Apparently my site does fairly well in its PageRank...ness. As a result, I have often had people email me offering me some form of compensation for advertising their site - so many dollars for so many months of exposure, for example.

One such email went round a few of Snark's members and a thread was posted on whether or not to do anything about it. Some said they'd display the link, why not? Others, myself included, refused.

Why, I hear you ask, would I refuse to link another site for money? That's money for nothing!

Well, let me tell you. I think paying others to link to sites for nothing more than increasing PageRank is cheating the system. I'm all for advertising a site I think visitors might be interested in, but that is solely for them to visit the site - not for Google or similar to scrape my site and see that I've linked someone and therefore push them up in ranks. I despise "fake links" and PPP-style fabricated glee over some brand new site about something I'm now suddenly interested in when I have never mentioned such an interest before ("ZOMG I LUV PAYDAY LOANZ LULZ!!!111one1!!")

I've always said there will never be ads on this site, and by ads I do mean links to sites that I have been paid for placing (because those ARE ads). I don't want your "free" money, I don't want to link to your site, so stop trying. If I like your site and I think it's worth sending some traffic to, I'll link it... But I'll most likely be using the nofollow attribute to make sure I'm sending visitors and not search engines, because to me that's what linking is for, sending people to sites; not just for increasing one's chances of showing up first on some search engine which may or may not increase your clickthrough ratio. Meh.

Edit on 16th Nov: Huh. My PageRank appears to have gone down into the minus numbers (apparently that can happen)... I checked it today and it's -1 at some datacentres and 0 at all the rest. Oh well, not much PR did for me anyway other than inflate my ego :P

I have reached new heights of geekiness. Why? Because I am now on the first page of Google when you search for Amelie. :D Yay! I'd been stuck in 11th place (top of the second page) for ages but now I am 10th (including repeated results - I think I'm 7th without). Note that this is on Google.com - I'm still 11th on Google.co.uk. I'm on the first page for most other Google TLDs though. Wonder why Google UK is being so slow to update? Hmph.

Oh yes, excuse the mess - I'm in the middle of having my account moved over to another server. WP has been bouncing up and down all morning and then for some reason all sites on the server were showing up as a client's. Errr, right.

In other highly interesting news, CG was hacked yesterday. This marks the third site in 5 days that I've seen hacked. A couple of the CG staff have been having their sites repeatedly attacked and I have to wonder what on earth they have done to deserve this. Hackers (or "script kiddies" as these people normally tend to be) and spammers earn zero in terms of respect from me. Especially those who lie about stuff they've found in order to make themselves look good and others look bad (thanks for ruining my reputation, kthxihateyoubye). Wow so you've found your way into something that isn't yours. What are you going to do, tell the site owner? No, of course not. You're going to delete all their files, replace them with stupid crap like "H4X0Rr3D bY 1337 kR0o 2 ThOuzAnd SiXxX : mC HaX / HakKa 2k / PeAc3 2 ALL n0 waR", then take some screenshots and plug yourself on Zone H. That's really mature of you. *Rolls eyes*

Anyway. I was going to say that I think WP is a problem and that hackers are finding their way in through there somehow. I'm not sure how, but as soon as I've finished my custom blog script, I am getting rid of WP and replacing it. Hmph.
This post had better not disappear as soon as I've posted it... Bah to nameserver propagation and all that >:(

Edit: Hmph. Since writing this post, Google's decided I'm back to 11th on Google.com and 12th on Google.co.uk. Wah :( Or not! Google is odd.

I'm back. I'm not going to talk about the funeral or anything here, but if you're an LJ friend you can see some of the details there if you're interested.

Before I went, I added one of those Feedburner things, inspired, once again, by Jem. The subscriber count has kind of diminished though, last week it was about 8 subscribers and now it's on 3... Or 2, depends when you look

Oh and speaking of Jem, I visted some site today where she's been credited with the creation of my script, PHPAskIt. WTF? I wrote that! I mean, I don't mind the site who did it crediting someone else (as long as it isn't themselves) but still... Jem gets too many hits as it is, she doesn't need ones meant for me on top of the ones she gets already. Hmph... :P

Aaaand, I discovered today that my site is listed on the second page of Google when searching for Amelie. Not sure when that happened... Last time I checked, the first 20 million or so results were all reviews of that film with the same name, and plus I have Google and other bots blocked from my site since it stops spam... Somehow it's still associating my name with my domain, which it shouldn't really be doing since it's not supposed to index this site or anything. Oh well, can't complain - I was thinking of getting back into SEO and letting the bots back in anyway so this is definitely a good incentive. :D

Finally... Remember my dad's sponsored run? Well, my aunt (his sister) has done a sponsored skydive. She's already done the skydive but is hoping to use it to raise money for Daisy's Dream, a charity she's volunteered for for some time and who do an amazing job. If you have some spare cash, it would mean a lot to her and to us if you would sponsor her. Thanks :P

Edit: Oh yeah, and I made a fanlisting. Yeah, yeah, I jumped on the bandwagon... Anyway, it's for Jem's script, BellaBook. JOIN PLZ JOIN PLZ JOIN PLZ!!!111 (No really, it would be nice if you could join... If you're a fan of BellaBook, that is. Hee!)