Wednesday, March 22, 2017

Nick V's Hedge, Site Badges/buttons and Nasty Bugs


If you are wondering about the new background to [SiteHoundSniffs], it is rows of [Nick V’s Hedge].  The rest of this mess is an attempt to connect the dots.

I have been fairly open about Grayson not being all that impressed with the appearance of our site directory.  Quite obviously, my best efforts have not been making his tail wag.  So, it especially stung when I received a reply to an email I had sent to a particularly-proper English lady about displaying her linked site badge/button.  She started off with saying that I really did not need to ask for permission, and then she went on about the fact that she would not normally want a link to her site on such a woefully outdated and homely site as SiteHoundSniffs.com.  To be perfectly honest about it, I was a little miffed and removed all traces of her site from our site directory.

As I was trying to go asleep a little later, the thought about using a high-definition image of mowed grass (in honor of Reenie, Arlynda’s long-gone love of her life, who needed a patch of grass to go on) crept in.  The first thing I went to do after getting out of bed six hours later was find such an image.  I quickly found a suitable one and made it the new background.  When Grayson saw it, he gave me one of his looks and pranced out of the room to leave me a present in a strategic place (he has never required a patch of grass to go on).

Plan B had to formulated, but my best efforts were getting in the way again.  Miraculously (I am really not joking about that) the solution was already in hand.  For after I read the emailed reply from the particularly-proper English lady and took action, I sent an email to Nick V about displaying the linked badge/button to his [Floral Friday Fotos] site and asking permission to display the linked headers for his [Melbourne Fresh Daily], [NixPages] and [NixPixMix] sites.  In his reply, he suggested that I might want to also include his [My Desktop Daily].  While going through this site to determine which categories it should be listed, I came upon his high-definition photograph of a hedge, and Grayson did his [Whirling Dervish] dance (he is always lurking about) to signify his delight.  For Yorkies feel right at home around hedgerows.
   
Linked site badges/buttons?  It was brought to my attention that I had been ignoring the fact that site owners with a linked badge/button wanted backlinks to bolster their search engine rankings, and displaying them avoided having to always obtain permission first before displaying a linked site header.  This made me literally grunt, “Duh,” to myself.  For I had already been clued in on the absolute truth of the matter truly being that most could not care less about whether or not their linked headers were displayed on SiteHoundSniffs, which included not caring enough to actually give permission.  So, site owners with a linked badge/button are sent an email informing them of what I have done and given the option to have their site removed.

If you are wondering about backlinks bolstering search engine rankings, there are several things that go into getting to the top of the results list when you search for something with Google, Bing, Yahoo and the other search engines.  One of them is the amount of quality backlinks a site has, and according to the research I have done, SiteHoundSniffs is a quality backlink site.  What determines a quality backlink is whether your link seems to belong on a site, such as links to other pet sites on a pet site, and since SiteHoundSniffs is a site directory, links to all legitimate sites most definitely belong.

Another thing that was recently brought to my attention is that I have been lax at making as sure as possible that a site is safe.  For a little notification thingy shows up on our Google Chrome address bar when an unauthorized script or Adobe Flash Player tries to download something onto our computer.  Our BitDefender anti-virus program also gives a notification when something funky is going on, and the image below is a screenshot of this.


In all fairness, one has to be looking for these notifications, and I have been focusing on other things.  Therefore, I am now going back through all of the sites listed to see how many I may have missed for the benefit of visitors with lesser anti-virus protection.  I am sure that there are not many, but it only takes one nasty bug getting through to make for a really bad day.  Yeah, most of the nasty bugs out there these days only seek to steal your information—not shut down your computer, but those are the kind that can stay on a computer for a long time before being detected and removed.  When you have one, you can change your passwords to sensitive sites all you want and the bad guys will still know what your passwords are.  Sigh.

P.S.: Nick V's hedge proved to be a little too dark to make for reading ease of the text to the [Home] and [Littermates] pages.  So, a high-definition image  of a New Zealand cloud formation from [WallpaperCave] now serves as the site's background image.  I hope you like it.

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14 comments:

  1. Wow, you certainly have your work cut out for you. I admire your perseverance.

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    1. Thanks for stopping by, my dear Silver Fox!!! Yeah, just think how much trouble I could get into if I felt better?

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  2. If you are playing around with your site you might want to consider changing the color of the text Ay Yi Yi is that hard on the eyes (as well as being hard to read).

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    1. Thanks for stopping by, my dear Grace!!! I just increased the font size and the color to a light sky blue on the home page. Would you go see if this is better for you and get back to me about it?

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    2. Nooo - Try white (and the font size was fine)

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    3. Thanks for stopping by again, my dear Grace!!! Okay, I give up for now. The text color has been changed to white. Since it is so hard to work in the text editor box, more changes may happen much sooner than later.

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  3. Thank you for the update. Good luck.

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    1. Thanks for stopping by, my dear Martin!!! I hope you are doing as well as possible.

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  4. Trying to figure all of that out would make my head spin. Maybe it's just me but I find it difficult to read the text on the green background.

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    1. Thanks for stopping by, my dear Ann!!! Thank you also for letting me know that. Even though it is easy for me to read (with a 23" high-definition monitor cranked up to 150% and sitting with my face less than a foot in front of the screen at times) I suspected that it might still be hard to read for others. Therefore, I will be working toward making another change.

      I am using a WordPress plug-in, DocExpresso, to get the special text-effect on the titles and "Additional Text-Links", as well as the yellow highlighting on other pages. It converts MS Word documents to where they can be used with WordPress, but when I made-up a very nice page with a bright-blue text and parchment background for the home page text, the parchment background could not be converted. Sigh.

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  5. What a rude woman. I wouldn't call her "proper" at all. Glad I won't run across her site here anyhow! Bugs are so scary, thanks for making double sure for us.

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    1. Thanks for stopping by, my dear Jenny!!! In the spirit of full disclosure, I may have been employing a bit of sarcasm in my description of her. She emailed me a couple of days later and told me that removing her site was my loss--not hers. She also said that she was just trying to help. I emailed back that if she truly wanted to help people, she would do well to be a little less insulting. I have not heard a peep back. Sigh.

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  6. I, and I am sure many others too, think your site is lovely Jerry.

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    1. Thanks for stopping by, my dear Brenda!!! Be assured that I greatly appreciate the encouragement. I have changed the appearance of the site twice since this article was published. I liked the New Zealand clouds background more, but I hated the obvious repeat of the image. So, I have settled on the white brick wall background (at least for now).

      Alas, it goes to prove that I am slipping back too much into looking at things naturally. For the absolute truth of the matter truly is that the success of the site rests solely in our Heavenly Father's hands--regardless of what it looks like. The appearance is an important part of it, of course, but my serious concerns are shameful. Sigh.

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Since the Blogger spam filter has been found sorely lacking lately, I will start moderating comments. Be assured that I am only interested in deleting spam. So, if you feel a need to take me to task over something—even anonymously, go ahead and let 'er rip, and I will publish it as soon as I can.