blogging – MagicalTimeBean

Website Update Part 1

This morning I got to take care of some long overdue housekeeping with this site. Since I have two domains, soulcastergame.com and magicaltimebean.com, it was time to merge them. 90% of links to this site were using soulcastergame.com, but with the advent of Escape Goat and other future IP’s, it’s definitely time to put it all under the magicaltimebean banner. Fortunately, BlueHost makes it easy to set up wildcard 301 redirects to handle this, and the lore of the internet tells me Google should preserve my pagerank.

I also properly categorized these posts and added them to a menu bar at the top. The Articles will have the most interesting stuff, because these are the thoughtful essays I write about every so often.

In preparation for Escape Goat, I’ll be adding some graphics finally, and should have a dedicated page for it within the next week. Some other cool stuff to follow as well, stay tuned.

Inane Comments Spam Attack!

In the past 36 hours, I received exactly 64 spam comments posted to this blog. They all come to my email for approval first (for just this reason) and I haven’t seen anything like this before. I’m still trying to piece it together, given this information:

The comments all contain a generic remark that could be used on any blog, such as “wow, cool, i’ve been looking for this info all day!”
Each comment has one word intentionally misspelled, such as “cheeerd.”
I have SI Captcha anti-spam installed here, so this was either a sophisticated Captcha-breaking bot or someone was paid to enter the Captcha codes.
Most interestingly, there is no motive I can find. They are not linking back to a website selling $18 Nikes. For the URL, they always put yahoo.com or google.com or something else totally generic. The email addresses seem valid but don’t have any rhyme or reason to them.

Clearly someone wanted to get a bunch of comments up here, but they weren’t going to drive traffic anywhere and didn’t advertise anything. My only guess is that this was a recon mission to see which blogs are penetrable. Whoever masterminds these could just Google the terms including misspellings, and find the blogs this tactic has worked on, and direct the real spamming efforts towards those.

SEO enthusiasts or anyone with knowledge of spam tactics, please let me know what this was all about, because it’s left me really curious.

Happy Bluehost Customer

Today I had a great customer experience with Bluehost, who serves up this website and a couple others of mine. They emailed me about a security vulnerability in a file used in a WordPress plugin I have installed, and told me how to remove it. I wanted to make sure it was gone, so I opened up one of those live chat things, and the rep taught me how to use the File Manager in their control panel to search for files. The wait to chat with someone was less than 2 minutes.

It’s going to be way more common to find gripes about customer service, because it’s more likely you notice when something goes wrong than when something goes right. Plus, as a powerless consumer you sometimes feel your only recourse for gross mistreatment is posting a rant on the internet. I am plenty guilty of that. So to counterbalance things a bit, I just wanted to say a few kind words about Bluehost.

They are inexpensive, have way more features than I would ever need, have good customer support, and I can’t remember the last time the server went down. If you are looking for somewhere to host your website, please check them out.

New Theme

Welcome to MagicalTimeBean featuring the Standard Theme. I had never really been happy with any of the free WordPress themes, so every so often I go on a hunt for a premium theme. About two weeks ago I was on such a search, digging through the WP theme marketplace online, when my wife Mary pointed out that the theme wasn’t the problem, it was that I never update my site. She put it in a much more diplomatic way of course, and I launched a personal challenge to post once per day for 15 consecutive days. Then I would earn my precious new theme. Well, last night was the last one, and I have to say I’m proud that I’ve been able to keep it going. And so far I’m enjoying the Standard. It’s still kind of bare bones around here, but I’ll get the graphics back as soon as I can.

This morning I managed to clean up the Soulcaster and Soulcaster II pages. They have much more comprehensive links to reviews and other related stuff online, a new bio, and some other general tweaks.