply to my query. The expert said I had to remove a certain side bar widget as this was causing a virus on my blog and ultimately denying me and readers access to my blog. He explained how to remove the widget which I did and voila! My blog was up and running again. 

Thank you to every one of my dear friends who edified, supported and advised me while my blog was unattainable!

This morning as the post is aired, Grant and I will be taking part in a 5km walk in the area. I hope to take photos and post about this afterwards. I walk fair distances and fairly regularly (read three-five times a day with the dogs!) but Grant hasn't done any form of exercise since we lived in Mwadui, Tanzania in 2014. This is a weekly walk and I believe that we're going to take part every time ! 

HAPPY CHRISTMAS !