Some site updates
So… a couple of weeks back we started a move to a new ad network in an attempt to cut down on the ads. During this time a few things were discovered and a lot of stuff broke.
The first thing that broke was our ad network started caching data for us – it’s something we did with Cloudflare, reduces server load, standard content distribution network stuff. Well, something between Ezoic, Cloudflare, and SiteGround broke and we started serving up stale ol’ data and sometimes really really odd stuff. Some of you will see a Disqus comment box, and some will see a weird old WordPress comment box.
If you’re seeing the weird old WordPress comment box, you’ve got a cached 30 day CSS that was served up and congrats, you can push a comment into our database without any validation. It doesn’t show however. You can hard clear and reload and maybe that’ll work.
The new ad network is learning Pocketables. This means sometimes it looks fine, and sometimes it looks like the early 2000’s vomited on you. I’ve been advised to not touch it for a week or so. I’m going to follow that advice.
Guest posts are going, going, gone. Moose out front should have told you. Any guest posts on this site are going away unless they added something. For a while we accepted some, but learning that things were SEO word salad by paid actors kind of ticked me off. Might have noticed we have not had any in a while. this does not mean editors/admins/writer posts are going away – just stuff tagged as guest post that now I see were obvious SEO stuff.
Bing delisted us with no reason given. After weeks worth of emailing with 2-4 day delays in response I got an email today that said the exact same thing the vague error messages said: reasons.
Reasons given? Reasons!
Bing still has scraper sites that stole our content listed and indexed so, yeah. Reasons.
I’d be fine if given reasons – I do not care about Bing other than their delisting means we lost some real traffic through DuckDuckGo which evidently is a Bing affiliate. Get delisted at Bing, get delisted at DDG. Really need to investigate that at some point but whatever.
My kiddos are out of school and yeah… busy week.
There’s not a whole lot of interesting stuff out there to report on, but as a daily blog unless I post something daily the site traffic tanks and doesn’t recover until I do. I think this is the case with a lot of sites as they’re literally posting things like “how to turn on your phone” pieces the past couple of weeks.
Seriously though, you don’t post for a day you can lose major traffic. Incentivizes making up stuff.
Got to tackle a 6yo and take on an internet slowdown… back in a while
