Yuri Arcurs a blog about selling your photos online

Hi guys. For those of you who just read the post called, "microstock photographers making big bucks" – uh, opps.

You were probably just as confused as I when that came up on my blog. The reason it went up was simple human error: a fairly new employee I just granted site access to was working on a set of google meta text and he accidentally pressed "post", so it went live. The result was a bunch of gibberish that made no sense about making money from stock…etc, a good laugh. It "only" went out to about 3000 subscribers so no big deal right..….Argh.

I'm really sorry about this, and in fact I would like to take the opportunity to apologize for the overall wackiness of my site recently. This last week has been a bit of a tecnho-joke where everything (I mean *everything*) that can go wrong, has.

Recipe for cutting your blog's traffic in half in a week:

Step One: Malware

The first whammy came when our server was hit by some malware and labelled by Google as a "virus" site (despite it being cleaned within hours of the attack). Trust me, you don't want to get on Google's bad side. After our massive cleanup effort, we found out that it was not us that was under attack, but our hosting company and, poof, our new cleaned version go attacked again. We then worked literally day and night to get the site up and running again, with three programmers in different time-zones overlapping, working around the clock. We decided to move everything to a new server hosting company and in the process our current server hosting company went cold. Died and we could not transfer our files… Unbelievable!

Step Two: Annoy loyal visitors by taking away their favorite tool – the keywording site. And while we where fighting with our server issues we also had to battle 5-10 pissed off emails per day telling us our keywording site was down – which we knew…

Step Three: Confuse the heck out of people by posting weird things. So after all that craziness, I wasn't all that surprised when today my new guy decided to misunderstood the "post" and "save" function in wordpress and posted a nonsensical article filled with gibberish and google meta-text. Awesome. Just great. We needed that! 

Step Four: Well.. so far I am waiting with baited breath to see what step four will be. So far, within the last hour, nothing has happened. It's eerily quiet. Maybe the techno(logy) gods are giving me a day off? If so, I expect their efforts to redouble and that tommorrow I'll wake up to my office burnt down, my staff infected with swine flu, my old and new server companies under terrorist attack, all my images to be loaded onto Flickr as free downloads.. …What else ya got techno gods? What else??

I have learned a lot during the last week. Most notably, how to cut your traffic in half in about a day. If you want the recipe you can re-read the above and execute it as a strict plan.

Please hold on. Please bear with us, because not only are we back on track, but we're just inches away from launching some seriously cool new features, resources and downloads. Stay tuned. I mean, what else could go wrong? Literally. 

Yuri – out – sleeping – with one eye open….hmmm