Kind of a long story… so if you’re not interested, you can still access the original website at,

thebackpackersunion.com

For those who are interested, here’s the abbreviated version of the story;

In conjunction with the movie, backpackersunion.com was originally intended to be developed into a website I conceptualized years ago.  Unfortunately, the technology and funding was not inline with the idea.  I had a breakthrough idea back in January of this year that allowed me to begin development, and for the past 5 months I have raced forward putting post-production on the film temporarily on hold while the site was developed at the domain backpackersjournal.com (I used a different domain because I didn’t want to break backpackersunion.com, even though that was the originally intended name)

Disaster struck.  Three days before I planned to launch backpackersjournal.com to test users around the world, I updated my servers to speed up international connections and allow for more users at one time.  The changes triggered a malicious spam file that was uploaded to my website one year ago, which was a result of being on a cheap shared web hosting plan.  At the time, my web host told me they fixed the server attack with backup copies of all my websites.  They were wrong, and royally F*cked me.

So after an almost mental break down, I’ve dusted myself off and started to reconstruct all websites with a pretty awesome and advanced, although expensive, web host.

Because the website would have to be entirely rebuilt to make sure the hacker exploit was not transferred over, I decided to rebuild with the originally intended name, “BackpackersUnion.com”.

So, over the next few weeks you will see this site undergo some changes, and eventually see the the original contact copied over from the original site with some fancy improved features.

Extremely exciting things to come!  Thanks for staying tuned!