MattMaroon.com

Blogging has been rough on me lately. Between infrequent updates (and therefore linkage from the readers) and failure to use the rel=”nofollow” tag on ads for some really cheesy sites that I sold there, the poker blog has seen its PageRank slip from a high of 7 all the way down to 2. I’ve cleaned it up a bit and have a couple good posts halfway ready to go, so we’ll see if we can’t that back to something reasonable.

Really, though, I don’t care as much about that blog as I do this one. I keep it around mainly because I feel like my poker thoughts (in the rare instances I have them anymore) don’t belong here, and because I’ve still got some money coming in from ads.

But unfortunately this blog has been hit with an even worse problem (because really, who cares about the PageRank of a blog with a trivial amount of revenue?). This blog, which I care about mainly because the URL is my name, was listed for about a week as a promoter of malware by Google. Anyone who came there on Firefox (which is a pretty high percentage of my traffic) got a big scary warning and probably left immediately.

On the one hand, I sort of deserved that too, because there were iframes in a number of posts that did something malwareish. On the other hand, I didn’t put them there. It was due to some WordPress vulnerability that I was unaware of until it was too late.

So I did what I could. I upgraded to the latest WordPress and then removed every iframe (since God knows there’s no reason I’d ever use one of those intentionally) from every post that had one. I then used Google Webmaster Tools to request a site review.

A few days later, my site was still displaying the malware warning. Needless to say that was as disappointing as ever R.E.M album after Automatic for the People, since I knew the site to be clean. Whoever had reviewed the site (I assume it was a person since it took a few days) listed a few URLs they believed were still tainted, but I poured through the html and saw nothing. So I just went back to Webmaster Tools and requested another review, and luckily after a few more days the warning was gone.

Then I had some problems with my template. I use a modified version of a theme I found somewhere on wordpress.org, but a lot of things were not working. Some links seemed to be doing nothing but regurgitating my home page, and my RSS feed was no longer being recognized as valid by FeedBurner. All I can figure is that the update somehow busted my theme, so I reverted to WordPress’s default.

So now I think I’ll see if I can’t find a good blog designer to whip me up a custom theme. I kinda like what Fred Wilson did with AVC. I think I’ll shoot for something like that, but minus the widgets. (Well, with different widgets anyway.)

Anyone know anyone who does a good job of that sort of thing?