I’m on a roll today. My 3rd post of the day! (Well, actually, it is 12:40am, so first of the new day).

I forgot to link to my post on the Inside Lacrosse blog. They were kind enough to let me post on their site. Most of the information is repeated from what is here, but the photos are different. I didn’t put up my favorite photos, but I didn’t use crappy photos either. Here is the link.

Wanted to link to a post by James Schaffer, art director at Inside Lacrosse Magazine. On it, he describes some of the post-production necessary to prep a photo for cover on their in the most recent issue. Pictured is Paul Rabil of Hopkins and Ben Rubeor of UVA.

I post the link for two reasons: One, I think it’s pretty interesting from both the photographer and fan perspective. But two, I freelance for Inside Lacrosse and it’s always great to suck up to the boss by linking to his work. Click here to view the post.

To any of you out there with a blog run by the Wordpress platform, here’s a warning to all of you: Keep your Wordpress software updated. I was taking the “it works fine” mentality on my software and not updating for at least 6 months. Big mistake. One of the fixes that I did not install was a vulnerability in the database. This vulnerability allowed a hacker to hack into my blog, create a new user account, and create about 40 spam postings. Not comments, but actual postings. The postings were posted-dated and did not show up on the “front” of the blog so I never noticed them.

My only clue to their existence came in the form of an email from Google saying my site had been removed from their index because of spam. I thought it was spam comments that slipped through the spam catcher but was horrified to see the damage that was done. It took sometime to sift through my blog and delete the offending posts.

Worse though, was that after being removed from Google index, it took about 2 months to get back in. The old adage “A website not in Google’s index practically does not exist” is very true: Removal from the index all but makes your site invisible. Traffic from keyword searches was cut by more than half.

But alas, a happy ending. Last week I finally got back in the index, this time with updated Wordpress software and a changed password in my court. As a soapbox moment, I can’t help but to point out the absence of ethics of spammers who hack into people’s blog, and get the blog banned from a search index. That is pretty damaging. Thankfully I don’t make money off this blog. If I did, it would have done serious financial harm to me. My guess is if this done to a bigger cat in the blogosphere, like one of the many blogs owned by Time-Warner, these spammers could be facing litigation seeking damages. That said, the offenders are probably in Africa, Russia, or other place outside of US government reach.

Today was the second day of practice for the team. They arrived back to campus last week from Christmas break but were doing weight training and conditioning before this week. Before practice started, North Carolina was having some beautiful weather. 60 and 70 degree days were not unusual to find. But someone upstairs has a sense of humor it seems - just as outdoor practice started, the temperatures began to plummet. With the wind chill, I think we were around the mid 30’s. I was pretty thankful that I didn’t live in the Northeast. I bet the boys at Cornell and Dartmouth have it way worse. I was trying to feel some sympathy for them, but after my feet began to hurt from the cold ground, I stopped feeling most everything.

I didn’t take very many photos today. My fingers were getting stiff from the cold making using the camera uncomfortable. I was also battling the light with darkness now arriving earlier in the day from the time change.