Hinky Dink SEO almost back to normal

Lots of shit hit the fan back in April. It seemed like everyone wanted to put the smackdown on the Dinkster after that security announcement about PPLiveAV—those damned port 9415 proxies in China—hit the wire.

As if the GoDaddy DMCA takedown wasn't bad enough—taking out both ProxyObsession and MrHinkyDink.com—the next insult hit my "brand" like a rock. Some stupid cop show announced an episode titled "Bathhouse and Hinky Dink" and in the process snatched up all my Google search hits. (See also here).

Motherfuckers couldn't even spell "BOT House" right. heh. (If you don't play UT on my server you won't get it.)

FOX finally cancelled Chicago Code. I rejoiced, but it took a long time for the "Bathhouse and Hinky Dink" hits to go away.

As we say in UT, "DIE BITCH!"

This was the latest Hinky Dink hit...


... which is the new link on the "Hinky Links" side panel on the right. It is my public PGP key, with which you can use to send me encrypted email (dink-at-mrhinkydink-dot-you-know-what). I should have done that long ago, but I didn't.

You may have noticed other changes to the right-hand sidebar. Just trying to clean things up a bit. The link to the Proxy List was removed when it was taken down and I never put link back in. It has been restored. The Twitter bar was moved up and the search box was moved down. The BOT House tweets are gone since that hasn't worked for months (it was fun while it lasted).

Of things not working, the World Domination link is still down. I haven't fixed that yet. I wonder if it will ever get fixed because Google has lately made some "improvements" to the Maps API that are driving me nuts elsewhere. Never, ever depend on someone else's code because you'll always get screwed in the end.

Has Google Been Shitting Itself Lately?

I just used that search box over on the right to look for references to RaLink wireless adapters here. Nothing came up. Then I did your standard Google-Fu against the site and got 13 hits, going back to 2007.

WTF?

I have also been having issues with Google Maps since early April, the latest being the inability to save street intersections to the M/S 2011 Map. Any plain old street number will work, but it hangs on intersections. I've tested it with every browser I run (and I run a lot of different browsers) with the same result. I can work around that, so it's not a big deal.

But it is annoying.

Another annoying Maps issue is the display during editing. If you move a marker from page 2 to page 1, the markers are all over the place. Luckily it only happens during editing.

And then there's Google Update. I kept getting an "Update server not available" error, so I finally re-installed it.

The last time I bitched about Google, my machine died a horrible death (long story, lots of blog fodder there), so I'm somewhat hestitant to put the blame elsewhere.

If you've had any issues, drop me a line.