Malware: All Clear

I have removed the script from the last nooks and crannies, Google has lifted the malware warning. Nevertheless probably time to burn some bridges.

A Malware Warning and Some Consequences

A couple of hours ago I wanted to check something on my old site and got a malware warning from Google. Someone had hacked the site and put some sort of script (no idea what exactly it was supposed to do) on every page. I reuploaded the site and changed the FTP password, so there shouldn’t be any more problems. I asked for a review, but it was a bit premature, I had overlooked some quaint subfolders. In the meantime I hope I’ve really reuploaded, or deleted, everything that was infected, but it might take some time for the warning to go away.

The annoying thing is that most of my newer sites still link back to the old one, especially Download Central. Most of the game concept links went back to the old site, and all of the flags, as far as they were linked at all. I have now un-linked the flags and started building an index of game concepts right on Download Central. So far, it has eighteen entries. There are more than a hundred game concepts, so it may take a while till it is complete, but most of the links back to the old site should already be eliminated.

In any case: Download Central itself was never affected, nor any downloads, no matter where they are hosted. It was merely a script on the HTML pages of Astoria, nothing more.

1,500 downloads on Download Central, some future plans

Today I uploaded Der Clou! for Amiga/AGA (the DOS version will follow in the next days), and with that, there are now 1,500 downloads on Download Central. It took some time, in June alone I uploaded 200 files, now it took me three months and two weeks to upload a hundred. Here’s some comment on that and my plans for the next future.

Astoria is encountering technical problems

The chello server is acting up again. The whole site is throwing 404 errors, I can’t access it with FTP either. This could take a couple of days, about a year ago there was a very similar situation. I’ll work on something else in the meantime and keep you updated.

Update: An hour later, everything is working again. Maybe it was just a hiccup.

Update II: I notice that the number of visitors was significantly lower in the last two days, probably due to downtimes, I just hadn’t noticed before. This might continue a few days, then things will certainly go back to normal.

Updates on Astoria

This longish post is just a digest of the Astoria newsfeed of the last week, if you’re already subscribed to that, don’t bother with it.

What’s popular on Astoria

About a week ago I finally implemented a stat method on Astoria that actually works (I don’t have access to the logs there). It’s a bit early to say much, but the top three are quite clear:

1. Strip poker games
2. Post-apocalyptic games
3. Games for 16-bit Windows

Graphic headers for The Orchard

After discovering FlamingText and blogging about it (I described it in my previous post) I simply had to try it out somehow. The best candidate for a header makeover turned out to be The Orchard, my old Macintosh site that hasn’t received all that many updates since April 2004. So I gave each page a graphic header (no flaming text of course, not even animated), checked all the links, removed the obsolete buttons, and brushed up the homepage a bit.

I hardly ever mess around with Macs any more. It was mainly two years of my life, from spring 2003 to spring 2005, that I was really interested. That was the time I built up my collection and took screenshots of all the Macintosh games you can download from Astoria. In December 2007 I activated some of my Macs again, but it didn’t last very long. Though the whole Macintosh culture has always fascinated me, I never got along with the machines themselves very well. I know they are supposed to be easier to use, but for me they never were. For me, they were always awfully complicated.

I’ll probably update the Orchard a bit more regularly now. There is stuff that still needs to be done, the link list isn’t particularly useful as it is now. A lot of this stuff is old, it makes more sense now to tell the story instead of just listing a few links. I might change the graphic headers again as well, I don’t know if I’ve really picked the best. But I sure do like the idea of graphic headers as such, it’s what’s going to motivate me to start working on Astoria again.

Oldest archived version of my old site

The oldest fairly complete version of my old site on the Wayback Machine is from February 2002. The games section was already “the fastest changing and growing” one, but it had only ten pages and covered less than twenty games. Meanwhile, all my sites combined cover more than 2,000 games. Strange thought, somehow.

I have now 250MB webspace on chello

UPC (the owners of chello) have increased customer webspace from 10 resp. 20MB to a cool 250MB. The cramped conditions were not the only reason I mostly moved away from there (others are the lack of any form of statistics and, less important, the lack of SSI support), but the most important. With the new amount of space I’m sure to do something with my old site again.

Alphabetic master list

That went a lot faster than I thought. The second half of the alphabet took me less than two hours, and the alphabetic list is now truly a master list containing more or less every game I have something about, somewhere. It has 1861 entries.

There still remains a lot of work to do. One side effect of having such a long list of games is that there are more and more with identical or very similar names. When I have three games named Codebreaker (with slight variations in capitalization, written in one or two words) that are all Mastermind implementations, then it’s easy to make just one entry that redirects to the Mastermind page. But other homonym games, like Blox and Bubbles, have absolutely nothing in common. I think I’ll take a page out of Wikipedia’s book and make disambiguation pages in these cases, so far I simply have separate entries.

So it’s not over yet, but at least there’s now one place where (nearly) all the games are listed.