…and I’ve already asked to be the Poster Girl, if you will, for that very idea. I enrolled in the Starting with Marketing course not knowing really what I was in for, all I knew was that I was willing to take action. Dean, and other mentors I follow talk about that a lot. You can read up and study the success of others all day long, but if you take no action. You’ll stay exactly where you started….at zero.

But Dean, in his youthful, ethusiastic, and get-to-the-point style of honesty took the idea of ‘action’ a step further. He said during the first webinar that there will be failure. And, that how we handle said inevitable failure and whether we learn and move forward from it was completely up to us.

Then he said the best attitude that we can have when facing the fact of failure during this journey is to get it done and get it past us. He calls it Failing Forward Fast. For some reason, the idea I get in my head when he says that is one of me heading toward the end of a cliff at a dead run. So I’ll either stop and not go anywhere again, stop too late and slide off the end anway, or take a leap!

So failure is where I was at last week and I guess I didn’t have enough because I’m back at it this week! BRING IT!

I’m hoping that by the time I get this posted the problem will be resolved, but Team Hansberger has been plagued with technical issues with this blog, and more recently my husband Mark’s new blog. First the issue with permalinks. I struggled through it and got a fix. NOTE TO SELF: Always HOST ON LINUX! I didn’t know til it was too late.

After the permalinks solve, everything was working great on this and Mark’s new blog, one that thanks to the Starting With Marketing Academy I was able to install in as little as 20 minutes. He was really impressed with all I had been learning and doing since starting SWM and as a budding photographer wanted to get in on the game. No problem Honey! You are now a Bloggerographer!

I installed it and he played around a bit learning how to install plugins and add pictures. We had a blast working on it together, well into the night. When we turned in, all was well. When we woke up, not so much.

The page header had a bunch of funky text and we couldn’t get into the Wordpress Admin page. Long story short (and after 2 days of trying to work it out), I had to reinstall his blog (at the time I didn’t know any other way…after all I’ve been doing this wordpress thing for a grand total of 3 weeks!).

After the reinstall, we chalked it up to a bad plugin that he installed, and again cheerfully played around with our new toy and went to sleep that night Happy Bloggers. Til this morning when I’m at work and Mark emails and says….It’s BAA-ack! Not only on his blog but now MINE.

The best thing about Failing Forward Fast is that you learn A LOT that you never expected/wanted to learn in a very short amount of time. I have learned a lot.

When Mark’s blog broke, I closed my eyes and reinstalled. Since then I’ve figured out a few tricks and learned how to read what Wordpress was really trying to tell me in the error code. Apparently there is a thing called a Malicious IFrame code that gets into your blog through FTP (more on this later) and adds a type of redirect to the end of any of your wordpress files that have a title containing index (like index.php), or default (like default-filters.php). What this did to us is add that text I mentioned to the header of your blog, keeps you from getting into the admin page and takes the blog down.

Ouch. My head hurts from having to think and speak in such technical terms.

So Fail Forward Fast to this moment in time where I am operating on a TON of faith right now. I’m writing this blog post BEFORE the problem is actually fixed in hopes that it will be by tonight and I’ll post this to hopefully help you not be afraid of failing as long as you get it out of the way and moving quickly.

The Fix:  The wordpress boards are the BEST. A lot of people have experienced this problem and were kind enough to note their experiences of how they were able to resolve it.

When I mentioned above that this problem is an FTP hack, it means that the bot or whatever it is got in through FTP. Unfortunately my windows-based webhost is a little loosey goosey on passwords, they default your hosting and ftp passwords to be the SAME. So your first step is to get them to change that. I’m in that battle now.

Next, clean the iframe code out of your files AND make sure your webhost does the same. Yes, they may buck you on this. Keep trying or switch. Third, install a Wordpress plugin called Antivirus (imagine that) that will go through and find files that still have the malicious iframe code and notify you so that you can fix them. It also does some other really great things.

As a recap, here’s my plan:
1. CHANGE YOUR FTP password
2. Make your webhost step up the security, don’t let them say it’s just a wordpress problem.
3. clean your files (scanning any pc that connects via FTP to your host is a MUST also)
4. install the Antivirus plugin.
5. Post about your VICTORY and as always, JUST KEEP SWIMMING!

Even if you don’t have any problems, I highly recommend installing that plugin!

Below are the links that helped me the most. My sincere hope is that I have helped you,  done enough failing forward for everyone in my Starting With Marketing group and that no one else has to be faced with such setbacks. After all we’re busy taking on the world! But if you are, that’s ok, just do it quickly and get back on track.

http://wordpress.org/support/topic/280878
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/antivirus/

Let me know your thoughts,
Tammie

Share and Enjoy:
  • Print this article!
  • Digg
  • Sphinn
  • del.icio.us
  • Facebook
  • Mixx
  • Google Bookmarks