Like a lot of busy companies, I have very little time to spend keeping up my own website. Shameful I know but the reality is that paid work comes first. So I was very surprised when Jon Carlos (aka @billywizz) alerted me to the fact that every page on my site was suddenly throwing the following exception:

Content controls have to be top-level controls in a content page or a nested master page that references a master page

I went on to the server for a look but I knew that nothing had been changed on the site in ages (including the blog! Oops). A quick Google search brought up the solution in the our.umbraco.org forum here:

http://our.umbraco.org/forum/getting-started/installing-umbraco/1444-Content-controls-have-to-be-top-level-controls-in-a-content-page-or-a-nested-master-page-that-references-a-master-page

I had a quick look at my default.aspx and it did indeed have a bunch of script inserted there that was breaking the whole site. Phew! There were also a few files in the root directory, most of them Russian, which I removed, along with the offending code. Et voila, I'm back up and running. As advised in the forum, I've changed all of the access passwords to my server.

Of course, I shouldn't have had to rely on Jon to tell me my site was down, so I've also added ELMAH exception logging and notification to my todo list for my own site. I always do this for my clients, now I need to do it for myself!