The PageRank update finally finished working its way through Jack’s Empire over the weekend. I thought I’d write a quick recap post (with tabular data, no less) showing how the PageRank on my main sites and my side projects changed.

As you can see, the Ohio Sports Report took the biggest hit but if you visit the site the reasons will be more than obvious. Early predictions for the New York City Sports report had its PageRank opening up at a 5 or better before the PageRank algorithm was adjusted. I’m very pleased with the openings for both WordPressings and Fore Score Golf Stats.

Overall, I have more reasons to be happy than angry now that the final public rankings have been released. I’ll make a similar recap post after the next update.

I’ve written in the past about the benefits of text link ads so the recent changes in PageRank are bound to have an adverse effect on my monthly bottom line. In case you hadn’t heard, Google is dropping the hammer on PageRank all across the web this week. There are a lot of theories about the methods behind the madness but the majority seem to center around sites being penalized for selling links and interlinking amongst themselves as a network.

This Shouldn’t Come As A Surprise

I think most people saw this coming once the public PageRank updates were being delayed month after month. It was obvious Google was making a sweeping change to the way their PageRank scores were being calculated. The sole purpose of this systematic change, in my humble opinion, was to crush the third party text link brokers like Text Link Ads who had setup successful businesses by using Google’s own system against them.

It’s important to remember that Google’s empire was built on the back of selling text links. For them to have a fundamental opposition to the act of selling links is ridiculous. The problem is that everyone saw Google making money in this sandbox they built and decided to build their own castles using Google’s sand. This parasitic economy, which I’m just as guilty of taking advantage of as anyone else, was obviously competition to Google’s business. So this week Google stomped on everyone’s castle.

So what now?

I’m taking a wait and see approach. If the drops in PageRank don’t equate to proportionate drops in traffic then we can all rest easy, talk about the good old days when we could make some extra money selling PageRank juice and get on with our lives. I think the lesson here is really about diversifying not only your income but who you really on to just do everyday business. Google is pretty great. I like a lot of their services. But it would be totally foolish for me or anyone else to rely on them as the backbone of any kind of business strategy when it’s so easy for them to totally change the rules of the game at any moment’s notice.

I use Google Apps for all of the email tasks for i am jack’s design. GMail has a simple feature that lets you “Star” a message and have it placed in a special Star-only folder. This turns out to be a very simple way to organize your tasks from clients.

I’ve tried using web apps for task management like Ta-da List and Remember The Milk but in the end I always come back to the simplest solution: GMail. It’s much easier to just star an email containing a client request than it is to open up a separate site/program to write down what you need to get done.

If you’re running GMail and looking for a way to stay organized give the “Star” feature a try.

The 2007 Web Design Survey from the folks at A List Apart has been released. It’s 81 pages of mainly charts and graphs explaining the responses from the nearly 33,000 people who completed the survey. Most of the questions on the survey relate to people working 9 to 5 but there’s a few bits and pieces in there for freelancers as well.

I hope next year’s survey (assuming there will be one) has more questions focusing on the technology web developers are using as opposed to the workplace and income issues that this year’s survey seemed to stress.

I use MagpieRSS a lot when I’m trying to parse RSS files with PHP. It forms the backbone for the spider that drives all of the sites that make up Jack’s Sports Report as well other small tasks here and there. For example, I use MagpieRSS to parse weather feeds for Fore Score Golf Stats so our users can get real-time information on their local weather and the conditions at their favorite courses.

There’s a major competitor to Magpie in this space called SimplePie that a lot of people prefer. Development on Magpie has basically stalled since late last year while SimplePie improvements have been coming fast and steady for awhile. You probably can’t go wrong using either one. I stick with Magpie mostly because it’s what I’m familiar with. Magpie is also built straight into WordPress now which might be advantageous to a lot of plugin developers.

A person could most certainly write their own RSS parser using PHP5’s XML functions. I prefer using a library because it handles most of the dirty work for me and it saves on time.