Just putting in a last minute pitch for a good thing:

There’s a FREE Web conference going on this weekend in Raleigh, NC that covers Flex, ColdFusion, AIR, JavaScript, CSS, Ajax, and other web goodness.  The schedule looks good, there’s a networking party Saturday evening, and the hotel rate is decent.  So go.

And bring your business cards…  the next time I’m asked if I know any web gurus looking for work I need some names and numbers. 

I had a very strange thing happen to me today.  One of my old friends called me to see how I was doing and he asked if I knew any db workers looking for a job.  I had to kind of stop for a moment and pinch myself.  Many of you probably know where I’m coming from when I say that I know a LOT of good IT folks who have lost their jobs over the last year and are still unemployed.  I heard earlier today that many states are seeing unemployment over 11%, so hearing that a good paying job wasn’t bringing in loads of applications seemed odd.  It turns out that the job just hasn’t been advertised much, and my friend needs someone good to work with so I’ll do my part and try to get a few more applicants headed to HR so he has a better shot of getting someone with some decent skills.

The job is in Philadelphia, PA.  Pay is $60 - $65k

Here’s the job posting
Here’s their main job openings page

I added the BlogRush widget thing onto my blog to see what the fuss is about. It looks like an interesting way to link to other related blogs and offer a different way to surf, etc.. they'll eventually put some ads in with the links, and it looks like people will be able to buy "credits" so their links will show up in the little widget, but it doesn't look like bloggers will be able to make $ off of it unless maybe there's a way to sell credits? hmm.. However, it might provide some increased traffic.

If you run a blog take a look at what they're building up here. They have a nice stats system on the backend that lets you see how much traffic you've generated, and how many times your links have shown up on other sites.

It's also based on a referral system, so if you get others to join then your links will show up more often on other sites.

I'm a bit perplexed.. you see I've been traveling a lot and working a lot so I haven't been watching my log files much lately. Ok, so I've ignored them for about a month. And now that I look at them I've got a bit of an issue to work around. Or an issue to have some fun with.. or maybe an issue to ignore.

You see, there's a couple of sites in China that decided they needed some English text so they grabbed the text from one of my blog posts. That kind of junk is to be expected in the wildness that is the Net. I'm quite sure they happened upon my site and chose the text totally at random because of how it's used. It's filler text.. hidden from view by the average user. It's fodder for Google bots, and there's my problem. They left the title to the blog entry in the text that they copied so it has a link back to my site. Having two crappy sites with some things that Google frowns on (dark text on black background, check!) linking basically every page on their site to mine isn't good for the old Google ranking.

The other little problem I had with this was a matter of traffic and bandwidth. They copied a blog entry of mine that had a wink in it. I know for a fact that their site had decent traffic last month. My page views stayed pretty steady at around 200,000 last month, but "hits" went from around 390,000 to over 600,000. That made me stop and look. Luckily the extra 300,000 hits were for a tiny little wink gif so it wasn't a major problem. I can fix that hotlinking pretty quickly and easily.

So now I'm left wondering what to do about this. I could be mean and redirect those hotlink requests for the gif to a different image, I could return a virus or something nasty, I could make all requests coming from those domains (i.e. if a spider happens to follow that link) go somewhere, or I could just block the requests and move along and eventually they'll find different text for that page. It's late.. I've got bigger things to worry with.

One interesting thing.. because they're leaching an image off of me I get to see all of the IP addresses that visit their site, what page they were looking at, how often, etc.. hmm.. if only I had time to waste I could have some fun.