I received yet another e-mail yesterday from Text-Link-Ads notifying me that they were not detecting any ads showing on my site and asking me to fix it. Of course, it makes sense that the ads are not being displayed since I CANCELED MY ACCOUNT IN JULY!
I know it’s probably just their faulty system blindly sending out these notices and not distinguishing between canceled and live accounts, but it’s still pretty irritating. I still occasionally get messages like this (or worse, notices saying that they’ve sold yet another ad on my site, long after I deactivated my account). I always quickly send them back an e-mail reminding them that I canceled, and also giving them a guilt trip / lecture about continuing to sell ads to their customers when they know they will not be displayed on my site.
Today I decided that maybe instead of just e-mailing them back to complain, I should post a negative story about TLA every time this happens. So, here’s today’s dose of TLA bashing, from a story on The Stanford Daily:
Last week, I noticed the Stanford Daily had dropped from a PR9 when I wrote the above in April to PR7 today. That’s a huge drop that has no apparent reason to happen. Someothers were also reporting PageRank drops. So I pinged Google, and they confirmed that PageRank scores are being lowered for some sites that sell links.
In addition, Google said that some sites that are selling links may indeed end up being dropped from its search engine or have penalties attached to prevent them from ranking well.
There’s still more that could be written (in terms of the documentation), but I go back and forth how much detail to get into, since for anyone who knows PHP well enough to read the code (and I think it’s pretty readable), it should be pretty obvious. I covered the high level stuff, and may or may not go through the details line by line later; right now, I’m leaning towards not doing that.
We also found out today that Oct. 22nd is the deadline date for the iPhone contest that we originally built this plugin for. The winning person or team will get free iPhones, courtesy of Matt Mullenweg. As far as I know, there is only one other team (3 people) working on an entry for this, and they haven’t released anything yet, but anything could happen in the next few weeks.
We’ve had our release out since Sept. 25th, and I think it’s a very solid contender for the win; I can’t think of much more that we could do better. Dan is working on polishing up the style even more, but other than that I don’t expect to have too many more changes before the deadline. Keep your fingers crossed.
No offense to any cigar smokers out there, but those things are nasty. They smell disgusting, just so you know.
This came up because last night I was at a poker tournament, sitting around a table with twelve guys and several of them were smoking cigars. I can handle the smell of cigarettes just fine, but cigars (at least in that high of a volume) for some reason make me sick to my stomach, and I was feeling pretty bad when I left after a few hours.
Of course, I could have been feeling sick because I wasn’t playing too well either. Ever since I decided that I wouldn’t take poker too seriously anymore, my game has definitely gotten a lot worse, as I expected. I made quite a few stupid betting pattern mistakes early on in the game, but not too many bad decisions - just didn’t play well enough to overcome an overall streak of bad cards and my out-of-practice mental state.
This eventually led me to being fairly short stacked by the time the blinds were getting up to serious levels, so I pretty much had to take my chances going all in with AQ vs. TT (classic race situation: 55/45), and his pair held up and I was out. Didn’t feel bad about that part though, it was a fine way to go out and I was feeling pretty bad by that point anyway.
Ever