Simone van Hattem

Barcamp Perth 2.0 is tomorrow (Saturday 10 May). I hope you’ve heard about it elsewhere, otherwise this is late notice..

BarCamp is an ad-hoc unconference born from the desire for people to share and learn in an open environment.
BarCamp is a relaxed community event with demonstrations, discussions, presentation and interaction from attendees. If you have something to contribute or the desire to learn you are welcome at BarCamp. The beauty of BarCamp is it is free.

Put your name down on the Barcamp website if you plan to attend!

Silicon Breach is a game that has been developed by pervasive gaming company Giant Dice, to be played during the day. Register now, it’s sure to be fun!

And tonight we have PTUB 3.9 (Perth Twitter Underground Brigade) (doubles as pre-barcamp meetup) at the Melbourne Hotel, and tomorrow night PTUB 4.0, a post barcamp gathering at the Royal Hotel in East Perth.

See the PTUB blog for more info.

A geeky weekend indeed…

Long overdue I got my own domain name!

Now to actually use it…..

Meetups and the like that might be relevant to you if you’re online in Perth…

Perth Bloggers Meetup - no longer on meetup.com but on Facebook and upcoming.org
Next one is next week, Wednesday 20 February from 7pm at the Brass Monkey in Northbridge.

Perth Twitter Underground Brigade (facebook and Twitter)
First PTUB to be held on 28 February at the Brisbane Hotel from 6pm.

MODM - Online and Digital Media (Perth facebook group)
First monthly event to be announced soon

Australian Web Industry Association/Port80
Monthly meetup for peeps working in the web industry.

Matt tagged me with the 8 things you didn’t know about me meme, and yonks ago Gary tagged me for 8 random things… so this will be it. I don’t believe in fairies, so stuff the rules. Don’t know why I haven’t done this before, I love the word random…

1. I was in the circus, age 10 to 14. Circus Freefall in Bridgetown… We did shows at schools and festivals in and around Bridgetown, and once at a tourist convention in Fremantle, and stayed the night at Bizircus headquarters in the Old Customs house! I can juggle 3 balls/clubs, ride a unicycle and do some other random stuff. I hate stiltwalking. I’ve also done a bit of theatre, but I’ve never been a performer. I always preferred working back stage.

2. I have scanned all our family photos from 1987 (when we moved to Australia, I’m Dutch) until 1996 (when we left Australia) and some more. See flickr… I enjoy linking to them when I’m telling random stories ;)

3. I’ve lived in 12 different houses for 10 months or longer, a migrant centre (in Perth) for 7 weeks, and a campervan for 4 months going around Australia (doing distance education for year 1). Two of the places were remote communities in north western Australia; Bidyadanga (La Grange Mission) and Nullagine. There are many random things from those periods…!!

4. The first concert I attended was BoyzIIMen at the Entertainment Centre (I’m only admitting this because it was actually my brother who was a fan at the time!), the last was the BDO with Rage Against the Machine. The ones in between have been mixed. One of the highlights was Pinkpop 2000, with Pearl Jam, Live, Muse, The Counting Crows and more.

5. I’m more of a n00b on the web than you think… I’ve never used ebay. I hadn’t even heard of blogs until mid 2005 (and was appalled I hadn’t!!) . I’d never used instant messaging at all until last year. And I’m sure I have more shocking stuff that I can’t think of right now…

But I now hack wordpress occasionally, so apparently that makes me a geek. I think Geek in Training is more appropriate. Just don’t call me a nerd… even if I did win the Library Award when graduating from primary school…

6. My favourite colour is purple. Don’t ask me why this blog is orange and snot. My second favourite colour is blue, and I’d mention black if it was a colour.

7. I’ve never had to stay in hospital (well, except when I was born, I was too early). Worst thing that’s happened to me is some broken bone in my elbow, which happened when I fell of my bike because mum and I were biking next to each other and our handle bars intertwined…duh. Was the day before starting high school in the Netherlands, so it wasn’t just my aussie accent which made me stand out, unfortunately.

8. I have never drunk coffee, and don’t need caffeine to stay up late.

But on that note, I guess I better act normal and go to bed now. Oops, too late.

You can all go tag yourself :p

Ok…. this happened months ago now… I’ve been a bit busy! Most of this post was written straight afterwards though, and it’s a bit of a ramble.

To cut a long story (the first bit of the story!) short: Google took EnjoyPerth out of their index on 16 October. I couldn’t see anything wrong. There wasn’t a message in Webmaster Central, and no one on the Webmaster Help Group could see anything wrong. Eventually figured it must be the Text Link ads I was selling in the footer. Wanted to wait till end of the month to take them out, so I still got paid…

Duncan Riley posted about my issue on TechCrunch on 29 October, after we chatted about it at Podcamp Perth. The article was about Google penalizing sites for selling text link ads, and the fact that we rely so much on Google, which obviously isn’t good (at least 80% of my hits come from Google).

But then someone in the comments spotted there was a whole heap of hidden spam links in the footer of enjoyperth! It had been hacked, and probably weeks earlier. That would explain why the google bot decided not to index it! Unfortunately the google bot didn’t let me know, there wasn’t a message in Webmaster Central! :(

Anyway, at least that solved the mystery why this all started. And the post even got Matt Cutt’s attention! If we removed those links and filed a reinclusion request, we should be back in the index soon! Phew!

It was about 11pm at this stage, but Pascal found the links in the mail-class.php file, in the wp-includes folder. And there was another bit of code in the general-template in the same folder. He removed all that and the links were gone.

But, the following afternoon at around 2pm, another comment on the TechCrunch posts alerted us to the fact that there were hidden spam links in the footer again!!

All through this time I’m getting a lot of support, help and tips from friends! Long live twitter, heh!

A few people had suggested upgrading to 2.2.3 first (hadn’t done it yet, cause needed sleep, and have a day job!), so that’s what I did (though I tried replacing just that class-mail.php, without consulting anyone first, and I think that may have messed things up more…)

So I backed everything up.

Removed class-mail.php in wp-includes folder. Fatal error. Inserted class-phpmailer.php from new wordpress download. Still fatal error. Put backup of class-mail.php (with the spam links still in it) back in. Still fatal error. (ok, so it was a long shot, but I thought it couldn’t hurt, and I could just put the file I backed up back. But that obviously didn’t work).

Went ahead with upgrade. Deleted everything except config file and wp-content. Upgrade successful, can see header etc again. But still fatal error and no content.

The fatal error was < ?php if (ls_getinfo(”isref”)) {?> on line 28 in index.php in the 3k2 theme file. That messed everything up. So I went back and deleted that and the whole bit underneath it, which was the code for the Landing Sites plugin.

Now the home page was alright, but individual posts were messed up, because the footer was missing from them. I finally figure that the code for the Related Posts plugin is messing that up on the single posts. So deleted that code.

A day later I checked the kids.enjoyperth.net site (which I don’t update..), and that had the same issue, so upgraded that too. My other blogs (not sub domains of enjoyperth) are fine.

I’ve enabled most of the plugins again (after upgrading to the latest version), but haven’t bothered with the Landing Sites and Related posts ones. Maybe one day when I find more time and motivation I’ll look at them again.

So that’s it. Just upgrading to 2.2.3 made the spam links disappear!

I still don’t know how this all could have happened in the first place, and I still need to upgrade to 2.3…

Aside from that, all’s well that ends well I guess. Within a day I was back in google though have gone from a pagerank 4 to 2 (but seem to be in the same position in results (or even higher), and am getting more hits than ever (though that’s just the normal growth I think)).

So I think that’s it! Thanks to everyone for their support, especially Duncan/ Techcrunch, Kay, Skribe, Kate, Matt, Grum and Myles!

And thank you to Google for getting EnjoyPerth back in the index very quickly, though I do hope you can get your webmaster notifications working better, so webmasters know what’s wrong when their site is taken out of the index!

For one and a half weeks now, Enjoy Perth hasn’t shown up in google, at all. There’s no way of finding the site on google in any way, doesn’t matter what you search for or how many pages you scroll through, it’s just not indexed at all. Obviously I get a lot of hits from google, meaning my traffic has practically slowed to a halt!

This is what it says at Google Webmaster Tools:

Home page crawl: Googlebot last successfully accessed your home page on Oct 23, 2007.

Index status: No pages from your site are currently included in Google’s index. Indexing can take time. You may find it helpful to review our information for webmasters and webmaster guidelines. [?]

I am still indexed in Yahoo and live.com search.

There are a number of things it could be, but none seem like they would be enough to not index the site at all…

The fact that I have text link ads (in the footer). Google says you should report paid links. I guess they do have a point, the ‘advertisers’ on enjoyperth are there to get page rank, well, I think at least most of them. There are a lot of reports around the blogosphere (and apparently it’s now been confirmed), that this is the reason many sites have lost PR. But, that was in the last week. My site stopped being indexed in the week before that.

The fact that http://www.enjoyperth.net and http://enjoyperth.net don’t point to each other (or the one to the other)

I’ve gone through all the Google webmaster guidelines, posted a message in the google webmaster group (no useful responses), and went through the webmaster tools. One tool is the ‘Analyze robots.txt’ tool and when I run that it says:

Allowed by line 2: Disallow: Detected as a directory; specific files may have different restrictions

I have no idea what that’s supposed to mean…!?!

Also in the Webmaster Tools, it shows me that there’s a number of http:// errors (where I’ve linked wrong), and some unreachable urls (it says the network was unreachable, all the recent ones are links to the calendar). But no where does it say that this is sooo bad that you have to fix it (though I should of course, if I could figure out how ;) )

So at the moment I still think the most likely cause is those text link ads, or it’s just random and will be fixed soon…

I’m going to remove the text link ads at the end of the month, because I don’t want to lose the tiny bit of money I have earned this month! :D If that doesn’t help, I’m need to try harder to find someone I can contact at google.

Podcamp Perth happened today (well, most of it), and for the first Podcamp held in Australia, it was a great success!

Hmmm, what to say…. I had a great time, was good to speak to people face to face, I learned lots and received some great advice and motivation! Thanks guys! :)

On Flickr: my photos and the group pool.

Here are some blog posts I’ve found around the place already:

Nick Hodge - Podcamp Perth 07 + Geek Stories (vids): Six and Podcamp Perth + Ross Buncle

Cameron Reilly - Podcamp Perth 07, and Final impressions

Librarians Matter (Kathryn Greenhill) - Blog Fodder

Luke from australianblogs.com.au - The who’s who Podcamp Day1

Loyd (blog down?)

Matt Vapor - Podcamp 2007 Perth

Tama Leaver - Podcamp Perth + Podcamp Perth wrap up

Michael Minutillo (Wolfbyte) - Podcamp Perth

KerryJ - several posts

Stilgherrian - Podcamp Perth First Impressions

Duncan Riley - Podcamp Perth 07

Ruminations (Constance) - Podcamp + Pondering Podcamp

Man with no blog (Gary Barber) - OpenID and beyond

Nick Cowie - The Social Network in your pocket

Scouta Blog (Richard Giles) - Podcamp Perth a huge success (and on his resurrected personal blog)

Adam Purcell - Podcamp Perth

Rene LeMerle at Gooruze - Podcamp Perth

The Boomtown Rap - Podcamp Perth 07 – Initial Impressions of a Bewildered Non-geek + Straight from the Cerebral Hard Drive - Ross Buncle is also in a Geek Story by Nick Hodge

Mobile Fono (David) - Exclusive Interview with Mr. Podcamp

Nick Cowie - Podcamp Perth 07

A Different Tune (Stewart Greenhill) - Podcamp Perth 2007

Bronwen Clune - Podcamp Perth - Putting our geek powers to good use

Thanks must go to organisers Bronwen Clune, Richard Giles, Rene LeMerle, Tama Leaver and Myles Eftos.

The sponsors: Microsoft, the Australian Web Industry Association, Gooruze, PerthNorg, Radharc and ivinyl.

And the initiators: Adam Purcell and Jared Madden.

Right, that’ll be enough linking for now!

Tomorrow (ehhh, ok, later on today) there’s going to be some meetups around Perth. Checkout the wiki for details.

Technorati tag: podcampperth07

It’s happening, Perth won the vote (by heaps!)! And it’s in a week and a half!

PodCamp is a FREE New Media community UnConference. PodCamp Perth is the first time this international conference will be held down under, helping to bring new media to the forefront.

Saturday 27 October is the ‘unconference’ day at Central Tafe in East Perth, with lots of sessions, presentations, discussions, demonstrations all to do with ‘new media’, so blogging, podcasting, social media and networks (think facebook, flickr), etc! Have a look at the list already there, which is certainly going to be added too! There’s also some suggestions at the top.

Sunday the 28th will be a more casual networking day, to meet up with like minded groups; bloggers, podcasters, twitters, entrepreneurs, photographers etc

Put your name on the register, so the organisers have some idea of numbers! (like myself, who’s going to *try* and organise lunch…!!)

Speaking of blogging and networking, tonight (Wednesday) is the monthly Perth bloggers meetup in Northbridge! See you there, and we’ll talk more about Podcamp!

I’ve already written about the WA Web Awards, but now PerthNow has started the People’s Choice Award. So get voting!

Do I regret not entering EnjoyPerth? Yes I do! I have no idea if it would have got through to the finalists, but we should have at least tried to get it up to scratch… (the main thing stopping me was that it wasn’t validating, and I didn’t really know what to do about it!).

In other news, the week that the WA Web Awards are being presented (17 August) is turning into WA Web (Geek!) Week, as on Wednesday (15th) the Velvet Lounge is hosting WebJam. Read more about it at Port80.

I don’t know if the bloggers meetup will go ahead, but don’t expect many people there, most of the regulars will be at Web Jam.

Recently came across this website thanks to someone on Twitter: http://podcamp.info/

Somewhat similar to Barcamp (which I willl one day write a post about, had a great day!!), I think it would be great to have in Perth, so go and register your interest!!

podcamp cover the topics:
- podcasting and blogging
- newmedia development and startups
- business newmedia marketing
- social networking
- emerging technologies
- creative social media (music and art)
- using newmedia content