Morning
Another morning without the walk. I do kinda wish I had more warning so I could sleep in. I’ve gotten a few subscribers here, pretty sure they’re bots though. I may have to add some kind of captcha to the new user form beyond what’s already there.
Analytics for the company site indicate that users who visit from facebook are better. They are less likely to bounce and spend more time on the site overall. The change I made to prevent the bots from showing up on my reports doesn’t seem to be working. Maybe I just haven’t given it enough time.
I’ve been doing some A/B testing on my Google Ads. I have two sets of two ads and each set has a different landing page. I want to see which landing page performs better with which ad. Unfortunately, I’m having a hard time figuring out the bounce rate on each specific ad. I can see it for the ad group though.
So far it seems like the ad group pointing to the home page is performing better. There is a lower bounce rate and more pages per session. I will leave it running longer though, because it’s only been setup for about a week.
I’m still looking into other WordPress themes for the company site. So far I’ve mostly played with Hestia. I did install a few others for testing, notably Cressida, Pakwall, Master Business, and Radon. None of them did quite what I want. Now I’m looking into other options, so far I’ve found Winsome, Hueman, Gaga Lite (and/or Gaga Corp), and ParallaxSome.
Basically, what I’m looking for in a home page for the site is a responsive theme that has a featured slider with call to action buttons in the header and either a widget area over that, or to the side. Oh, and parallax would be nice too, people like that. Should be pretty simple, right? Oh yeah, and it needs to be free.
I could just make the villa search different, instead of using the built-in one. Maybe customize a form that is horizontal, although I think there is a horizontal option for the existing one too. Not only that, but the existing form uses some kind of Ajax to submit a soft query before you actually search to tell you how many results you’ll get based on your criteria.
I’ve been using Elementor (free version) for some things, and looking at the pro version, it might allow me to do what I want with the theme. Problem is, there’s no demo I can find to play with. I’ve reached out to them, hopefully they have something I can play with.
We made our usual rounds, stopping by the villas to see how things are. First we stopped by Casa Asombrosa to check out the windows as well as cleanup that was previously done. Next stop was Somoya, we just had some new doors put on the shed and it looks great .
We also stopped by Southern Gables to do a quick check, and then Grape Tree to make sure the shingles were still there. Our last stop was Waters Edge Villa where we found they were installing some doors and windows. Unfortunately, the style of door they’re installing doesn’t really seem to be right. They’re three section doors, but only have two tracks, so you can only really have a single section open at a time. The doors are great , but it would be so much better if they could open more.
Somewhere along the way I lost my Misfit Flash fitness tracker again, this time likely for good. Unfortunately, the design is just bad, the band just doesn’t hold the tracker well and I’ve had it fall out so many times. It’s possible I might find it eventually at one of the villas, but if I don’t it’s no big loss as it was inexpensive and I’ve had it for years.
Afternoon
After eating a quick sandwich for lunch, I got a couple more emails about new user registrations to this site. That makes 8 new users. Looking at all the accounts though, I’m starting to think they’re bots because they all have a similar pattern to them. Every single one has a 3 part email domain, and most have random numbers in the username.
Yeah, I’ve confirmed they’re bots. Every single one of those 3 part email domains goes back to the same damned “Catch All Box” web page hosted by the same provider. Not sure what the point of the bots is, but those accounts have been deleted and I’ve installed a plugin that should hopefully prevent future bot accounts.
Only one of the users didn’t follow the pattern of the rest so I’m not deleting it. Instead I forced a password change and if it’s legit user (which I still doubt), I’m so sorry for doing this to you, but hopefully resetting your password won’t be too hard!
A little further research into the bots suggests they’re some stupid black hat SEO garbage. Likely they would eventually fill my comments with spam that links to some other WordPress site that wants to boost their search rank through whatever means necessary. I’m actually glad I’ve already (hopefully) dealt with it and added some more anti-bot protection.
I decided today I would play some more Minecraft on my Nintendo Switch. I started off by visiting the Nether for some much-needed nether quartz. My build ideas so far involve a lot of it. I’ve got myself a villager trading building that I’m expanding.
Afterwards, I moved and improved my villager breeding area . I made the breeding area bigger to allow for more crops, hopefully speeding up the breeding. It will also make getting good villagers out a lot easier too. I’m using 50 doors total which should allow for 17 villagers and I currently only have 12. Hmm, I think I’m going to need to add more doors.
Evening
I spent my evening in my room as usual. Tonight is another episode of The 100 and more YouTube.
Spoiler Warning
I love the battle at the gorge! Taking out a sonic cannon with an arrow? Nice shot! Ugh, Clark just listen to her and fucking kill him. . . Dumbass! Why didn’t they just shoot down the thing with their missiles as soon as they had control of the ship?
I wonder now if this is the end of the season it just a mid-season break. Pretty sure it’s the end, would be weird skipping ahead 10 years in the middle of a season. Oh, looks like it isn’t even the end of the episode, oops.
Oh boy, a whole new planet that has been populated for 100 years? That won’t end in disaster and bad decisions, no way!
/Spoiler
Afterwards I watched Etho’s latest Minecraft video, followed by Vintagebeef in The Forest. And I ended the evening with a couple episodes of Quantico.
This show used to be good. The first season was great, second wasn’t bad either. I loved the overarching storylines. But now it’s just some formulaic procedural, cheesy and trite. Not sure if I’ll keep watching once I’ve finished this season.
