This is kind of cool, in a Google geekish sort of way. It should be worth noting that the links displayed here are not the most viewed nor the most organically searched for pages on this site.

It was just my birthday and this year I am psyched with the gift my wife got me. It’s called a Readingpen and I hope it will assist me while reading books.

I love reading books but quite frankly I stumble quite a bit when I come across uncommonly used words and a lot of the books I’ve been reading lately seem to be filled with them. Basically, I never excelled with the English vocabulary.

For years I’ve been telling myself I should read with a dictionary but when it comes down to it I can’t really be bothered. For the number of words I have trouble with I would probably be spending more time reading the dictionary then I would the book.

Anyhow, I’ve sort of overcome this by typically skipping over the words I don’t understand and assume what the words mean based on the context of what the writers are trying to say.

I’ve basically been doing this my whole life and I am sort of getting tired of doing it. I feel I have been shortchanging myself. Also, I have come to learn that one word could change the whole context of a sentence and I’ve probably been completely missing the concepts for many points in many books that I have read over the years.

For a while now I have had my eye on the Readingpen. It’s a cool little gizmo that will allow me to scan a word and it will immediately show me the definition of it. I know that there are other electronic pocket dictionaries but for some reason this product appeals to my techno-geek nature.

Before I dive into this I want to give a public thanks to Cash Volume for pointing out the fact my site had been hacked.

A couple of weeks ago I noticed the traffic coming to this site phased out. I know I have not been the most active blogger but I did not think that was an excuse for the organic traffic to just die out.

A few months ago I had upgraded Wordpress to its most recent version. When I recently noticed the volume drop in traffic I thought that perhaps there were some coding errors with an incompatible plug-in as result from the upgrade.

When upgrading the site I did not really spend much time doing any quality control. I’ve been so busy working on other websites that actually pay the bills.

After quickly running down the list of plug-ins, I found the Cloud Tagging plug-in had failed. This failure had thus set into motion 1,000’s of unique urls that all pulled the content from my index page. Thus I now had 1,000’s of duplicate pages.

The 1,000’s of pages were a result of the keywords that were tagged in my blog posts that had their own unique URL. When this was working, the number of pages Google indexed was in the 1,000’s not 100’s which represent the true number of blog posts.

Because this site is just something to pass the time I did not want to spend hours upon hour’s hand editing all my blog posts with new tags. So I wrote a disallow function in the robots.txt file to prohibit the spiders from crawling any subdirectory that started with /tag/.

I then went into the Google Webmaster Console and asked them to remove all pages from their index that had /tag/. This seemed like the easiest thing for me to do.

Then something interesting occurred last week that completely took me by surprise.

I got an email via MyBlogLog user, Cash Volume. He had pointed out the fact many of my Adsense ads were displaying content that was not even relevant to this blog. They were displaying pharmaceutical ads.

He was kind enough to show me the ads in an image and then he went on to tell me that he peeked at my source code and there were dozens of hidden pharmaceutical links on all my pages.

After getting his emails I jumped into my WordPress theme and searched through all the code for this blogs theme. For the life of me I could not find anything.

I then found my way to the Wordpress core files and upon review I noticed that there were two files whose modified dates stood out from the rest. The files had been encrypted with some hash or something and I could only guess if those were the culprits. I had no idea.

At that point I just got fed up with the whole thing and quickly made a back up of some core files and directories and then deleted the entire site off of the server.

Once I had a clean directory I did a fresh install of WordPress and uploaded the files need to get this blog looking the same. I doubled check to see if that removed the spam links and it appears to have worked.

I hardly review live source code on my sites unless I am debugging a change made. I suppose this is something we should do on a regular basis.

As for why the traffic died I do not know for sure if it was hidden spam links or the mass duplicate content. Whatever it was, the new entries I had posted this past week have ranked very well in the SERPs for their respective keywords in quick time. This leads me to believe whatever penalty was placed on this domain has now been removed.

Burger King Whopper Freakout

If you have 7 minutes to spare you should watch this. I think Burger King takes capturing customer testimonials to the next level. Instead of asking what people thought of their product after ordering it, they captured their reactions when they were told that could not have it.

Part 2 of Avinash Kaushik presentation which he goes over several lessons he has learned over the years doing Analytics.

His first rule is the 10/90 Rule. If you had $100 to spend on a web analytics implementation, you should spend $10 on the cost of “analytics tool & professional services” and spend $90 on the required investment in “intelligent resources/analysts”.

Installing analytics reporting and reviewing those reports is not the same as analysis. You got to analyze and interpret the data. Take advantage of multivariate tools.

Ideas seem to strike at the worst possible time for me. Just as I am lying in bed watching the last show of the evening come to its conclusion and my breathing becomes shallower as I prepare to finally fall asleep.

My eyes become heavy with the glow of the television putting me into a semiconscious state. Then without warning my mind awakens to a random thought I’ve never before had. Neurons flux, blood starts to pulsate and my heart begins to beat rapidly. Immediately I open my eyes with one compulsive thought in my mind, it’s the birth of a new idea! (more…)

When they say: “You will never find anyone better than me!”
I tend to respond with, “Give me ten minutes and I will show you at least a dozen people whose work is much better than yours. The only reason we are talking now is because their work is so good, they are not for hire.” (more…)

With my wife resting up and taking it a bit easy, I have taken over as Master Chef of the ShandyKing household. This means I’ve had to come up with substantially more creative ideas than ordering takeout Indian food or heating Kraft macaroni & cheese. (more…)

While watching a movie I was struck by this quote.

Our Deepest Fear
by Marianne Williamson

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”

When it’s triple-digit temperatures I can think of nothing better than heading out to the Southern California desert to roast my ass on scorching aluminum bleachers. (more…)