Category Archives: General

Minimizing debt into 2018

It’s coming to the end of another year and time to write a brief wrap-up post.

I think I have achieved a lot this year:

I finally got my Mazda MX5 through another MOT after a lot of hard work and that’s still ongoing.
I’ve been able to maintain a loving relationship which I am proud of, and through that, also made some new friends.
I’ve progressed in my job although that’s been a struggle, having to be put through potential redundancy early in the year.
My freelance work is still progressing, I tend to allow work to flow in via word of mouth so not to stretch myself but do pursue some leads when I can (sneaky feelers!)

I am attempting to reduce the amount of debt in my name. A while after buying my house (Keep calm, just bought a house) I required some additional money to buy furniture and decorate, and to also pay off some credit cards (consolidating debt). I immediately closed a credit card account thereafter. Credit cards are bad ideas. I am now left with one credit card and have just reduced the credit card limit to £1500 after they had increased it to £2900! I don’t want that temptation. If I don’t have the money, I can’t pay for something. Simple as. My loan will be near enough paid up at the end of 2018, so I’ll be able to close that too.

Considering I am only 27 I think I have done quite well. I have big dreams and passions but sometimes I have to look back and see how far I have already come.

I wish everyone a good new year, and remember to set achievable targets that you can reach!

Bad Flavors!

With flavors out much warning from Flavors.me, my original non blog site is defunct!

Looking at the Twitter feed it looks like many people did not receive an email to see the site was shut down, so I have had to make adjustments.

My www.tobywhite.de domain now permanently redirects to /blog (this site). I have added a Contact form also. This is mainly due to me being lazy and not wanting to spend time adding a landing page; I cheated in the end anyway, adding the previous site in an iframe rather than paying for the Flavors Premium subscription to add a domain etc.

Let me know if there is anything else you want to see here specifically?

My blog got hacked but now I’m back!

My site recently got hacked. Unfortunately, at the time, I didn’t have any real-time alerts so my only way of finding out was from a Google email notification as I had registered with Google Webmasters (recommend you do the same).

I had found that the hackers had accessed my WordPress blog and database and added redirects to another site involved with essay writing – go figure! It makes absolutely no sense and from what I could see was doing nothing other than redirecting to another site.

Luckily, I keep full directory backups, and database backups, every time I do a full version update of WordPress and the last backup I had was December ’16. I had only posted one additional post and made some minor changes since then (I’ve been slacking).

Everything would have been relatively straight forward had phpMyAdmin displayed a logical error message when trying to import an oversized SQL file (70+Mb). After much deliberation I decided to set up a local install using a MAMP stack, courtesy of Bitnami, to try and work out why the database wasn’t importing. Voila, on my test site everything imported without any problems.

I then took to HostGator who actually have a page explaining what to do with oversized databases (here) and a section called Your import file is too large! under common issues! So I got on their webchat and 15 minutes later they had imported the database successfully back in situe. Unfortunately unless I pay more for hosting (at the minute I’ve an account on the Whitecherry / Frantik reseller package) I will need to get in touch directly every time I want to import a database over 50Mb.

I’d like to do a shoutout to WPBeginner and their following page – http://www.wpbeginner.com/beginners-guide/beginners-guide-how-to-restore-wordpress-from-backup/ – it’s a little outdated but the principles remain the same.