It’s no secret that Google Rank Spanked me, tkaing me from a PR 3 to a PR 0 when they went after paid posts. This site had none of those because: A) I work for IZEA / PayPerPost, B) I work for them so I can’t tkae those opps nor any competitors. Yet because of A I got nailed in the first round and never got any Page Rank back.

No I’m not going to crawl on me hands and kness to Google to get it back either. I’ll entertain the other Search Engines and Web Crawlers out there.

However I do use WordPress, and while I didn’t upgrade in a while until a few weeks ago I did have problems with the WordPress versions I was using being suspectible to hack attempts and injecting malicous code into my posts.

While I never figured out how the attacks were being done I did notice that Google noticed. Thanks to Mouseclone for first alerting me to this I set about sanitizing my posts. All was wel and good.

I recieved word from Cassknits that she couldn’t really enjoy the site because Google had slapped a malicous site label on me. Har Har I thought; Google just making a mockery of me, again. Yes in fact a lookup of techraving on google search did show such a branding.

OK, fine. I do have an account with Google and checked the webmaster tools for the site maps.

Sure enough Google said they found malicous code that triggered their flags but also which pages they found it on. Wouldn’t you know it was exactly the kind of scum I had been battling. One post I either didn’t catch or got re-injected.

I reluctantly, but tired of dealing with the security flaws of WordPress, upgraded. So far no new injections have occured. Only a week after the upgrade though I I wasn’t getting hit on evry post :). I did however ask Google to re-evealuate my site to remove the malicious site label. Only took a few days and sure enough I am in the clear from bad things, and that was a week again; no fair thinking I’m writing this apease them.

I don’t wwigh a whole lot of worth on Google in Page Rank or indexing. When I target my keywords carefully and use those to my niche adventagously I have performed very well. Irregardless of my Page Rank. Google is a search engine, just like all the others.

However Google has seemed to take one extra step in that they have the technology and the know-how to protect us from spreading the crap the sticks to the bottom of the intrenet pond. Certainly we can by “some” programs to do this; Google does it for free. We just have to look.

I do have to give them credit for that.

Tags: google, security

Being a member of several mailing lists gives me they opportunity to try several new things coming out. An email I received today indicated that HP has created a plug-in that allowed posts to be changed into PDF’s. I though hey cool I’ve done this many times using PHP so let me go check out HP.

The link I was given was HP Blog Printing and upon getting there wouldn’t you know it, they have a WordPress plugin as well! Great time to check out the plug-in and see if it works; hehe.

So I clicked the WordPress plug-in image link and was introduced to the registration screen.  You can not download the plug-in without: first, giving your email address; second, entering the URL of the blog you are using it on; third, accepting the terms & conditions. Ehh?!? OK so I can expect unsolicited email I guess but we’ll see if the email account I gave suddenly starts receiving them. >:-)>

Upon completing that step I was sent to the download screen. Which I promptly downloaded the WP plug-in. Although there were some strange files I did exactly as the README file said and uploaded the plug-in folder to the right folder. After logging into Tech Ravings I activated the plug-in.

Tech Ravings doesn’t have a theme that supports WP 2.2 so I had to manually include the php function to activate the print function and image but the README says that for version 2.2 you can widgetize it as well and my version actually shows it; again my theme isn’t widgetized though.

I was un-impressed with the results as the print image had a border around it and it was left justified in the sidebar. Not good in my opinion. HP released this under the GPL so I could modify it. Which I promptly id and added the border=”0″ to the image and wrapped it in a div tag through the code.

However when clicking the print button I was highly impressed as a category listing of all my posts where displayed with the post in each checked marked for conversion. Using the deselect all and then selecting a single post I made a great PDF of a post. This was converted to a PDF which I saved and then printed.

If you are interested in my hack you can download it here: HP Blog Print which will center your image within the area and remove the border for Internet Explorer; otherwise go to the publishers website as posted above for the “official” version.

I came across a post that discussed an age old problem, reducing draw times for JavaScript widgets on external sites. As a widget and web site developer I’ve seen this time and time again; the publisher embeds the JavaScript code into their pages. When the JavaScript file producing server becomes slow or un-responsive the publishing web page barely gets drawn and visitors become impatient and leave.

Mike Davidson with consultation from Intern Rob have published a post Widget Enabled DOM JavaScript Embedding which can be found at WEDJE . They also recognize the implications of bad JavaScript includes and even cross-browser incompatibilities. Their solution to these is thus coined WEDJE.

In short the solution surrounds creating a standard div element in the page and then utilizing the DOM elements to create a script element within. Their post simulates a slow loading server and their pages still fully loads and when the 7 second delay is up their widget appears.

I will definitely have to explore the WEDJE pattern some more. Definitely review the comments as there are some further examples that are worth taking a stab at. I had to laugh as I wrote this article on Widget Enabled DOM JavaScript Embedding because I realized that the WEDJE acronym sounds like Wedge.