It sure has been a while. As always, things keep happening at lightning speed.

I’ve talked about personal balance before (you need time away from work), but it seems like I can’t even follow that myself. From 8 am to 6 pm, and then back at it from 11 pm to 2-4 am, it seems like one day blurs into the next.

One of the things we had been grinding out (and finally released) was vB Skins. I had posted earlier about ForumTemplates.com and how it was going nowhere (when it came to Google). At that time Yahoo saw 800k backlinks - that number had since increased to 1.75 million. At that time Google saw roughly 155k backlinks - that number has again increased 235k.

And yet nothing. A painful penalization. So I went ahead and plunked $5000 and bought vbskins.com

There were of course other reasons in changing the site. The domain no longer fit (we just did vBulletin, not IPB/phpBB/vBulletin as we did originally). The design was crap - I actually lifted it from CSSFill (a semi-defunct site we own). And the code-base was absolutely terrible - another horrible experience in outsourcing (when we were smaller) that resulted in me having to go in and patch things up. The new site was (of course) all built in-house, and it shows - much nicer design, much more robust backend, smarter ordering system - superior in every way.

The lesson here is obvious - buying a domain that was previously parked is like playing with fire. Google not only ‘kills’ the domain when it is parked (nevermind they generate at least 50% of all domain parking revenue), but even when its up, when it gets links, when people find it useful - it is still knocked out.

We also have some huge organizational changes happening in-houses (in regards to a few of our divisions) - that should be interesting to talk about (when the time comes).