Since July, my company has been trying to fix various sites over various issues.  Two, I shared WPengine and my issues with Adsense.   It feels like I am trying to repair a house of cards from the bottom while trying not to disturb the top.  We found two issues for every issue we think is fixed.  But it feels like things are stable.

..something is going to break, isn’t it?

At some point, I need to make a checklist of what needs to be fixed or checked regularly.  Last week, I found a site that dropped off search engines because something happened to the site map two years ago.  Google sent no notice, and we had not noticed search engine traffic drop since it was low compared to social media traffic.  But that can potentially affect Adsense’s revenue.  But speaking of ads, never mind, even though small, it is free traffic.   That fiasco from September with Google had derailed ad campaigns with Pinterest, and I am just now getting those ads back on track,  never mind the fun of fixing the Pinterest tags and getting the tracking right.  At the end, we removed it from the header and have it set up under Google Tags.  Only to realize that I forgot to publish the tags. Meanwhile, we are replacing ad units from Adsense with more up-to-date versions, but first, we test.

But while we fix things, we are also trying to enhance sites, ensure compliance with the GDPR and other European regulations, and replace Jpegs with WEBP Files.  Among other changes that are beyond my skill.  Keeping user experience in mind as we do all of this.

Google was not the only problem ad-wise.  Outbrain (hangs head in shame).  I commonly refer to as the tabloid section at the end of the article, much like that of a checkout section at a grocery store.  They decided to hijack the back button function to put up a full page of ads.  It took a month to get them to stop that.  Luckily, my completion has not figured that out.  Hopefully, with our diligence with Adsense, we can afford not to use them.

Then, Copytrack came along

When I was ready to take a few days off, they tried to make two claims against the same image.

Was there an issue of copyright?  No.

Was I a little too obsessed with them?  …maybe.  Their copyright claim was different than any I had seen, plus they took a lot longer to respond than any other company or individual.  But I have addressed that in previous posts; this is about getting sites back in order.

But that was not the only thing tCopytrack had done to cancel my vacation plans.  Copytrack invertly helped me, revealing a problem I thought had been solved a few years ago.  The removal of .png files.  The file they filed a claim against was a .png file.  Revealing that the person I had hired did not remove the .png files when replacing them with .jpeg.  This means that as we replaced .jpegs with WEBP Files, we are also cleaning the server of .png files.  So technically, Copytrack was not the only thing I was obsessing over.  I am hoping to fix that this month.

Why this site is a mess

A theme we had been using for a while had become unstable, which is why this site is a mess.  In this case, it became abundantly clear the theme we used on several sites, including this one, was abandoned.  It is never a good sign when the developer is saying something like this to almost every negative review in the last three months:

I was in the middle of tweaking the theme when I noticed its rating.  It was 4 stars… 4.75 on the sales page.  With my weird memory, it was 5 stars from our end, which led me to go to the reviews.  It looks like things started to fall apart a year ago, and by November, the themes became unstable for many users, such as us, and this blog.  As much as I want to gripe about the developer, I have to blame myself for not keeping track of the last major update, which was in December 2022.  several minor changes up til June, and that was just a Joomla update.   The old theme was Bimba, and I will not go into length about them.   But,  it should be pulled from sales, esspecially when there are significant changes to adapt to.  I sympathize with keeping a theme up-to-date,  as  I had themes built, and it is a lot of work to keep them working.  But, again, I am not excusing their abandonment.  It should have been announced they were ceasing updates.

Before we move on to another theme, we have to test the new theme on sites not in use.  I had forgotten I had offered up this site, among others, for testing before we applied changes to working sites.  As I never had the time or motivation to start this up.  As to how I got the motivation, I have Copytrack.com to thank.  As for time… lol, I slept less.  Those first three posts were made by an employee who hoped I would delve into Marvel stuff while providing some content for testing purposes.  While I praise her for taking the initiative, there were some inaccuracies.    /sigh no, just no… Adam Warlock is not an Eternal.  Dam you, MCU.  She was punished with reprints to read.  But, yes, maybe we can venture off into fandom. 

We are almost done… I hope

Web development is far more complex than when I first started in 1999, and I hope this is my last year doing it, handing the reigns off to other people who can do it far more efficiently than I can.  Hopefully, I can take this weekend off.