PixelRN

A Final Word on my Google-Wordpress Saga

So what have I learned from all of this? First of all, here are three steps to keeping your website from getting hacked:

1. Use Google Webmaster Tools - if I had been using them they may have helped me diagnose the problem much earlier.
2. Change your password often and make it a good one! I HATE keeping track of passwords as much as the next person. But guess what I hate even more - Getting my blog hacked.
3. If you are running a self-hosted wordpress blog, you have to be diligent about updating to the latest version. Updates aren't just about the latest bells and whistles  - they are about security.

If you know what you're doing updating to the latest version shouldn't take more than 15 minutes. If you don't know what you're doing, take a minute to read the instructions on wordpress.org. It's not that hard and if you do it once, it will be in your brain. I never thought hackers would bother with my site in the first place. I have a simple little wordpress blog with a modest audience. Why would someone want to hack into it? Because there are millions of "simple little wordpress blogs" out there. The hackers figure out how to break into one, and then they can break in to all of them. Do I have second thoughts about using Wordpress? I did at first, but then I realized that no matter what platform you use, there will be vulnerabilities. Wordpress is obviously going to be vulnerable because so many people use it. On the other hand, so many people use it because it rocks! It's so easy to install. It's built for blogging and yet it can also be used as a simple content management system. It's also easy to customize for a "casual" web designer like myself, and there is a great community of theme builders behind it. I will continue to use Wordpress. Bottom line - if you are hosting a site on your own domain, then it's up to you to be a responsible webmaster. Use the three steps that I outlined above. Last week I was tearing my hair out and suffering from a blogger existential crisis, this week I am triumphant. I found a problem, diagnosed it, and fixed it all by myself, and now I am that much more tech savvy. It's a good feeling. One thing I have had second thoughts on is whether or not I want to encourage other bloggers to host their own domain, particularly those of you who are strictly blogging for the sake of blogging, and have no use for the technical end of it. If that describes you, then I would recommend sticking with wordpress.com, or blogspot. On the other hand, if you find all of this technical stuff kind of interesting, then I heartily recommend moving forward and using your own domain with a host. There is something so cool about having your own little place on the web that is not part of some larger system. To me it's like the difference between owning a house on a little piece of land, and renting an apartment in a multi-level building.

My Google problem turned out to be a Wordpress problem

I know I said last word on Google, but guess what? I lied. This is too important not to share with you. So to recap, you know the story of how I lost my google traffic, and then how I tried to figure out why I lost my google traffic. A couple days later, on a whim, I decided to revisit google's cached pages of PixelRN.com. I wanted to be sure I wasn't missing anything. So I clicked on one of the cached pages, did a "view source" to see the HTML, and low and behold I scrolled all the way to the bottom and found this:

So now I realized that someone had hacked into my wordpress blog and flooded it with hidden spam. This completely freaked me out. I mean, who would want to hack into my lil' old blog? But at last I had found out exactly why I lost my search engine traffic: Google thought I was a spammer. After reading about similar situations, I realized that my site was hacked because of a vulnerability in earlier versions of Wordpress (2.1 - 2.3). Previously I hadn't been in any hurry to upgrade to the latest version of Wordpress, because I was afraid I might screw something up. I eventually got over this fear, and upgraded, but by that time it was too late. So meanwhile, I changed my wordpress password, and upgraded to Wordpress 2.6.2. I then became completely unable to log onto my wordpress admin page, meaning, I couldn't update Pixelrn at all. I spent some time on the Wordpress forums. I fooled around with Google Webmaster Tools. I fooled around with phpMyAdmin. I learned how to add a new user, and change the password manually. I learned about MD5 hash. I also fooled around with the wp-config file. I even tried an emergency wordpress password reset script. Nothing worked, and no one could give me any answers on the Wordpress forums. Finally, I resigned myself to the fact that I would have to export my database, delete all the files from PixelRN, reinstall wordpress, and import the parts of the database that I was pretty sure were okay. Not looking forward to any of this, I procrastinated. While I was procrastinating, Matt Cutts, the head of Google's webspam team, was alerted to the problems I was having and wrote a blog post about it. While it thrilled me to no end that someone from Google was actually paying attention, I was still S.O.L. as far as getting onto my wordpress admin page. Maybe it would have been better if someone had alerted the other Matt, Matt Mullenweg (the creator of wordress.) As it turned out, I was supposed to attend WordCamp NYC on Sunday, where Matt was speaking. I opted to instead stay home. I was way too down on Wordpress to attend, and besides, I needed to actually spend time fixing the problem. So that's how I spent my Sunday afternoon: fixing PixelRN.com. As you can see, it worked, because here I am blogging again! Tomorrow: I'll blog about what I learned from this experience. I'm hoping I can save others from having the same experience.

More on Google: My First Video Post!

Okay, last word on Google, I promise. But this word will be a good word because it's my first video post! Inspired by Emily, Enrico, Kerri, and Dr. Anonymous, I decided to join the fray. So have a look and tell me what you think!

The World is Bigger Than You Know

Just a quick reminder for everyone to take a deep breath. The financial news is coming out of Wall Street faster than we can absorb it; and the political news is coming out of Washington faster than we care to take it in. I'm not happy about what's going on, but I'm not really worried about it either. The market needs to be corrected. If a company has been using credit to make its payroll, well then maybe that company has no business being in business in the first place. Even if we have some tough times ahead (and I'm pretty sure we do,) we will continue to do what we do; work hard, play hard, love hard, debate hard, and laugh heartily. That is all. (creative commons photo courtesy of thelizabeth)

Are You There, Google? It's Me, PixelRN. (part 2)

The first thing I did after finding out that Google was hating on me was to sink into a pit of despair. I've been doing a lot of research lately on SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and I was starting to pride myself on being someone who was able to give out SEO advice to other bloggers. All of a sudden I'd suffered the opposite of search engine optimization: search engine demoralization. My husband said, "Hey, it least you didn't lose all of your traffic. I think it shows what a loyal readership you must have." What a wise man he is. I'd like to thank you, loyal readership. Then I decided to ask Shane for some advice. He took a look at my HTML and realized that the content of my blog didn't actually start until 2/3 of the way down the page. He guessed that perhaps the Googlebots were getting halfway through my page, looking for an actual blog post, and then just giving up. Googlebots are applications that that crawl the web, looking for content to index. They then return the information they've collected and it becomes integrated in Google search results. The problem is that sometimes you have too much gobbledy-gook code in your HTML, and the bots look at it and say "nevermind!" and move on to the next website. So the problem was in my Wordpress theme, and more specifically in my layout. Remember my three columns of idiocy? Not only is the three column a bad idea design-wise, it's also a nightmare for SEO. So I switched back to my old Wordpress theme because I knew it was better optimized for Google. But I changed Wordpress themes in January. So shouldn't my traffic have dropped in January, rather than in May? What happened in May? I was working on Orientedx3 a lot in May. I'm worried that Google is interpreting it as a link farm, which is not what I intended it for at all. Also, I have this habit of coming up with new domain names and installing Wordpress on them in the hopes of starting a new blog. I usually abandon them when I realize that I barely have enough time to write this blog. I'm kind of the queen of unfinished projects. I have over a dozen domain names - some day I'll show you the list and I promise you'll get a kick out of it. Anyway, I sometimes insert a link to PixelRN in these unfinished projects, just to see what the link will look like. So now I'm worried that Google might also think I'm a splogger. (spammer + blogger = splogger). A splog is an "artificially created site which the author uses to increase the search engine rankings of associated sites." It's a fake site with links on it. Unfortunately, the bottom line is that I have no way of really knowing what happened. The only thing I can do is change my theme, get rid of any blogs I'm not using and just start posting again. Only time will tell if Google decides to love me again. There is a silver lining to all of this. I have decided to take one of my little unfinished projects and finish it - which means I will be starting a new blog! I've been working on it all weekend and I hope to launch it soon. In the meantime I'll keep posting here in the hopes that Google will show me some love again.

Are You There, Google? It's me, PixelRN. (part 1)

So how did I find out that google wasn't just knocking me down a few notches but was completely ignoring my blog? I started searching for key words that I knew Google should rank me high for. Google did not seem to acknowledge that I had written that post. In fact, Google was ranking some of your blog posts that linked to my post, but was ignoring the actual post itself. Hardly seems fair, right? So I decided to confirm my suspicions by checking my "google juice." Here's how you check your google juice: Choose one of your blog post titles that is fairly long and doesn't contain any cliches. Pick a phrase that you are fairly certain wouldn't show up anywhere else on the web, except your blog. Copy and paste the entire title in google and hit search. If you chose a good title, and have a reasonably well positioned blog, your blog should come up at number one for the search. Here's an example: Take "Now they don't want my blood..." from DisappearingJohn. Google it, and DisappearingJohn's blog shows up at number one. Google likes Disappearing John, and rightly so! (he's a great nurse blogger.) So I did this google search for some of my own titles and that's when I realized that Google wasn't listing my blog for any search I could come up with. As Shane put it, "Google is really hating on you right now." I decided to take a closer look at my stats. You know when you check out all the funny keywords people use to get to your blog? Well, it turns out the only keywords that were being used to get to my blog were "PixelRN," or "pixelrn.com." (Yes, some people actually put PixelRN into google to get to my blog rather than putting it on the address bar, *ahem*, Mom. But I digress. I don't care how you get to my blog, as long as you show up!) I then checked to see what percentage of traffic was coming to my blog via search engines, and at what point in time did it drop off. Here's what I found:

So as you can see, my search engine traffic seemed to drop off drastically some time between May and June of this year, and in September, it got even worse. In part 2, I'll try to figure out what I did in May, 2008 to offend the Google Gods.

Kickin' it Old School with PixelRN

(creative commons image courtesy of Ninha Morandini) Forget about the economic crisis we are facing. Readers, I am in the midst of a full fledged blogger emergency. I've recently discovered that Google is blacklisting me for some reason. I have completely lost all of my search engine traffic from Google and I'm not sure why. Luckily I have Shane working on the case, and he suggested changing my wordpress theme around. Instead of getting into that, though, I decided to just revert back to my old theme (which Shane, himself designed!) until I can figure things out. I have some ideas about what happened, and I'll be posting more on this later. Meanwhile, if there are any other SEO experts that might happen upon this blog, I would love to hear from you.

Social Networking Strategies for Travel Nurses: Part 2

In this post, we'll take a look at Facebook, Blogger, and Wordpress. Facebook is kind of a grab-bag for all of your social networking activity. You can create a profile, upload photos, write notes, and post links, and find people that you may know from high school, college, or previous places of employment (among other things.) If you are a traveling nurse and still aren't using facebook, I suggest you sign up. It's a very convenient and fun way of staying in touch with people. There are also social sites dedicated strictly to nurses and people who are interested in nursing. Nursinglink is one of them. It contains many of the same features that you see on Facebook but centers around nursing. If you are really ambitious about social networking you can start your own blog. What is a blog, exactly? The original word comes from web + log, and the first blogs were kind of like personal journals. They date back to earlier in this decade. These days a blog can be about anything you want it to be. It can be a personal diary, a way to update your friends and family on where you are traveling, or it can even be a collection of articles that you have written on a chosen subject. Travel nursing and blogging go hand in hand, and there is a great community of nurses who blog out there. Setting up a blog is really very easy to do, and free as well. You can start a free blog at wordpress.com or blogger.com. Each of these sites have templates that you can choose from and fairly easy to use interfaces. There's a large community of nurses who blog. You can find a partial list of them at OrientedX3.com. There's also a biweekly roundup of some of the best nursing blog posts called Change of Shift. You can see the latest edition of Change of Shift at crzegrl.net. In part three we'll take a look at Twitter, a micro-blogging tool, and LinkedIn, a social site for professionals.

Travel Nurses and Social Networking

What could a travel nurse possibly want to know about social networking? How about everything? In my view, every travel nurse should acquaint themselves with at least one or two of the social networking tools that are available. I can't think of a better way to stay in touch with friends and family while you're on the road. With that in mind I wrote a series of articles for my friends over at travelnursingblogs.com. You can find part one here. I'd also like to thank Medical Solutions for sponsoring my trip to Blog World Expo. It was well worth it! Also, I just finished writing my about page. I've had this blog for a long time and it recently occurred to me that I'd really like to tell the story of how I got here to people who arrive by *accident* Enjoy!

Blogging Under the Influence: How a glass of wine (or 2) can make you a better blogger.

(creative commons image courtesy of slack 12) One of the great benefits of attending Blog World Expo 2008 was all of the great advice and inspiration I got that will help me to keep on blogging. Hands down, my favorite blogging advice was dispensed by Tim Ferriss, author of The 4-Hour Work Week: Talk to your readers the way you would talk to your friends after 2 drinks. This makes perfect sense to me, and here's why: What happens when you sit down with some friends and have a couple drinks? You start to get that relaxed, warm fuzzy feeling. You start to loosen your inhibitions. Your enthusiasm starts to bubble up to the top and affects what you say. As people who blog, we all have something to say. The question is, What's the best way to say it? And how do we write a really good post without letting all of our little insecurities and doubts get in the way? And the answer is, blog like you're buzzed! I think the 2-drink rule is brilliant, and I've already started to implement it. And what's more, Tim Ferriss actually wrote his entire book with that rule in mind. Did I mention that it's a New York Times bestseller? If 2 drinks are good, wouldn't 3 or 4 or 5 drinks be even better? Easy now, I don't want to encourage any lush-like behavior. At three drinks you start to take that turn where warm and fuzzy becomes silly and sloppy, and bubbly enthusiasm can turn into incoherence and long-windedness. Which is fine if you're at the bar, or a party, or even sitting at home watching House and tweeting - Goodness, who would do that? ; ) - It's probably just not good for your blog. And obviously the 2 drink rule would need to be adjusted to fit your weight and tolerance. If you weigh 98 pounds, a scant glass of sherry might do it for you, but if you're > 200 pounds, you might be halfway into a six-pack before you start getting the warm fuzzies. And remeber, we juSt pretending we had two drinks, right? Not like we drink so much we forgette how to type an spell. And maibee even fall off out of the chair wile we are blogging. *hiccup* I see you later. guys,. Got t0 go take nAp. o_O