VisualsSpeak blog

Nuke that website!

It all started with a colleague saying she got a strange notice when she visited our VisualsSpeak website. Then she called her web guy, who came and cleaned something off her computer. That’s how the summer started. I upgraded the software on the backend and did everything I knew how to do.

Have you noticed how vague this is? So now you know how it has felt.

While I was totally occupied with learning how to communicate over technology across cultures, Google sends me an email. Is it real? Or is it another phishing scheme? It sounded pretty dire:

We recently discovered that some of your pages can cause users to be
infected with malicious software. We have begun showing a warning page
to users who visit these pages by clicking a search result on Google.com.

and it goes on

If your site was compromised, it’s important to not only remove the
malicious (and usually hidden) content from your pages, but to also
identify and fix the vulnerability. We suggest contacting your hosting
provider if you are unsure of how to proceed

Hidden content on a Wordpress site. Great. I know there is a database involved somewhere? So into the other side of the tech world. A place where they speak in tongues and letters. Since Google suggested contacting our host, we sent an email off to Bluehost. Their response?

The content of your site is your responsibility. We do not provide support for coding, development, or design. If your site has been hacked, you will need to consult a developer to resolve the issue.

Any hints? What kind of developer? Developer of what? We have no context. What do you type into Google to find such a person? What do you ask them for?

We are getting emails from our customers and collegues. Some people can get on the site, others are getting dire warnings about their computers being destroyed by our site. Not so good for PR.

Back to Bluehost. Do they know any developers? Yes, they refer us to edynamo.com Let’s just say they took our money and after 18 days have done nothing. Not happy.

Desperate acts come from not knowing what else to do.

Today we are just ripping down the whole site. Having Bluehost remove it completely from their servers.  It will take down all our email and everything else. And we’ll start over.  Then we’ll have to convince Google we have it taken care of so they remove the dire warnings from our site.

Biggest lessons?

• people who are not experts in what you do don’t know the language you speak
• search is great, but useless if you don’t know what to enter
• there are a lot of different kind of developers, I still can’t tell them apart
• there is a huge gulf between the tech side and the user side of technology
• being a fairly savvy user means nothing when there is another kind of problem
• never take a customers money if you can’t deliver (this one is a review  for edynamo.com - NOT recommended)
• we should try to meet people who understand how to fix viruses, malware, trojans, worms etc

How do customers talk about the problems they are trying to solve?

Never once during this period did I say I was concerned about a malware injection attack. If that is even what I should have been concerned about. And when I googled malware, I got sites on how to remove it from my computer not my website. I never figured out what would get the results I needed. I did get pages of what I think were code? With instructions that made no sense at all to me.

What did I say? At least the things that are fit for print:

• My site is a mess and I don’t know why.
• Malware, what do I do?
• What do I do with a broken blog?
• Help, I’m infecting my customers!

Important

If you have visited our VisualsSpeak website this summer and do not have up to date virus software installed on your computer, you should run some kind of checker/detector program. I’d like to be able to guide you to resources, but honestly I still don’t understand this whole thing. Perhaps someone who does will leave some resouces in the comments?

Brandon Hall Research’s Innovations in Learning conference will take place September 25 and 26, 2008, at the Fairmont San Jose, in San Jose, California, with a pre-conference day of workshops planned for Wednesday, September 24.

I will be facilitating a session, Using Visuals to Unlock Strategic Processes

In this experiential session we are going to tap into strategic problem-solving capabilities quickly and deeply. We’ll be using photographs as a way to unlock a group’s ability for innovation and creativity. This process is a way to bridge the verbal and visual, the tactical and strategic, and with the added benefit of building stronger teams. This is a low-tech process for getting high-tech results.

A number of my colleagues are facilitating pre-conference workshops.

Tom Crawford, the CEO of Vizthink, is facilitating a pre-conference session. Visualization for Learning: Approaches, Tools, and Applications to Improve Effectiveness. Here is a podcast with an interview I did with Tom.

During this one day workshop, we’ll explore what visualization approaches exist, how they can be applied, and what tools can be used to assist in the process. Visualization approaches can be used to improve the entire learning development process. Regardless of your specific development approach, visualization techniques can provide dramatic improvements to your analysis, design, development, implementation, and even evaluation processes. During this session, we’ll explore a variety of techniques that can be applied to each step of the development process. We’ll even put several of them to the test both on paper and online. No drawing skills are required.

Michele Martin from The Bamboo Project is also doing a pre-conference session with Janet Cleary, Social Media Jumpstart. Here is a podcast with an interview with Michele.

This pre-conference workshop is for those who want to maximize their conference experience by exploring the social Web before the conference begins. The workshop will introduce you to social media like blogs, social network sites, wikis, social bookmarking, photo sharing, Voice over IP, virtual worlds, instant messaging, videosharing, microblogging, etc. Delegates will be exposed to applications like WordPress, Facebook, Ning, wikis, delicious, SlideShare, Flickr, Skype,SecondLife, YouTube, Twitter, etc. Each media will be presented Pecha Kucha style followed by a brief, hands-on trial or demonstration. You’ll leave with the skills to explore each of these social media applications on your own while at the conference and later, at your workplace.

Gary Woodill and Anya Wood are doing a pre-conference workshop, Emerging Learning Technologies in Healthcare Training. Here is a podcast interview with Gary.

The use of technology in healthcare education has increased dramatically over the last decade, and none too soon. Because of rapid change, providing meaningful access to learning opportunities for both practitioners and the general public has become increasingly important. With the advent of the Internet the general public has become more knowledgeable and, in turn, demands access to healthcare education in a variety of different formats. Practitioners continue to experience time constraints and a need to relate training to practical, real-world experience, making accessibility and application to real-life top priorities.

I presented at this conference last year, and it was great. Not only were the sessions high quality, but the other participants were also very engaging. Here are posts I wrote about sessions last year:

• What is innovation in learning? This was the session I did.
  
• OilSim: Learning to explore for oil in an hour This session was facilitated by Olavur Ellefson who will be doing another session this year.
• Five Worlds of Learning 2.0 This session was facilitated by Lance Dublin, he is one of the keynotes this year.

I hope you will consider joining us in San Jose!