My heart is just sick that this happened today.
A few hours ago I was working on PPP and went to grab coffee down the street with a blogger friend of mine ~ we literally walked away from our computers for all of 12 minutes.
As we walked down the road, I noticed my good friend & blog manager Jamie called twice ~ when I answered she quickly told me Passionate Penny Pincher had been been hacked, and was showing porn whenever anyone clicked anywhere on the site.
I was sick to my stomach and at a loss as to what I could do with only my phone in my hand.
Thankfully I have an amazing team of helpers on PPP and even though I wasn't there, they immediately contacted our hosting company to close down the page, quickly began fielding questions from readers as fast as they could type, and did all they could do to fix the issue until I could race back.
All I could think when I sat down five minutes later was that I was just sick that even my own team had seen the pictures they'd seen. (Y'all, we have one of the sweetest girls on our team who I just adore and almost feel like she's my own. Thankfully her spam blocker was on and none of the pictures came through, but the thought of her or anyone on our team seeing that mess along with the sweetest PPP readers and possibly even their kids if they were nearby just made my stomach sick.)
Here's the truth behind the picture you see online that you might not really know.
I never-ever-never planned to create a blog that would have over a million folks visiting each month, and sure never thought my safe little happy corner of the internet would get hacked with porn.
So today for a moment I considered just throwing in the towel.
I took a deep breath, ate one too many cookies for dinner, polished off the container of Brandless Nutella that I'm supposed to “unbox” on Facebook Live, and folded a load of laundry or two.
For the most part people were incredibly gracious as they sent in messages letting me know exactly what they'd seen on PPP, but the few not-so-happy-readers-who-don't-know-my-heart broke my heart a wee bit, because if they knew me at all they'd know I was more sick than they were about the whole mess.
(I mean really ~ there are days we'd love to share Victoria's Secret bra deals but I don't want to send you to the site because I think it's a wee bit too risqué ~ so this just about did me in today!)
Thankfully in almost nine years of blogging I've only had something like this happen one other time (thank heavens!), but things do happen sometimes on the internet that are simply beyond our control. Thanks for taking the time to keep up with PPP, for supporting PPP by clicking on and using our affiliate links, and for being my very greatest cheerleaders each day.
I'm so crazy thankful for you I can hardly stand it ~ I know there are precisely 500 million other blogs you could choose to visit each day. So the fact that you hang out here every once in awhile means more than you could ever know, and you're just a crazy gift to me each day.
Please know I'm so very sorry if you happened to see anything you should have missed ~ and that we're constantly watching to make sure that things like this don't happen.
Now, go watch some March Madness basketball, take a peek at this awesome Lowe's coupon ($50 off? Yes, please!), check out the HUGE list of Walmart deals this week, and don't miss this Sam's Club FREE MEMBERSHIP Groupon or crazy fun deal on Dick's Sporting Goods Polos & Pullovers too.
(And don't miss this Jane blouse tank deal too~ I just ordered it in ivory to wear under sweaters this Spring!)
Thank you again for being part of the PPP community. You're the one reason I didn't just quit it all today, and I sure do appreciate you!
Hugs from this side of the screen,
Laurie
P.S. Are you keeping up with our More Money in March Challenge? Here's my one HUGE HUGE HUGE TIP TODAY~ I promise it's a game changer and will save you SO MUCH MONEY if you'll commit for the rest of this month to this!
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