scriptygoddess

I was able to stop by the Wordpress meetup here in Utah and finally got to meet The Matt! After “knowing” him online for many years. (By the way, it probably goes without saying - but Matt is a very cool guy. It was really nice talking to him, and I really liked listening to his thoughts, ideas, and plans for Wordpress. As introverted as I am, and as difficult as it was to *get out of the house* LOL - I’m really glad I got up there to meet him) In talking to him, he suggested I really needed to get Scripty into some current social networking trends - like Digg - Yeah, I know. This site, as clearly apparent from the default template, has sadly been victim to my ever expanding freelance work. But with the snow storm that rolled through here, and nothing else to do this morning - I finally got DiggBadger installed. So now my posts can be dugg if you feel so inclined…

A note to anyone brave enough to come here from Google: Scriptygoddess never has (and never will) distribute malware. I honestly have no idea where they got that idea from, unless this is their retribution for me pissing about their business practices previously.

All paid links have been removed from this site for some time now. The only ad on this site besides Google’s own adsense (which I make crap from by the way and will now probably just remove entirely) (Google’s ads have now been removed. If I’m not making money on this site, then neither will they) is an ad for the hosting company I personally use and have been recommending to people because I think they’re a good hosting company. (HostICan (now called “HostISuck” in my house) ad has been removed. I’ll probably make a post on them too soon) I have NEVER distributed malware. Never. Not once. So where they got that idea from is completely fabricated and a total lie.

You should know that I make NO money off this site now. It is purely a public service and information personal storage house.

I have asked for a reconsideration from Google, and they say that may take some time. (as in several weeks) Heh. I would greatly appreciate anyone’s/everyone’s help in this matter. Please make a post on your site that Scriptygoddess is alive and well and DOES NOT DISTRIBUTE MALWARE, despite the lie that Google tells.

update: So after further investigation, it seems my site had been hacked and in such a way that made it hard for me to even notice. A hacker was able to add a line of code to one of my template files and from the way it was written it seemed it wouldn’t even have shown up in the html unless you were specifically coming from Google. Google is supposedly in a war against spammers and hackers, and in their fight I guess they don’t mind punishing some victims as well. (How noble of them.) =puke=

The strange thing is that I am running the latest version of Wordpress, I am (obviously) not even using a customized template, I am using VERY FEW plugins… so now I’m left wondering what the deal is with Wordpress - or the few plugins I have running, that would allow the hack to go through. I’ve been searching around online to try and find more information, but I’m not getting anything back specific. (What I HAVE seen on the forums seems like a lot of defensiveness to me. People saying they have some kind of XSS hack on their site, and then other people trying to put the blame elsewhere) I’ve sent a few emails to a few Wordpress people - but haven’t heard back. This is distressing to say the least. I love Wordpress, but if it means having my site get hacked without my even knowing it and then getting banned and labeled by Google as a malware distributor… I don’t know…

Update: 12/18/07 - FINALLY! Google has lifted the “malware” curse on Scriptygoddess. Guess that was my belated Hanukkah present. Good thing too - because I’ve been very busy the last few weeks - have a post due probably after the holidays about a cool site I did using Wordpress - all kinds of custom templates for posts and pages, and basically stretching Wordpress’s CMS ability. As well - I did a very cool site using CubeCart and I have a few things I learned from that experience to post about. Stay tuned…

(oh, also, - seems I got a PR push as well - from a 3 to a 5. Of course, I used to sit comfortably at a PR6 - but I’ll take what I can get. LOL!)

Trying to do some clean up here - there are files on this site still from my movable type days. So going to do a fresh start and removing a lot. The design will probably end up being the boring default for awhile once I’m done… hopefully will get the chance to get a real design up, but at the moment, as work has gotten busier and busier for me, this site is increasingly becoming the example of the saying: “the cobbler’s children have no shoes”.

Updated 11/8/07: Adding a few plugins, etc. here and there. I really am having trouble deciding on where I want the design to go on this site. No matter what I come up with, I’m not happy. LOL! In any case, in the meantime, I’ve added the ability for users to register on the site, so if you tend to leave a lot of comments (*cough*Ajnabiz*cough*) now you don’t have to complain to me about entering your user info each time.

That feature has been removed. If you comment here a lot let me know and I’ll create an account for you. Otherwise, until Wordpress has an ability to approve users before allowing them to register on the site, I’m not adding this back in. I know that users who register can’t do anything but edit their own profile, but for some reason, the register/login form is becoming of interest to spammers.

So I’ve seen a few blogs talking about how Google is now punishing sites that sell link advertising, by downranking their sites. I’ve now seen this firsthand on scriptygoddess. It used to have a page-rank of 6 - and now it is a pagerank 43. I’ve seen other sites (good sites with good content) get downranked.

I know I’m probably stating the obvious - but I think its outrageous that Google wants to hurt sites that have good, valueable content, just because they’d like to make some cash for their work. What exactly is “wrong”/”bad” by my making some money for my effort? For a long time I had scriptygoddess remain up, and posted information I had learned - out of the goodness of my heart. But when I started working for myself to help make ends meet - it made sense to put up advertising on the site to help that end as well. I tried to be clear about which links are sponsored links. While it would have been lucrative to use those “inline” advertising links (where they link text right in your own post to advertisements) I didn’t go that route because I felt it gave a bad user experience. Some links were intentional - and others were advertising and how could you tell the difference without mousing over or clicking on it? Annoying.

The biggest joke of all this, is of course, Google isn’t punishing sites that ONLY contain GOOGLE advertising (which, by the way, pay the least/worst of any advertising I’ve contracted with)

On the whole, and up until now, I thought Google’s been a pretty cool company but this move is just plain bad. Back before the dot-com bust - many sites were designed to draw revenue strictly from advertising. The business models didn’t work out quite right - but I think I’ve been seeing a revitalization to that idea - the right advertising can support a website. And what is Google trying to do? Completely smush it and stop progression.

And I think it will eventually come back to bite them. I’ve found recently that when doing searches strictly through Google, I’ve found myself going back through their pages a lot more than I used to - and in some cases never finding what I had needed to. So by downranking sites with valuable information, they’ve pushed them further back in the list of pages, and maybe in some cases, pushing some sites so far back that you’d never find them *making their own search engine not as useful as before*.

I hope they re-think this idea.

Edited to add: The more I think about this, and the more I read, the more I have to laugh. Google is playing “link-police” from what I understand because their complaint is that selling links puts less-relevant sites up on top when you do searches - and that you’re not allowed to “buy” that position. Right. That’s why when I do searches on Google, top of the page, and all along the side are links for sites that BOUGHT that position. So really what they’re saying is it’s only ok when you’re paying GOOGLE. *no one else should be making money* except for them. I think it’s definitely time to change my default search engine!

Something strange happened to my email address (the one that receives comment notifications from this site, of course) - it just sort of disappeared off the server. I’ve set it up again, so everything should be fine now - but if you’ve tried to contact me and I haven’t responded, or if you left a comment on this site and it seemed like it was stuck in moderation forever, I apologize. Everything’s fixed now. (And here I thought I wasn’t getting any email because no one loved me) ;P

Almost done with a custom wordpress theme design for Christine and Elaine for their joint venture: Fresh Photography. Still putting a few finishing touches on it - but I’d say it’s 99% done. (There may also be a few pages still with placeholder text. Heh) Christine’s also working on finishing up the portfolio section. She’s using Slide Show Pro for those flash slideshow animations (she’ll be putting up one for each section in the portfolio). I really like those.

Fresh Photography is the site I’m using that script snippet from ClioWeb for, and that trick I had to do with multiple “home pages” (What Wordpress thinks is the “home” page is actually the “artwork” page. There’s actually two wordpress installs for it. I’m sure there was probably a way to use a separate categories for the “blog” posts - and another category for her “photo” posts - but this seemed simpler and gave her more flexibility.

You’ll also notice many of the photos in the artwork section are available for purchase. For that I used a trick I had previously posted to get an order form to work using Wordpress’ custom fields.

=blows the dust off=
Uhm… Hi. Yeah, it’s been awhile. Life has been great. Family is doing great. I’ve started working again (from home) woo hoo! And as such, there’s a few things I’ve wanted to post here. Little tid bits of things. No big scripts at the moment. So, just upgrading to the latest WP, using a theme by andreasviklund.com - but I need to update the header photo. And then I’ll be posting again, here and there.

Also - in the interest of being able to stay at home for as long as possible - I’ll be adding GoogleAdSense to the site. (There’s a few posts with ads on them already). I’ve held off doing the ad thing for a long time… but the time has come to sell out survive. See you soon…

(Speaking of blowing off the dust… over 400,000 spam comments that were stuck in moderation were deleted) LOL! Comments will be coming back online shortly…

Just wanted to come on here and let you know that an article you first saw here (What does full server path mean) is being reproduced (with my permission) in Kevin Airgid’s book: Web Designers Success Guide.

Ok, I lied. That wasn’t the last “personal-related” post.

In many many respects, life is good - definitely better than before. As someone told us recently (and I completely agree) we’re living in a secret paradise. Weather is great. Scenery is great. Lots of kid-friendly/family-friendly stuff here. Lots of outdoor activities. BUT (there’s always a but) don’t let anyone kid you - being a stay-at-home-mom in MANY ways is more work than GOING to work was. And then to make it all even more interesting (and busy, and overworked, and…), are the freelance gigs I’m trying to keep up with in the evenings and any spare time I have.

So, fortunately or unfortunately, I don’t see me getting more time any time soon. I’m not taking down the site or anything - but it will probably be months before I’m able to really start posting on here again. In many ways this is frustrating - because there are a lot of cool things going on with WordPress right now - and I would really like to be a part of it. But right now, there are more important things going on with my life and I’ll just have to try and catch up with blog-software-stuff at a later time.

Being that the last post I made was a couple of months ago - it’s pretty obvious I’m on a hiatus. So, I guess you can consider this the official word on that.

So - now it’s safe to discuss all this - as anyone who I know who might stumble on this blog already knows. This, I promise, will be the last “personal” related post, and once I pick up again, we’ll go back to our regularly scheduled scripting.

SO - here’s what’s going on in my (personal) life in a nutshell…
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