As Facebook celebrates the “hacker way” amidst its looming IPO, my website suffers from a serious malware attack, inflicted by some bastard, criminal hackers. (Dont’ worry, this infection impacts my site, and will not harm you.)

My ongoing saga…

Last fall, several readers of this site notified me that various pages contained names of several male-enhancing prescription drugs. And then others pointed out that a Google search for my name led to search results littered with the same.

CRAP! I’d been infected with the “pharma hack”!

The purpose of this hack is to gain valuable links from pages that rank high in Google search results, and leverage that reputation to increase search-engine visibility for other sites — in this case, shady pharmaceutical sites located in Canada.

This practice is considered “Black Hat SEO”. It’s illegal, time-consuming and damages my own online reputation, as my Google mojo has definitely been reduced. In fact, Google removed my site for a few weeks back in November 2011, until I could prove that my site was clean. My traffic decreased 50%.

These pharma hackers are some sneaky bastards: The results of the hack are visible only to search engines, while most of the site remains visibly unaffected to users. The pharma hack hid malicious files deep in my WordPress (content management software) folders in order to gain control of my site. The site targeted and manipulated select pages that receive more traffic.

I’m no software engineer, but I went into my site’s content management system and attempted to remove malicious files.

I thought I fixed the problem, but attacks continued.

I sought help from my site host (DreamHost, which recently has been brought to its knees by malicious hackers), but they were pretty useless. Even though I underscored I’m not a technical guy, they sent me some highly technical articles about the problem. Thanks for nothing, DreamHost.

I’m also a paid subscriber of VaultPress, a security and back-up service from Automattic, the makers of WordPress. They were helpful (yet inconsistently responsive) in recovering the site and claimed to have removed malicious files. But the hack kept coming back, indicating to me that they don’t have a firm grasp over this popular malware. Hopefully they will overcome it, because that’s what I thought I was paying for.

So it’s been several months and I’m still getting attacked. The problem is severe and beyond my ability to rectify on my own.

So I recently signed up with Sucuri, a website security firm that has high knowledge of WordPress and the pharma hack. I’m really hoping they can help. If they can, I’ll be sure to report and endorse them.

Finally, I’ll point out that WordPress is wonderful and wildly popular open-source software, but that’s made it popular among hackers. The people behind WordPress are very good, to be sure. But I sure wish they’d do more on the security front.

This malware issue is severe and I’m losing patience.

*If anyone reading this has technical knowledge and can help my situation, I would really appreciate it and will endorse you.

(Photo: f1uffster)

If you stock your kitchen with anything, be sure to include cooking staples like olive oil, onions, garlic and dried oregano.

I’m not a chef, but I’ve worked as a line cook in some upscale French restaurants during some weird periods of my life.

That partly explains while I’m the primary cook in my household.

I’m practical. I dish out family meals in little time — while keeping the kitchen clean and sterile.

I prep. Today (Sunday), I prepped a meatloaf to bake tomorrow, after work.

After the meatloaf, I also prepped some homemade tomato sauce for the night after.

This is all part of a quest to deliver delicious, hearty meals that not only nourish, but bring the family together. It’s an expression of love. It creates happiness and memories. These meals provide leftover lunches most of the time as well.

Someday I’ll write a book of practical recipes and techniques for two-working-parent households (summarizing ongoing food posts like tuna and cheeseburgers and more).

Until then, you should note the important ingredients: olive oil, onions, garlic and dried oregano.

To be sure, I usually deploy many more ingredients, depending on the recipe and season (my garden produces heavily in the late spring, summer and early fall).

But these four ingredients are the reliable core of our hearty family meals, especially in fall, winter and early spring. They store easily, and so they’re always on standby. They’re like the bassist in a band — a steady foundation devoted to making the other players be their best. And they occasionally take a lead role.

The onions and garlic typically appear through sweating or caramelizing in the olive oil, followed by a sprinkle of dried oregano.  This was the case with the meatloaf base, tomato sauce, and last Friday’s grilled chicken breasts. These four ingredients also played a critical supporting role in our recent Christmas dinner of leg of lamb.

If you stock your kitchen with anything, be sure to include cooking staples like olive oil, onions, garlic and dried oregano.

Let me know if you need help.

If you want your written correspondance to make maximum impact on an individual, the handwritten letter is always best.

File this in my list of personal pet peeves and subtle ways that business people frequently make themselves look stupid…

I received a follow-up email last week from a salesperson hoping to sell me his company’s business software. I had already spoken with him on the phone earlier that day.

His email recapped our conversation. Great.

But his closing —  ”Great to talk to you…Best,” followed by his name — was in the same font as his email signature, which was a different font from the body of his email. Obviously, this was an automated closing embedded into the email template.

I know, this is a little thing. But…

The font inconsistency made him look sloppy.

Second, the automated letter closing emphasized that I’m nothing more than a generic transaction, not worthy of the effort of a genuine closing.

If I were seeking to impress a prospective customer, I’d want to avoid sloppy font execution.I’d also ensure my closing is genuine and personalized.

The email medium is inherently impersonal and sterile. It lacks tactile and personal characteristics like texture, smell and handwriting.

Therefore, it’s critical to compensate with other details and signals, especially the copy and personalization.

But don’t ever forget: If you want your written correspondance to make maximum impact on an individual, the handwritten letter is always best.

(Photo of the original John Hancock signature from The Declaration of Independence via marc.benton)

Cars — and especially SUVs — are lethal machinery. They’re even more lethal when combined with young, inexperienced drivers.

The other night at around 10:30pm, nearly asleep after a 19-hour day, we heard a car skid outside our home.

We looked out the window to see that a Ford Suburban had spun out of control, side-swiped one of our oak trees, skidded over the sidewalk and through our bushes, and landed halfway into our front yard.

I couldn’t get good pictures from my phone that night, but I’ve posted on this page a few next-morning images of the damage. More pictures are here.

A cop had been following this lethal SUV, and one minute later four patrol cars were parked in front of my house with emergency lights flashing in full.

Minutes later a group of young girls got out of the SUV, escorted and then questioned by the police.

The driver was 16 years old with a beginner permit — and NOT permitted to be driving after dark. That made her, legally, an unlicensed driver.

One of the officers on the scene told me she was driving erratically, though was not under the influence of drugs or alcohol. She was just an inexperienced driver, speeding, when she shouldn’t have been behind the wheel in the first place.

With this monster truck and tiny young girl on my lawn, I asked her how fast she was going. She said she was going under the speed limit and just lost control. I thought to myself: Bullshit. You don’t spin out like that on relatively dry roads (it had rained earlier that day) going less than 30 miles per hour.

I was livid that night. In fact, I still am.

I understand that teenagers — and all people — sometimes do stupid things. I, too, fall into this camp. Sure, this was an accident. But it was horribly reckless.

This girl not only caused damage to my home, but violated my sense of home as a safe haven.

Think about it…

I often walk home on that sidewalk — the one she plowed over.

My kids — ages five and under — often ride their bikes on that sidewalk, they and play in that yard.

I’m left with a paranoid feeling and it lingers. I think of Andrew Burrous, a nine-year-old struck by a 16-year-old girl in an SUV.

I’m reminded of it when I see the chewed up tree in front of my home. When I see Ford SUVs, or any SUV. When I walk along quaint sidewalks in my town. And especially whenever my kids are on a sidewalk, or near a street.

That’s why I plan to contact the driver and her parents and request three things:

1. Meet my kids, who live and play in the space she violated — the ones who, thank God, were not riding their bikes on that sidewalk at the time of this recklessness.
2. Come to my home to see the mess in daylight and help clean it up.
3. Pay for replanting of bushes and grass.

Face it: Cars — and especially SUVs — are lethal machinery. They’re even more lethal when combined with young, inexperienced drivers (or drunk ones, but at least they’re outright illegal). Sure, they be more safe inside, but they’re all the more lethal for pedestrians and other cars.

This incident prompts another paranoia of mine: drivers distracted by mobile devices and other interruptive gadgets, increasingly showing up on automotive dashboards. But that’s another post.

How do we deal with this problem?

UPDATE:

HighTechDad pointed me to his post on Ford’s teen driver education program. Hey Scott Monty, can you help educate this girl, an owner of a Ford Suburban?

UPDATE:

I contacted the driver’s father. He was defensive and said that the roads were probably slippery and that she hit some black ice (it was dry and about 45 degrees that night). I requested his daughter come to my home with him and apologize to my family. He said he’ll talk to her. Nearly a week later and no response. Lame.

Twitter now is fully a part of a marketer’s universe. But it should not rule out other social media venues when seeking deep customer sentiment.

Serendipitously, I met with two CEOs last week to talk about their ventures in text-mining and social media analysis. I’ve been out of the social media analysis game for some time, but my legacy and this site regularly attract companies seeking either confidential feedback or public affirmation. I’ll always be fascinated with the subject, so I welcome these connections. (My work at Clickable is catapulting me back into the social media realm — particularly around ads — but I’ll delve into that another time.)

One similar comment from both execs struck me given the Twitter rage: Twitter’s signal-to-noise ratio makes it more difficult to glean deep customer and brand insights using text analytics — that is, unless you know exactly what you’re looking for. Sure, there are binary, extreme high-volume events that can be detected and analyzed, but valuable nuggets are widely scattered. Moreover, there tends to be more spam and false-positive signals. (Although, like email, I think spam and intelligent source filtering will eventually alleviate that pain.)

That’s in comparison to a large, steady universe of highly specialized niche venues, like ratings and review sites, groups and communities — where there are more complex interactions. For example, if you’re a pharmaceutical company seeking deep understanding of patients undergoing a new treatment for hodgkin’s lymphoma, you’ll certainly find a lot of 140-characters chatter on Twitter, but are more likely to glean deep interactions and insights in the Hodgkins Lymphoma channel at Supportgroups.com.

To be sure, this does not suggest Twitter is not valuable for gleaning deep insights. And it certainly does not suggest Twitter lacks high and immediate value as a communications channel, an early trend indicator, or intervention signal for a company’s marketing, sales or customer-service departments. But for deep brand sentiment analysis, it is more challenging.

For many brands, there simply are other passive observation venues — lower hanging fruit — which marketing professionals should prioritize in their quest to understand customer sentiment.

Speaking of Twitter, you can follow my sentiment at @maxkalehoff.