Apparently, Google no longer thinks very highly of my blog.

Well, okay then. I can reciprocate. Thus, the image above.

By the way, have you tried Bing?

Google is so last year. Time to move forward. Bing! Bing! Bing!

This is something that only happens once a century and even then you have to have the right conditions and the right angle, so it’s very rare indeed. The moon has to reflect itself, twice, onto clouds in the sky. So, if you have a clear sky, you’re not going to see this.

You might have to adjust the brightness or contrast on your computer if the image is too dark. Neat-o-o-o.

For more photos, visit Wordless Wednesday.

Since the other day’s photo guessing post was so successful–ha ha!–here’s another.

The question is, am I asking you to figure out what you think I’m asking you to figure out, or am I looking for you to figure out what didn’t occur to you that I might be asking you to figure out?

Yep. This one could be a real tricky one. So, do you know what it is?

‘Nuff said.

It’s Labor Day and I’m tired from labor. And, since writing a blog post is laborious, this is all you’re getting today.

And, oh yeah, that eBook you need to buy so that the star doesn’t get it? That’s right here.

Holiday weekend. No one’s reading. Slow day.

So, let’s play a game. You know, for the three of you who actually are reading this weekend.

It’s the Guess the Flower Game! That’s right! It’s exciting!

You guess the flower shown in the picture! Wow! That’s what you do!

And, that’s it. Nothing more. No prizes, no awards. Nothing. Nada. Just maybe the envy of your peers. You know, your peers, the other two people reading.

Alright, getchyer guessin’ engines goin’!

And, oh, yeah, get your flower power on, baby!

If you’re a WordPress user, you’ve probably heard by now about the attacks going on against WordPress blogs, for which the solution is the ever-alluring mantra of “Upgrade! Upgrade! Upgrade!”

Before rushing out to upgrade to patch your version of WordPress against the latest security vulnerability, you might need to consider whether you really need to continue to remain on the WordPress upgrade treadmill.

If you are using WordPress for a blog, you may have little other choice but to upgrade.

But, if you’re using WordPress as an “easy” way to get a website up and running, as many people seem prone to do these days, you may wish to reconsider, especially if you are running a small site with not a lot of content.

In the case of a small (or mini-) site, WordPress is probably overkill anyway. Using WordPress as a shortcut to starting a new website is only going to kill you over the long run, as you will be spending an undue amount of time upgrading the thing to keep it “secure” and then upgrading it again once the new vulnerabilities have popped up in the newest version.

For example, consider a very simple site I had done in WordPress. A small site. With WordPress, the website takes up about 4.4 MB of space. Without WordPress, it takes up 48 KB of space. Much, much smaller.

When I heard about the latest WordPress fiasco, this is how I handled that site:

1. Logged into the website through my control panel. (Could have done it through FTP too.)

2. Deleted all files.

3. Replaced with HTML and/or PHP pages.

That’s it. Done. And, guess what? I will never have to “upgrade” the site ever again. It will never be vulnerable to any WordPress security flaws because it is not using WordPress. The site doesn’t store content in a database, so there are no worries about that either. If it were to get hacked, there’s no clean-up. I just delete the whole thing and re-upload the pages and I’m back in business.

So, if you’re using WordPress on your blog, you probably ought to upgrade it now. But, if you’re using WordPress for something like a mini-site, it’s a good time to reconsider whether using WordPress is the best option. If not, rather than going through yet another upgrade, maybe you ought to look at switching your site to HTML or PHP and giving WordPress the ol’ heave-ho.

It all started back here. (Actually, it started a couple weeks earlier than that, but that seems to be the earliest blog post where I first mentioned it.)

And, today it ends! I finished the book over the weekend, but today is the day it actually became available for sale! Yay!

You may remember I (prematurely) declared it finished near the end of July, but it wasn’t quite done! I still had to wrap a few things up, which took longer than I had planned or hoped.

In any case, it is finished now! (Though I am already making notes for the next version…)

As for how it is done, well, I (pretty much) followed my Day-by-Day Information Product Creation plan I had written back on February 1st. Imagine that… I followed my own advice. Sure, there were ups and downs, some of which I mentioned in blog postings, but, ultimately, I finished it. (Wow. That’s also the last post on that blog. Wonder why…?)

Bottom line: You just have to keep going and power through!

Yes, I’d like two dozen of the codeine, a case of the hydrocodone and do you have any of the chocolate-covered Lipitor?

I swear, this gets me every time I get spam: “We have your favorite Rx medications!”

Seriously, do you have a favorite prescription medication? I mean, sure, you may need certain prescriptions to stay in good health, but do those really count as favorites? Do you look forward to swallowing one pill over another?

You know, I have to take a half dozen pills a day to live, but I swear I just love the way this Avapro pill goes down. It’s my favorite!

I mean, really? Is there anyone that thinks like that when it comes to their prescription drugs? Does anyone go, “Oh, goodie! The pharmacy called and my Zestril came in! I can’t wait to pick it up!”

This stuff turns my stools green. It’s awesome!

I don’t know. I just can’t get my head around the concept of having a favorite prescription medication. If the doctor told you you could stop taking a medication because you didn’t need it anymore, are you going to beg him to reconsider?

Since starting this new medication, I sleep soundly at night. I wake up feeling well-rested and ready to start the day, which I do once I clean up all the loose stools from the bedding.

I can’t imagine having something I would call a favorite prescription drug. I suppose if you became addicted to painkillers or something, you might call it your favorite. But, if you’re an addict, that’s a whole other issue. For the non-addict, can you really have a favorite prescription drug?

First off, I just want to say “Hi!” to Jeanne, on whose blog I tried to leave a comment, but gave up after ten minutes of trying with two different browsers and concluding that Orble sucks. Here’s how their CAPTCHA system doesn’t work. But, after entering the letters, it would only take me to the Orble home page and never actually post my comment.

That’s a good example of why I would recommend something like WordPress as a blogging platform, because it (for the most part) puts you in charge of your own site and content. And, if something like a CAPTCHA plugin messes things up, you can always uninstall it. When your platform is controlled by someone else, you don’t have that option.

And that is not meant as, nor should it be construed as, any type of chastisement against Jeanne. Orble is the one that is failing here.

And so we segue into blogging. Not the cleanest of seques, but it’ll have to do.

After August, here is my blogging income graph:

As you can see, things were pretty stagnant over last month. The green line had a slight bump and the blue line had a slight dip but, overall, it pretty much remained the same. The red line was supposed to be my focus for the month of August, but wrapping up my eBook and working on a client’s website kept me from doing anything in that regard.

Don’t know how September will fare. I do know the green line will be taking a nosedive back to first quarter levels due to the loss of three advertisers. That blue line is all over and could go anywhere. So far for this month, it’s looking grim but that’s always once that bounces around during the month, so I can’t draw much of a conclusion there. In fact, the bulk of last month’s earnings on the blue line came from earlier in the month, and it was looking as though it could potentially be double the prior month’s earnings, but then it just fizzed out during the last half of the month, and it fell short of matching July by 12 cents.

So, we’ll see how September fares. With kids back in school and family vacations over with, maybe more people will be back on their computers.

As many of you (those of you still around) know, this blog has taken a bit of a nose-dive in the last few months. It hasn’t been often that I’ve had a substantive post, aside from maybe Tweet Week, which was pretty much a bust as far as traffic was concerned.

As you know, I started my eBook (er, course) around February 15th of this year. (Somewhere in that area anyway.) At first, it didn’t affect the blog, but then it started taking its toll. Here is the traffic graph for the year so far:

As you can see, February’s traffic was down from January. Much of January’s traffic came from my postings on the Twitter Phishing scheme that went on in early January.

Traffic went down in February, but was still up from December’s levels. Traffic went up a bit in March, then continued a nosedive through the next two months. It leveled off around May and June and steadily increased from there.

While I got deeper into working on my eBook, I often hit writer’s book when coming to post here. In April, however, I largely wasn’t working on the eBook (waiting to hear from people on my first draft), yet traffic continued to decline. I think this was because I still wasn’t in the “groove” of things.

My analysis is this. In the early part of the year, I got a nice bump in traffic. But, while I got sidetracked with my eBook project, I didn’t pay enough attention to this blog, so I probably didn’t retain many of the new readers I had brought in. As new readers dropped off, the number of visitors also dropped. However, I maintained my loyal group of readers while also keeping search engine traffic to prior posts.

So, while new quality went down, I still had traffic from a quantity of old quality. In other words, your previously written content continues to pay dividends long after you’ve written it. But, fresh content is still important, even if it is lower quality. Bear in mind that lower quality will result in a smaller percentage of repeat visitors. Eventually, you may reach a plateau where new low quality with old high quality results in a break-even rate of traffic.

Which means I need to increase quality in order to increase traffic to this blog, which I need to do since I lost two advertisers last month. (Ouch!)

Now that I’ve completed my eBook, even though I will continue to do promotional work on it, I can invest a little more time into improving the quality on this blog, and having more substantive posts and fewer fluff posts.

It also bears mentioning that, during the same time frame, my level of commenting on other blogs went down as well. So, that no doubt impacted traffic somewhat as well. But, during this time frame, I don’t think it had a significant impact. Since the beginning of this year, and perhaps as far as last fall or so, I haven’t been commenting on a lot of new blogs, so commenting was probably largely negligible in terms of traffic here. While I did comment on my regular list of blogs, albeit less frequently, I don’t think that negatively impacted repeat visitors too much, especially given that a number of those bloggers also reduced their level of blogging as well, so it may have been a wash.

At any rate, yesterday I started going through my list of “blogs to visit again.” These are blogs I’ve visited in the past, but have not visited regularly. I think I commented on one or two of them yesterday. More than that were no longer very active and at least one was completely gone.

In other news, “Hollydale Mental Hospital” made my list of the Top 10 keywords people use to find my blog during the month of August. Apparently, it’s not just in Speedy’s imagination. It’s a real place and it’s purportedly haunted or something. I’m presuming it’s haunted by ghosts. You never know, though. It could be haunted by leprechauns or something. Maybe gremlins.