Trends

One of the most interesting things for me is the activity on the site. Roughly the site traffic has jumped by 600+% this month; it’s highly encouraging. I’ve added some PINGS to the WordPress blog post process, signed up for Twitter and I visit some blogs and make some constructive comments from time to time- which seems to draw more traffic than most anything. The result is more traffic- it’s good.

All but odd, Internet Explorer 6 shows to be making a come back in regards to visitors. I can’t stress enough to those visitors, they should upgrade; upgrade to Firefox. Or at least the current version of Internet Explorer.

One the more entertaining things is to see the Playstation 3 visitors. Reminding you that PS3 is a gaming console, but has the ability to surf the web. So I say a special hello to those guys. Thanks for taking the time out from gaming to visit with me.

Hosting

My switch to GoDaddy has been good. I still notice some issues from time to time, but still better than Cookiehost.

Adding WORDPRESS-cache to the site helped a lot and there was also a small issue with the WWW on the site, that might have caused some issues. Those are resolved.

Security

On the 8th of June, my site was attacked by a myriad for requests [5000+] hits in a day; all going to a unpublished/unknown page on the site; I’ve to assume it was an attack.

On June 9th Google Adsense canceled my account for suspicious activity and they’ll not provide any kind of intelligent response to the occurrence.  They seem to be very happy being obtuse to their ad publishers. Google still refuses to answer an single email with anything other than a canned response.

This spawned a recon on my part to find out who these rogue requests were coming from. The bulk of the requests we invalid and they were topping my list of Top Viewed Pages.

Just a bunch of garbage strings:

d=7Q72WNTAKBA1006

d=yIl2AUoC8zA1003

i=fY9nbbPm0G8:P3p295iA_qM:gIN9vFwOqvQ

I’ve reviewed the logs and identified the IP’s and they are now being blocked. The page views are going down.

Revenue

This is a huge disappointment here. With my account with Google Adsense suspended, I lose all revenues from that were earned. This pays for the site to operate. Previously I had earned enough to support the site and all that’s gone.

I provided all the information I had about the occurrence and they simply didn’t reply with any kind of intelligence. It was a canned response and any inquiries I make to it, I simply get another canned response. There’s no way to get a personal response from them.

I’m now with another advertiser and it’s a slow process again. I’ve to start over from the beginning. I curse Google for their customer relations tactics and practices.

Articles

Trying to get visitors involved in the posts is a trick I have yet to master. While I get plenty of visits on posts, I get no comments on my efforts. The readers [17,000+] seem to have no drive or obligation to leave comments.

I did add a plug-in for DISQUS, and this was strictly for making it easier to have visitors leave comments. I allows them to use their credentials from DISQUS, Twitter or Facebook to leave comments without having to sign up [that’s one of my drags on blogs].

While I understand this is not a requirement as a reader, as an author you would like validation, it would be nice to hear from more people from time to time; how right was I or was I completely off base.

I’m still trying to provide something Mon, Wed and Fri.