Xiaxue Endures The Worst

It seems that our creative works are not safe from exploitation.

Xiaxue, a very popular Singaporean blogger, has been recently mired with hate mail, threats, and spam from readers who disagree with her entries. This weekend, she was the victim of a malicious attack from a hacker, who deleted her entire blog, hacked into her email, deleted all her messages, and then published his own version of Xiaxue's blog. Miraculously, Xiaxue was able to regain entry into her email account and her Blogger account, change her passwords, and begin rebuilding. At this point, it is unknown if she will ever retrieve all her lost posts. She did, however get a lot of publicity from Singaporean newspapers and television stations, and is enjoying a healthy surge in web traffic. Ironically, Xiaxue has emerged stronger and more popular than ever before, and the hacker is the one who ultimately wound up with egg on his face.

This is further justification that we are not safe from hacking, and Xiaxue was likely not the first case. Matt Good has been troubled with readers writing abusive comments on his site, but I don't think his site has been hacked. He has mentioned that he has had server crashes, in which he has lost months or years' worth of entries.

It just breaks my heart. You could not imagine my fury if I had lost two years' worth of writing. I would likely be shopping for a new computer since my current one would have met an "unfortunate accident". This is another nagging reason that us bloggers should get into the habit of backing up our blogs once per month. Popular bloggers, who get thousands of hits per day should consider backing up their sites more frequently, either weekly, or even daily.

Mind you, some of these bloggers are such prolific writers, that it would take a lot of legwork to manually back up a website. I should expect that someone has written an application, at least a script that would save the weblog (including individual post pages and archives) automatically. Millions of bloggers would thank the author for it.

Speaking of which, I think it's about time I back up this site as well.