Blog Archive: August 2019

YES — this is happening!

We're almost ready to release the NEXT version of Spin Rewriter.
And this is an especially important one!

Why? Because we're talking about Spin Rewriter 10!
The big 1-0! Spin Rewriter X, if you will!

And what better date to launch Spin Rewriter 10 than 10/10 ...... yes, that's October 10th!

Interested in promoting the launch? The JV Page is waiting for you right here...

We absolutely cannot wait to show you what we've been working on!

Counting down the days until 10/10... Woohoo! 😃

Yes — it has finally happened!

The official Spin Rewriter blog now lives inside the Spin Rewriter website, the way it always should have been.

Up until this point, the Spin Rewriter blog lived on my own personal blog at AaronSustar.com.

Sure, all relevant posts were tagged with the "Spin Rewriter" keyword for easy browsing, but still — at its core, that situation was less than ideal.

There was also another UX issue: When visitors were browsing the Spin Rewriter website and they clicked the "Blog" link in the main header, they were suddenly taken to an entirely different website.

Sure, a lot of companies are doing things this way, hosting company blogs on dedicated blogging platforms (such as WordPress) — but it's definitely not the best way of doing it.

And here at Spin Rewriter, we only want what's truly the BEST for you, our awesome users.

So, here's what we did:

• First, we set up our own custom, in-house blogging platform. That's what you're seeing right now.
• Of course we also set up the administration part of our new blogging platform, but that lives inside our other admin tools.
• We moved all 292 existing blog posts from the previous WordPress-based blog into our own blogging platform.
• We updated and re-formatted all imported posts as required. This included moving all previously uploaded images to the primary Spin Rewriter website etc.
• We created 3 new types of subpages right here on the Spin Rewriter website: Blog Home (self-explanatory), Blog Archive (e.g. when browsing posts by month) and Blog Post (when reading an individual post).
• We added "301 redirects" from all existing Spin Rewriter related blog posts on AaronSustar.com to their rightful place right here on the Spin Rewriter website. As you know, SEO is pretty dang important!
• Finally, we rolled out the new on-site Spin Rewriter blog to our live (production) servers.

And that's it! 😃

With that, all of our existing 292 blog posts about Spin Rewriter now live right here on the Spin Rewriter website, in this Blog section.

We're super SUPER excited that we've finally made this happen. Hope you like it! 😃

In early August we noticed a brute-force attack that was targeting our login form.

The attackers were targeting 6 specific Spin Rewriter accounts, and they were sending us hundreds of login attempts per minute that were coming in from a variety of different IP addresses.

These login attempts were trying what appeared to be a set of predetermined passwords (we have no way of knowing the exact passwords that were used in the attack because we always hash the passwords before storing them, like every web service should).

So, first the good news: None of the accounts were compromised. The attackers gave up after a couple of hours, after getting nowhere.

And the even better news: In light of this, we've taken another look at our login system and the code that powers it. We are extremely satisfied with how well it has done, and we've now also tweaked a few parameters to make the login system even more secure, out of an abundance of caution.

Without revealing too much (this information could help guide potential attackers in any future attacks), our login system remains truly state-of-the-art, following all modern security standards, now also including rate-limiting after a set number of failed login attempts in a certain time frame, and so on.

So you can rest assured that your Spin Rewriter account (and all of your articles and other information inside of it) is safe and waiting for you — and you only. 😃