Morning
I woke up groggy and sore again today. The roommate woke up late again so no walk today. I think I need to get my exercise in the pool instead. It’ll be much cooler and much easier on the body. If I just spend an hour milling about in the pool that’ll be just as good as an hour walking, right?
Yesterday’s Analytics shows about what I’d expect, much lower traffic than normal. But at least I know that most of this traffic is legitimate. Bounce rate was kind of high, but hopefully the site redesign will help.
Google Ads has 3 new keywords for me, but only two really fit our site. The new strategy and max CPC for keywords made it so yesterday our ads only ran for about half a day. Maybe I should edit my campaign to make it only run during a certain time of day. Not sure how I can do that, but I’ve changed the bid strategy (again) to not aim for the top of the search page but instead aim for anywhere on the first page. Oh, there it is, now it’ll only run from 6am to 11pm.
Nothing new to report on the social media front. Roommate forgot to post to Instagram all week. No real change on Facebook since the first day of the most recent post. And of course, no Twitter strategy decided on yet. I think I’ll research that a bit today. So just a tiny amount of research shows the best approach is to engage the community through twitter. I was hoping there might be a bit of a better “set and forget” approach, but I guess that’s not the case.
It seems that there’s so much more work to be done when it comes to promoting the business through social media. To really make it work I’m going to have to dedicate some real time every single day to engage the audience. I’m pretty sure I’ve mentioned it before, but I think Gary Vaynerchuk’s $1.80 Strategy to Instagram is the best method for social media in general. I just need to learn to focus on that in time.
I really think we’ll need to get a Pinterest going too. I just have no clue how it works. Maybe a little research is in order. I was gonna do some reading, but the internet today is just garbage! I have my own personal Pinterest account, but I’ve never used it. No idea where all the stuff comes from that I see when I go there and my pins are completely empty. Maybe that’s where I should start, play with that to learn before doing something for the company.
At the very least I’m going to create a Pinterest account for the company for later use. My god that was hard to do with the internet issues we’re having right now. I’m still not sure if I’ve confirmed my email address because the link they sent gives an error. Well, that’s as setup as it can be, now I just need to find content.
Seems, Pinterest is a bit unfriendly. You can’t link their business profiles to a Facebook Page or have multiple admins. I’ve added my first pin, the blog post Charlie made about her SNUBA experience when we all went to Cooper Island. Started following her too since she’s got an active social media game. I need to come up with ideas for boards, so far all I have is “Awesome Activities” and I don’t know if I’m happy with that even.
Wish Granted
We headed out to a nearby villa to drop off some pillows and pick up the cleaning supplies we left yesterday. Wouldn’t you know it? A scorpion! Took a few pictures, hopefully they turn out well for Instagram. Seems like nature is listening to my requests, ask for birds, get birds, ask for scorpion, get scorpion. Now I what I’d REALLY like is to get a nice picture of that red moth I see all the time.
Party Prep
Tomorrow is to be the fabled “Bubbles and Brunch” gathering at our house. In preparation, we went shopping, and boy did we go shopping. We hit up every grocery store on this side of the island. Each store had something we were looking for. At our last stop there was a sign for a local bake sale happening right that moment.
As we pulled into the local community college’s parking lot they had just arrived to unload. We helped them setup a little bit while eying the merchandise. Once everything was out, we ended up with a tray of cinnamon buns for tomorrow and a guava tart for me. They also had locally made drinks so I had to get a bottle of the mango juice. It is absolutely delicious!
Afternoon
It took a while to recover from the workout of shopping and unloading the car. After, I went back to the world of Pinterest, first by trying to verify my email address. Turns out either the email sent was broken or my mail system broke it. The link to verify is a relative URL and didn’t contain the actual top-level domain. I tried to guess it was just meant to contain the standard Pinterest address, so I hope I was able to hack together the correct address.
Next up is domain verification, which I received an email telling me it failed. I verified I had uploaded the file as requested, but I guess WordPress is sending that to a 404 even though the file exists. So instead I hacked into the header and dropped their little code in and resubmitted to Pinterest for verification. No idea why it’s erroring but the header meta tag should fix it.
Looking at the 404 logs in Redirection they indicate what the bots are likely doing on my site. They’re trying to find exploits they can use to hack the site or use it for their own malicious purposes. Seems the two things they’re most interested in is finding a way to upload to the site and finding a way to send emails from the site.
I guess I should look into a way to IP block. Digging deeper it I found that it would be best to do it at the host level. Now to figure out how to do that on Network Solutions. And just like everything else they don’t make it easy. I guess maybe I’ll find a nice way to use the .htaccess to redirect them somewhere annoying, or maybe waste their time and/or bandwidth. Since they’re already getting 404ed it’ll be okay.
I decided to look into it on this site and only one bot so far. There were a couple redirections I needed to add from some keywords I changed at one point. Fixed and tested those really quick.
Sleeping Dogs – Spoiler Warning
The roommate sent me to my room again so she could sun, which is fine by me because that means more Sleeping Dogs! I started out by helping Winston’s mother get a bit of revenge. I shot my way through dozens of armed assailants to get to Johnny Ratface. Bastard took off in a car flanked by thugs trying to take me out, but in the end I got his sorry ass back to Mrs. Chu, and she had her way with him.
After that it was time for the boys to meet their new boss, me! Seems Big Smile Lee wasn’t so happy about that though. He sent his men after us and shot up the club. Eventually we were able to get out of there and I tracked down Ponytail only for him to get away by sheer luck. I was able to escape the police with the help of another Red Pole, Broken Nose Jiang. Seems she wants my help taking over in place of Uncle Po if he doesn’t recover.
/Spoiler
Minecraft
I spent a good bit of time in Minecraft digging out more stone around my skeleton grinder. This thing is so much more efficient than my zombie grinder! I’m able to keep my sword fully repaired while maintaining my pick while I dig. The biggest issue is that I need to setup some kind of sorting system. I’d like to have a large storage area for arrows and bones while discarding all the bows I get. It shouldn’t be too hard to setup, but it might require some water flow.
I could setup the hopper to put everything in a dropper which goes into a water flow that has three sets of hoppers. One for arrows, one for bones, and one for everything else. the arrows and bones then go into a chest stack while the bows get dropped into lava. I can use bubble streams to push the items to the top of the stacks and into hoppers which then fill the items down in to the chests.
I still have a lot of digging to go before I’m ready to setup the catch/sort system though. Once I’ve got the area dug out to my satisfaction I’ll be able to decide where everything will go. One area for storage, another will have enchanting, a third for brewing ,and the final will be the nether portal. I will also have a path near the nether portal that leads to the witch hut area.
Evening
Tonight’s dinner was another round of steak and potatoes. Strip loin rubbed in salt and pepper, drizzled with Worcestershire and olive oil, and grilled to perfection. Add a side of crispy baked potatoes with butter, cheese, and sour cream and you’re in heaven. Don’t forget to garnish the meal with a splash of Dark ‘n’ Stormy!
Killjoys – Spoiler Warning
Aw yeah baby, more Killjoys! Let’s see what’s in store now that the old Johnny is back. . . . Of course the kids is gonna grow fast, we already knew that was coming. I want to go to Utopia! Oh boy, those dolls are gonna be trouble.
Is Pip taking the kid on his own or is it spider-Pip? Be good Pip, fight it! Oh my, is there a Delle Seyah and Johnny love interest brewing? He really does need a woman. Glad they finally figured out what Khlyen was trying to do.
A Quiet Place – More Spoilers
After that I chose to watch the movie A Quiet Place. It was really good but there were just a few things about it that made no sense. First off, if you knew sound attracted them you would also know to use it against them. Sure they used fireworks and that egg timer, but why aren’t there speakers setup somewhere outside the house a ways to draw them away? Hell, that would make them so easy to trap (as long as you had something strong enough to hold them in).
Then there’s that fucking nail. They walk around barefoot, there’s no way they would have had a nail bent like that on the only safe place you can step on that stair. Even without it sticking straight out, the way it was before she pulled her bag free it would hurt like hell to step on!
