For just over a year now, I have been told by various people that some browsers and search engines were raising security issues about some of my older websites. This past weekend I finally had the time to explore this issue further, and I have found the explanation.

I have been maintaining both personal and professional websites for over twenty years now. Due to changing technologies and services, some of the javascript and PHP widgets that I wrote many years ago needed to access remote resources, such as databases, software files or PDF files that my later webhosts did not support. In particular, the Synthasite and Yola servers do not currently allow anything to be posted other than a few formats of graphics files. As I have always wanted to keep my academic papers and freeware offerings available, I was hosting these on another server and linking to them. And as these servers no longer allow PHP to be run off of their sites, many of the widgets that I wrote to record visits to my website or to offer dynamic content had to be hosted off-site.

Being naive, I didn't realize that some nefarious websites use off-site resources for malevolent purposes, and as such the cyber-security experts are understandably wary of such widgets. As a result they have had to develop automated flagging systems to warn users of such things. And unfortunately my clever workarounds for server limitations look suspicious to an automated system.

I assure you that my own website has never been used for any evil purposes, but I now understand why there were concerns raised. As I wrote in January, I have started to move all of my websites into one unified site, with a more secure and feature filled webhosting service. As part of my migration to this new webhost (located at public.drchrisbird.net), I will be rewriting as many of these widgets as possible in the coming months. Hopefully this will resolve all of these issues.

I apologize for any upset or inconvenience caused to my friends and followers.