So, much earlier this morning when I went to just randomly watch a stream over on NGame.tv, I was greeted with a very large and red error message:

NGame, flagged...?

When the bloody fuck did that happen? I had been watching the site without any problems 3 hours before that and got nothing in my way. A quick look on Twitter shows that other had been experiencing the issue too. Since I have faith in Avast, I went ahead anyway and had no issues at all.

I will point out that at this point in time, the Safe Browsing diagnostic page for NGame was completely clean, nothing mentioned.

Fast-forward to about an hour ago, and…

Say wha?

Jesus, where the hell did that come from. But on further reading I notice something else – IT’S CLAIMING MY SITE IS INFECTED NOW TOO?!?!?!

Sure enough, I go to visit my own website, and I’m greeted by the exact same big red error page. And the diagnostic for me:

...for fuck's sake.

Upon checking my Google Webmaster Tools, I was told that the page on my site in which I embed my NGame channel page was what had caused my site to be flagged also – bearing in mind they said nothing about just the physical stream video itself on my homepage – so I went to go file for a malware review after privatisation of that page until this issue blows over…

EXCEPT THERE’S NO FUCKING LINK ANYWHERE TO BE FOUND.

As they claim: “Very rarely, it can take up to a day for malware warnings (and links to the malware review request form) to be visible in Webmaster Tools after your search has been flagged in search results. If you don’t see a warning in Webmaster Tools, but your site is flagged, please check back later.”

Searching around for other instance like this show that this is the complete opposite of “very rare”, rather it’s more of a “happens all the fucking time”.

Moral of the story? Google is shit. Go disable this stuff in Options -> Under the Bonnet -> Privacy -> Uncheck “Enable phishing and malware protection”. And then go download Avast, which has been a hell of a lot more use than this browser “feature” has.

So, to bring in the new year, and to try coincide with my recent shift of focus from the “normal blogger” to the “gamer and video editor”, I’ve slightly re-organised my site a bit to try and help that. I’ve basically reverted the previous change of putting the entire blog on the homepage, to put more information relevant to my current interests there.

A slight rewrite of the About page was done as well, the Stream page has been updated to my current Livestream channel, and I should hopefully soon be working on the Videos section a bit more as I believe I’ve found a good WordPress plugin for it.

Might still jiggle stuff around a bit, knowing my tendencies to never be happy with the way my site looks. Thankfully I’m not this anal with the bear’s site…

So, despite the fact it’s barely even up a day, I’m already starting to get some flak over that new Facebook page I created for myself. As such, I’m going to explain the main reasons why.

Over the past year or so, I’ve had two main personas that have manifested – my own: that is to say, me the blogger, Twitter addict, boards.ie semi-lurker; and a more gaming-centric one: so that’d be my YouTube channel, Raptr, TrueAchievements, UKCS, Xbox and the like. Recently though I’ve started to feel that these two main personas have started to mix in with each other, and that’s not really something I want.

To put it into more detail… Well, I was following a crap-ton of gaming/YouTube related accounts on Twitter, and my own tweets were getting filled with YouTube tweets, gaming stuff and the like that I really don’t think those who follow me really cared about all that much. On Facebook, I was starting to get friend requests from people who followed my YouTube, thus I had to set my privacy so that only friends of friends can request me.

I feel that now with a separate Twitter account and Facebook page, then I can be the massive gaming/YouTube nerd I want to be, and those who actually want to listen to that stuff can read it there. This way my YouTube subscribers and gaming acquaintances can go follow my ramblings on either (or both!) sites without having all of my random banal rants getting in their way, and also my normal feed can be a lot more true to me.

This whole thing is not a new trend. I know plenty of YouTubers who have a separate FB fan page for people to follow them on. Chuggaaconroy, SuperSkarmory, FPS Russia, the guys from Is It a Good Idea to Microwave This; and more all have separate FB pages, so that their video fans can keep up with them there, while their personal profiles can stay true to their personal lives, family and friends. Yes, I’m nowhere near as popular as them, so I may be jumping the gun a bit with creating it at this stage with only 500 subscribers, but at this stage, I’d rather make things perfectly clear, rather than having to try do this at a later stage having already had everything mix together too much (a perfect example of that would be Jonny Paula and Jory Caron from the Microwave show – they hit the 5k friend cap simply because they were so popular, so an FB page made perfect sense).

This last bit is in direct response to Samm’s tweet:

What would you think of someone who made his/her own fanpage on social media? What about someone who “liked” him/herself?

I needed to “like” myself to do a few connection thing with the page so it would work. But I guess if that makes me seem really sad, then fine…

To be honest, I’ve been thinking about where I want to go with this blog/site/whatever. Given all the general stuff lumped into separate pages as you see in the menu section, I was beginning to think maybe about turning my entire site into more of a lifestream, although there are two big things against that – it’d look pretty cluttered, given the infrequency of blog posts and the possibility of massive amounts of external crap; and secondly, the main lifestreaming plugin for WordPress kinda fucked itself up a couple of months ago and hasn’t been fixed since.

I dunno, we’ll see how things go soon enough anyway. I definitely at the very least want to write something specifically about my new desk layout with the new monitor, if only because it is something that I can properly write a few things about. After that… Well, who knows.

Maybe I’ll start by cleaning up a few things from the archives of this blog. Remove some of the old outdated crap, particularly stuff buried in lesser-used and obscure categories.

I also really should not write stuff at 5am after having been up all night…

So within the past few hours, after finding out that the transitioning of Google Apps accounts to fully fledged Google Accounts was available for early adopters to opt into, I decided to jump the gun and go ahead with it, seeing as I just wanted to get everything finally together for once in one place.

Now though, I’m maybe thinking it wasn’t such a great idea to choose to do this so soon, mainly because of a few niggling issues I’ve had with the transition, primarily from my point of view that my Google Apps account was created for my sole personal use, and that my conflicting Google account also used the same e-mail addresses as what was in my Google account.

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This is probably something that I originally thought of a few months ago, but never really got around to popping up for… reasons unknown.

So, one of the things that keeps me on my toes, in a way, is the fact that I almost seem to be constantly changing my site around, be it a brief quick edit in the stylesheet, laying out a page differently, or attempting to overhaul the whole thing and failing miserably. In fact just as I’m writing this, I just changed my header to remove the dark green border from it and the banner image…

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So, on Monday while hanging around college, after contemplating it over the weekend, I finally decided to move my e-mail hosting from Windows Live Admin Center to Google Apps. And I must say it was the best fucking decision I ever made.

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I kid, I kid… Yet another one of those spontaneous decisions to re-design my site a bit – I’m almost as indecisive as miralize… – removing the massive black sides when on large monitors, but keeping the original width and the like. Getting the background stretching out while keeping the content constrained in the middle was a massive pain though…

Anyway, other than that I’ve also changed the links page to use my Google Reader subscriptions rather than trying to manually update it myself. If you’re not there, then that means I’m not reading you, but if I should be and I have in the past, then I probably just forgot when I was re-adding all my subscriptions when I got my new desktop. Kindly give me a nudge to remind me to re-subscribe, and you’ll appear there

I also want to ditch the huge Gallery installation and replace it with something that’s more integrated with WordPress’ functions and the like, and uses WordPress’ commenting system so that people can comment on individual pictures on their own separate pages. If you know of any plugins that do this sort of things, let me know!

Hey look, I’m making vlog sorta thingies now.

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So, I’ve been getting a fair few new subscribers on my YouTube channel – I’m not sure if I can go so far as to start calling them "fans" just yet though – mostly from people liking my current Let’s Plays. If you don’t know what I mean by an LP in this sense, go Google it now.

I’ll wait.

…

Back? Good. Now I can talk as if you know what I mean

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