{"id":85,"date":"2008-01-22T00:02:58","date_gmt":"2008-01-22T04:02:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/patorjk.com\/blog\/2008\/01\/22\/the-miscellaneous-section\/"},"modified":"2014-01-25T18:03:47","modified_gmt":"2014-01-25T22:03:47","slug":"the-miscellaneous-section","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/patorjk.com\/blog\/2008\/01\/22\/the-miscellaneous-section\/","title":{"rendered":"The Miscellaneous Section"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>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&#8217;s personality. So I took a trip over to <a href=\"http:\/\/archive.org\">archive.org<\/a> and grabbed up some of my old pages for a new section I&#8217;m calling &#8220;Miscellaneous&#8221;. It&#8217;ll basically house content that doesn&#8217;t fit into the categories of Software or Programming. Specifically, I grabbed up my old collection of funny chain letters: <a href=\"http:\/\/patorjk.com\/misc\/chainletters\/179waystoannoypeople.htm\">1<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/patorjk.com\/misc\/chainletters\/guysandgirls.htm\">2<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/patorjk.com\/misc\/chainletters\/myfirsttime.htm\">3<\/a>, and <a href=\"http:\/\/patorjk.com\/misc\/chainletters\/theendofallchainletters.htm\">4<\/a>. I also grabbed up a <a href=\"http:\/\/patorjk.com\/misc\/funny_im_finalf.htm\">funny IM conversation<\/a> my friend Mike Smetak sent me when we were in high school, a neat <a href=\"http:\/\/patorjk.com\/misc\/cokepoem.htm\">poem about coke<\/a>, and a profanity filled rant on <a href=\"http:\/\/patorjk.com\/misc\/roombusterrant.htm\">room busters<\/a> by Ping (who used to do art work for this site).<\/p>\n<p>While creating this new section, I also did a little house cleaning around the site:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>The Links section was removed. I noticed this section wasn&#8217;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&#8217;ll think of the Blogroll as my new links section.<\/li>\n<li>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.<\/li>\n<li>The <a href=\"http:\/\/patorjk.com\/programming\/tutorials\/vbarrays.htm\">VB Array Tutorial [fixed]<\/a> 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.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Google Penalty for the Color Fader<\/p>\n<p>Woe is me. My <a href=\"http:\/\/patorjk.com\/software\/colorfader\/\">Color Fader<\/a> app seems to be suffering from a Google penalty. The program went from being ranked #3 on Google for the phrase &#8220;color fader&#8221; 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&#8217;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&#8217;s index. The program still ranks for one key phrase, so its not gone from the index, but I&#8217;ve also noticed that <a href=\"http:\/\/www.google.com\/analytics\/\">Google Analytics<\/a> doesn&#8217;t appear to be reporting any data for the app, so for one reason or another, Google has decided it doesn&#8217;t like my color fader.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m kind of at a loss for why this is. I emailed the support team through their Webmasters Tools application, but I haven&#8217;t heard anything so I&#8217;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.<\/p>\n<p>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&#8217;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.<\/p>\n<p>DarcFX is Not Dead<\/p>\n<p>In my &#8220;Three Things to Say&#8221; post I mentioned that <a href=\"http:\/\/darcfx.com\">DarcFX.com<\/a> 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 &#8220;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.&#8221; So it&#8217;s good to know it&#8217;s not gone, it&#8217;ll be interesting to see if anything new is in store for the site.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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&#8217;s personality. So I took a &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/patorjk.com\/blog\/2008\/01\/22\/the-miscellaneous-section\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">The Miscellaneous Section<\/span> <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-85","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/patorjk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/85","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/patorjk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/patorjk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/patorjk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/patorjk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=85"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/patorjk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/85\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2764,"href":"https:\/\/patorjk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/85\/revisions\/2764"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/patorjk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=85"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/patorjk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=85"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/patorjk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=85"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}