Wennington School (3)

I am happy to report that my new domain, wenningtonschool.com, now comes up on Page 1 of the results of a search for Wennington School at Google. At present, it is in third place, behind two listings for the "official" site, which means it has almost certainly been noticed by someone from the defunct institution. I wonder whether there will be any kind of reaction to it — any suggestion that I have "broken ranks" or somehow "let the side down". After all, one of the school's sustaining fallacies was that, though not perfect, it was as close to the ideal as any school could hope to be. And such fallacies die hard.

(Originally published at http://nzsf.com on March 4, 2007.)

Wennington School (2)

As I noted in my last entry in this column, I acquired the domain name wenningtonschool.com in November of 2006. I acquired it through my account with registrydomains.net, and set it so that it pointed to a page headed Wennington School: A Memoir of the Fifties on my nzsf.com website. The result? Google picked up only the link to the page from my nzsf.com index page, and placed the link on Page 3 (when I last looked) of the results of a search for Wennington School. In other words, it did not record the existence of the domain. Clearly, for the domain to be listed by Google, I had to have it hosted by my website provider. I therefore upgraded my website account to corporate level and transferred the wenningtonschool.com domain as soon as the mandatory 60 days had elapsed since initial registration. All being well, Google will now record my Wennington School website as a site in its own right — and place it on Page 1 of its results.

(Originally published at http://nzsf.com on January 29, 2007.)

Wennington School

More than four months have passed since I last updated this column. But they have been four months in which I have done many things on the internet. For a start, I have acquired another domain name — wenningtonschool.com — which points to a memoir of life at a coeducational boarding school in Yorkshire, England, in the 1950s. It's such an interesting story — even if I say so! — that I can't think why I didn't write it earlier. For some reason, Google still hasn't picked it up, though Yahoo! and Alta Vista had when I checked them the other day. I always thought that Google picked up almost everything, almost immediately. My site will provide a little "competition" for the "official" Wennington School website, which you will find if you do a Google search.

(Originally published at http://nzsf.com on November 26, 2006.)

Java/ByteVerify virus

I was a lttle disconcerted last night ( July 16, 2006 ) to find that I had eight files infected by the Java/ByteVerify virus. Goodness knows where I had picked them up, as I hadn't been doing any reckless automatic surfing. I was even more disconcerted to find that my AVG Free Edition anti-virus software couldn't remove them. What does one do in such a situation? Five years ago, when I was still a nervous navigator in cyberspace, I would have panicked, disconnected my hard drive, and taken it in to my good friend Warren at the computer shop, who would have removed the offending files for me — for a fee. ( I'll never forget the faint, derisory smile that crept across his face when I confessed to him once that I had stuffed up my computer by changing my cursor into the head of a cat. ) But now, I do the sensible thing: I do a Google search for the virus in question, and see how other people have got rid of it. In no time at all, I had the course of action to follow: Go to Control Panel, double-click on the Java icon to open it, click Delete files, leave the boxes checked, and then click OK. A subsequent AVG scan showed that the infected files had gone — with a few other things, I think. Hopefully, I haven't lost anything important.

(Originally published at nzsf.com on July 17, 2006.)

Blog transfer complete

I HAVE finally completed the transfer of my mental illness blog at friendcircles.com to nzsf.blogspt.com. Although I will continue to maintain my blog at FriendCircles, I will give it a subsidiary role. I have also spent a lot of time recently in the political discussion forums at yahoo.com, where I have been trying to inject a little sanity into the debates. One can enter these forums at any time of the day, on any day of the week, and find male Americans advocating, in the most unsubtle terms, the extermination of all Arabs and/or Muslims in general. And often, in their next breath, you find them describing Islam as a "violent religion". The irony is staggering, yet apparently completely lost on those pumped up with testosterone. For the record, I would also like to say that I cannot recall a single posting by a Muslim that has called for the extermination of all Americans and/or Christians in general.

(Originally published at nzsf.com on July 4, 2006.)

The dreaded warning

AS soon as I saw the subject line of the email — Google AdSense Account Status — I knew what it contained: "It has come to our attention that invalid clicks or impressions have been generated on the Google ads on your site(s) through users of third-party programmes paid or provided with other incentives to visit your
site. Such programmes may include, but are not limited to, auto-surf, pay-to-surf, pay-to-read or pay-to-click sites. As a reminder, any method of generating invalid clicks or impressions is strictly prohibited by our Terms & Conditions and Programme Policies." I know what triggered this warning: In the previous few days, I had sent about 100 hits to nzsf.com from autohits.dk. Well, I've learned my lesson. I am now sending all my autosurf hits to adilbookz.com, which means that, if you reach nzsf.com, you have found your way there as a result of some deliberate action you have taken — unless you are one of the handful of surfers I send there, from time to time, from SponsorHits.

(Originally published at nzsf.com on May 28, 2006.)

Website design at nzsf.com

THE experts on website design all say the same thing: Maintain a consistent design/layout from page to page. In other words, don't have any given page looking completely different from the pages that precede and follow it. Well, I'm coming perilously close to breaking that rule, because I simply can't resist the urge to be creative — to try new things and, by doing so, to raise my skills to a higher level. My creativity was given a further boost recently when I stumbled on the memorial website of Candy Wei, and was impressed by the quality of her artwork. Some of that would look good on my site, I said to myself, as I fired off an email requesting permission to use a few of the pictures. Somewhat to my surprise, I received a reply the next day, saying that Candy's mother was agreeable to my using as many pictures as I liked. I was elated, and immediately went to work on new designs for the pages that carry the first three (Manawatu Standard) articles on Tessa's case.

(Originally published at nzsf.com on April 17, 2006.)