Virus Developer Recruiting Emergency Averted

I just got a shock to discover that a link on my old website was sending people to a bizarre dating search engine. I felt, by turns, murderous, stupid, panic-stricken; I harboured extreme revenge fantasies and wanted to do serious harm. All in the space of just this morning. A year or two back I decided against renewing my domain name - lessbrilliant.co.uk. I was at a point where I felt like I couldn't justify the miniscule amount it cost to reregister. The website was a hobby and a learning curve and an opportunity to fawn over my favourite music; all good reasons, I know, but when the renewal came up I thought I would pack it in. Then, a couple of months later, I had a moment of regret, like you do, and I attempted to buy the domain name again in order to keep things ticking over. Blow me if someone hadn't bought it already. The name means nothing to anyone except me! What does "lessbrilliant" mean? It doesn't give anyone an idea about anything in particular, so why on earth would anyone want to purloin it? As innocent as the person was at the other end of a couple of vitriolic e-mails - with an offer of whoever-knows-how-much to release it - I know that unscrupulous people have methods of keeping an eye on domain names which have been abandoned and buying them up so that they can either: 1) Act vaguely innocent and not a little bolshy and offer to sell your domain name back to you for extortionate and unnecessary administrative fees, 2) Rely on lazy mugs like me to leave their website live and have any passersby - however few there may be - redirected to some bizarre dating search engine, 3) Some other demented reasons I can hardly be bothered to think about. It was a little window into the world of virus developers, I feel. To seek revenge on society is perhaps one of the unearthly reasons why virus developers exist - and momentarily I wanted to join their ranks and pour all my wormy, trojanic, buggy, virusy scorn on whoever had picked up my innocent domain name. You'll be disappointed to know that instead I calmly broke into a cold sweat, fumbled around for passwords and usernames, logged onto my generic webspace and re-edited all (I hope) the relevant webpages. The good things I gleaned were: Once again installing and using HTML Kit, surely the best and most exhaustive HTML editor, evah! And finally finding a use for Portable FileZilla, FTP client extraordinaire. Like any language, without continued use the different brain areas have partially atrophied, but I was able to dredge up enough know-how to put right what was wrong. You live and learn and learn and learn...