Technicalese

We'll be churning out some stuff over the next couple days, but then we may be on a (very) brief hiatus while we do some more behind-the-scenes work. I don't mean a week or anything; specifically, we may take a day or two off to try and get this stuff done, but you know how these things go... if everything doesn't work out just right, it may stretch into several days. Hopefully, this won't be the case, but I can't say for certain, so I wanted to give everyone the heads-up.

Here's more or less what's going down:

Google dipped into the time-honored "business practice" of extortion to try and force those of us who employ sponsored posts and other advertisers to go back to using only Google AdSense. This caused our Google Page Rank (PR) to drop dramatically, which has forced us lower down the Google search engine listings. Where normally I don't bother with this kind of stuff, I am trying to at least make enough money so that the site will pay for itself and I am not paying for hosting and all that, so it's one of those things that I have to be concerned with.

To those ends, one of our sponsors was singled-out by Google and I stood up for them. I don't respond well to threats, especially not from monopolies. Unfortunately, their hands are also tied and they simply cannot offer us the money and opportunities they once did. While I fully support Izea and PayPerPost, the unfortunate fallout is that I am getting double-whammied here: I am forced to remove the sponsored badges and logos in order to attempt and regain some of the PR Google unceremoniously stripped me of because I am losing visitors and money and PPP cannot do anything to help me with that.

Further, I am in the process of moving each of the blogs to their own sub-domain. Had I gotten this done previously, it would have softened the blow, since each sub-domain would be seen by Google as basically a separate website, in a manner of speaking. However, preparing for this while trying to maintain the blogs and keep them visible without you getting a bunch of dead and broken links and etc. is no mean feat.

What this all comes down to is that I am going to be busy as hell for at least a week or two and you probably won't be able to tell from your end. I am going to do my best to keep things moving, but (as with any major remodeling job) in the case of any major setbacks, I am obviously going to be up to my neck trying to smooth things out technically, and you might not see many posts until it gets done - not just here, but on any of the blogs.

Keep watching The Wording for any updates on how things are going and I'll do my best to keep you apprised here. In the meantime, I'll go on and get you some of this good stuff I've got here to keep you busy for a while, at least!