The other day I realized that I sort of missed some of the more light hearted content this site used to have. When I relaunched patorjk.com, my original vision was for something a bit more focused, however, I think neglecting the humorous content took away a piece of this site’s personality. So I took a trip over to archive.org and grabbed up some of my old pages for a new section I’m calling “Miscellaneous”. It’ll basically house content that doesn’t fit into the categories of Software or Programming. Specifically, I grabbed up my old collection of funny chain letters: 1, 2, 3, and 4. I also grabbed up a funny IM conversation my friend Mike Smetak sent me when we were in high school, a neat poem about coke, and a profanity filled rant on room busters by Ping (who used to do art work for this site).

While creating this new section, I also did a little house cleaning around the site:

• The Links section was removed. I noticed this section wasn’t getting much traffic and it was slightly redundant to my Blogroll (which is basically a links section), so I decided to remove it. I think I’ll think of the Blogroll as my new links section.
• The Contact page was merged with the About page. Having a whole page for just my email address seemed kind of silly, plus it sort of cluttered up the navigation a bit.
• The VB Array Tutorial [fixed] was updated. Someone emailed me requesting that I add a section on multidimensional arrays, so I added a blurb at the end of the article that discusses them.

Google Penalty for the Color Fader

Woe is me. My Color Fader app seems to be suffering from a Google penalty. The program went from being ranked #3 on Google for the phrase “color fader” to not being ranked at all for that phrase (I checked all 68 pages). A Google penalty occurs when Google decides your page is somehow violating their terms of service. No published data is available about the kinds of penalties, but they’ve been speculated to fall into the categories of the -30 penalty (your search rank goes down by 30), the -950 penalty, and being removed from Google’s index. The program still ranks for one key phrase, so its not gone from the index, but I’ve also noticed that Google Analytics doesn’t appear to be reporting any data for the app, so for one reason or another, Google has decided it doesn’t like my color fader.

I’m kind of at a loss for why this is. I emailed the support team through their Webmasters Tools application, but I haven’t heard anything so I’m not sure what to do. Google had been bringing that page around 30 visitors a day, so it sucks that all of a sudden its facing this bizarre penalty. Luckily Yahoo and the other search engines still seem to like the app.

Edit: Woo! It appears the mysterious penalty has been lifted. I now rank again for various color fader related search terms. My guess is that the penalties are auto-generated and that to undo one someone at Google has to go look at the page and make sure everything’s cool. I probably should have been more patent (I sent my reconsideration request on the 15th), but for some reason I was thinking I was in for a long penalty. I read a couple Google penalty stories I found online of most of them revolved around people having long penalties (up to 10 months). I guess I just got lucky.

DarcFX is Not Dead

In my “Three Things to Say” post I mentioned that DarcFX.com was no longer with us, however, it apparently is not dead and was just offline for a while. In the comments to that post Syber dropped by to say “DarcFX is still around and the victim of me recently being useless with linux and ruining his entire site. All the stuff still exists though.” So it’s good to know it’s not gone, it’ll be interesting to see if anything new is in store for the site.