The Web Journal aka Weblog or blog of Jere Matlock
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You've found the blog of Jere Matlock, a web designer and writer. This journal is mostly about writing, web design and getting sites to the top of the search engines (SEO is my business). It is also full of opinions and observations about pretty much everything. If these things are not of interest to you, feel free to go now. Go on, shoo!

Still here? If you have something to say, post a comment or send me an email.

By the way, if you feel like taking offense at something posted on this site, go right ahead, it won't bother me a bit. Kingsley Amis has a nice quote about that, in which I take solace and some pride when the flames arrive:

"If you can't annoy somebody, there's little point in writing."

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Nigerian Scam Moves Headquarters to United Nations

June 25th, 2009

Today I received a spam from the United Nations — well, at least it *says* it is from a Mr. Tim Peterson of the United Nations Department of International Fraud Surveillance and Control– claiming to have shut down the bank accounts of the unethical and fraudulent Nigerian scammers. But not to worry, my funds are safely being held in trust by the United Nations [obviously stolen UN logo inserted here].

un Nigerian Scam Moves Headquarters to United Nations

After laughing myself silly, I realized that Mr. Tim Peterson is only doing in the online world what was done decades ago in the actual United Nations. Nigerian and Ivory Coast …

Kid’s view of psych drugs

June 23rd, 2009

This video from CCHR gives some perspective from both the parent’s view and the child’s view of the harmful effects of the psychiatric drugs he was forced to take. The parent was forced to drug his child by the court system (he says so) or he would lose parental rights to the child.

I believe what they were forced to experience is wrong on so many levels it is hard to know where to start.

Parents should be making the decisions about what drugs to give their children, not their schools or the courts.

Children should not be being drugged and punished for …

SEO of big drug-rehab site

June 6th, 2009

I’ve been working long hours on a large drug rehab site (over 200 pages), taking it out of a Content Management System (CMS) so we can actually optimize each individual page for its keywords; it’s a relatively large project as these things go. It has a ton of drug information to help educate people on the dangers of drugs.

Their CMS system was really getting in the way of doing things like adding a “canonical” meta tag to each page of the site.

Over the years I’ve optimized several smaller drug rehab sites; yesterday I received a nice SEO testimonial from a drug-rehab SEO client …

SEO Acknowledgement

May 18th, 2009

Nice Acknowledgment:

Every so often I receive a thank-you email from a random user of my main site about SEO, Words in a Row:

Just wanted to thank you for the incredible information about SEO on your site. Everything was so easy to understand/well written for the non technical user. Thank you! ~~ Cheryl Palange
Heard about through a Google search on “SEO tutorial“.

There IS a lot of info about SEO on my site; it’s nice to be appreciated.

Thoughts

May 18th, 2009

One of my favorite e-newsletters is the one put out by Mark Alexander, which used to be called The Federalist and is now called The Patriot Post. He digs up some great quotes from history and this one struck a chord with me:

“Truth does not become more true by virtue of the fact that the entire world agrees with it, nor less so even if the whole world disagrees with it.” –Jewish philosopher Maimonides (AD 1135-1204)

As a long-time Scientologist I have seen a lot of false and malicious chatter about my religion online over the years. Everything from the “Scientology …

One-legged man bicycles his way out of bitterness…

May 8th, 2009

An excellent human interest story from the LA Times about Felix Hackenberg, the one-legged bicyclist who is often seen cruising the hills of Griffith Park in LA.

The message Felix (a name which means “happiness” in Latin) gives is this:

“… he has let go of the despair that followed the loss of his leg.

‘There was a lot of apathy and grief going on those 12 years,’ he said.

‘I could be bitter at the guy for pulling out in front of me. But ultimately we’re all responsible for whatever happens to us.

Something I couldn’t agree with more.

 …

New video on mandatory mental health screening

May 1st, 2009

I’m of the opinion that mandatory mental health screening is nuts.

There are politicians and lobby groups from the APA and Big Pharma in Washington DC right now pushing “The Mother’s Act”, which should really be called the “Medicating All Mothers” Act. The real purpose of this lobbying effort is to get a whole new mandatory class of people who must take psychiatric drugs, to expand the market for Big Pharma and their incredibly profitable and dangerous psychotropic drugs.

Get informed, starting with this video from CCHR. Get active in calling and writing your elected representatives and tell them that you …

SEO audit of an online directory

April 28th, 2009

I just completed an SEO audit (an alalysis of the points that make a site search engine friendly) of a directory and sent the owner and her webmaster a list of 20 things that need to be done to make it more search engine friendly. I tried to cover both on-page and off-page SEO points. This is a site I built about 6 years ago — haven’t optimized it for about 3 years as it was doing very well for its keywords and it only recently started to fall in the rankings — I suspect mainly because of link-building on …

Difference Between a Disease and a Psychiatric Disorder

April 27th, 2009

This is a short entertaining video from CCHR about the difference between a Disease and a Psychiatric Disorder

Love the “cha-ching” at the end. And how you can’t tell the psychiatrists from the drug company reps without looking closely.

So the next time a psychiatrist tells you your kid needs a psych drug to handle a “brain chemistry imbalance”, ask him exactly what lab test he used to discover this brain chemistry imbalance.

In memory of Baby Indiana – why we need to stop “The Mother’s Act”

April 21st, 2009

This heartwrenching video about Baby Indiana, born with breathing problems caused by her mother taking the antidepressant Effexor during pregnancy, points people to the Unite For Life website. The video is a photo documentary of the problems leading to the death of this beautiful baby girl.

The purpose of the insidiously named “Mother’s Act” is to screen all pregnant women, all new mothers, and all infants from birth, for “mental health” problems. The only remedy the psychs have is these horrific drugs like Effexor, which cause birth defects and death. The underlying purpose of the Mother’s Act is for Big Pharma …

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