Odd Day



I should be feeling energized, it is a beautiful but slightly cool sunny skies day. Instead, I couldn't wake up this morning, I was just incredibly groggy and sleepy and nothing seemed to help. Well, a shower helped a little. But it was probably 10 a.m. before I could even do that. Maybe the time change has screwed up my inner clock somehow. Or maybe I just need a 'down day' to lie around and read.

Anyway--if you have websites, it pays to ck on them in person. I was seeing unusually low number of clicks on ads on a bunch of web pages yesterday & this morning--more like a Thursday than a Monday. Monday's are usually my best days,... Mondays and Sundays. And the amount of traffic seemed the usual for a Monday. Wasn't sure of why the ads were preforming so poorly.

--started cking different things, and in the process, I clicked a visitors search results for Glass Chandeliers, saw that I ranked well on Google (#2) in their datacenter zone, so I click the link, and low and behold, using FireFox I got a security violation notice pop-up on my site...I took a screenshot just in case I needed it--it sure looked suspisious, the cert said that my page was attempting to connect to "SnakeOil" servers. Now that certainly sounds trustworthy--SNAKEOIL !

I left all that open on the screen and

On another computer , I did web searches on the important words in the security alert, but didn't find anything telling, I read the alert details, seems the cert. expired in 2001. Big deal, that is a long time ago, anyway--what is snakeoil? So I eventually close out the alert and got additional alerts that made reference to Apollo Hosting...so I do more searches to see if this Apollo Hosting is some known hijacker, no it seems to be a reputable web hosting company. But I have never done business with them. Finally in the back of my mind, I remembered seeing 'Apollo' somewhere before. SO I start searching my page code. It turns out that a house plans company that I have an affiliate relationship with uses Apollo Hosting. I found a reference in the code that led to the trackable ad and it was in a shared bottom border on all pages.,...so I guess everyone who came to any page on that site, at least the ones using FoxFire for sure, were getting the scary SnakeOil security alert when the last few lines of the page loaded. So plenty probably left asap.

I removed the affiliate link so that should fixed things. Good thing I looked at my own pages thru the typical visitors eyes to see the alert.

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