From My Perspective – Official DateHookup Blog

This story might challenge that theory:

LORAIN, Ohio— Looking for love in all the wrong places!
A Lorain County man logged online to land a date, but soon found
himself in a terrifying situation.
The man, who asked not to be identified, said he recently signed up
for an online dating website called “datehookup.com.”
After finding a potential match with a woman who identified herself as
“Jazmine,” he began exchanging text messages with the woman. A few
days later, they agreed to meet for a date.
According to the police report, when the man pulled up into the
driveway of a home in the 800 block of West 10th Street in Lorain on
Wednesday night, a woman came outside and told him to walk around to
the back of the house.
“She said her apartment was in the back of the house, so we were going
back there, and there was two dudes standing on the corner. They came
out with a gun in their hand, instantly put me on the ground, and put
the gun at the back of my head, and took my money out of my pocket,
and my wallet,” the victim said. “I thought I was going to die.”
Before he had time to react, the victim says he was lying facedown on
the ground. According to the police report, the men went through the
victim’s pockets and stole his wallet, drivers license, social
security card and $20 in cash. The victim said once the suspects took
off he hopped in his car and headed home.
“I still feel the gun on the back of my head today. I really didn’t
sleep last night,” the victim told Fox 8 News. Police say the home
involved in the robbery was vacant. The victim said the suspects were
wearing all black clothing. Although the victim was not injured, he
hopes this terrifying experience serves as a warning to anyone who
goes looking for love online.
“It was a stupid move, and I tell people to be careful. People tell me
I should have met in a public place.”

http://jacksonville.com/entertainment/relationships/2010-04-16/story/second-chance-marriage-was-easy-couple

I love seeing this!

This is just a little notice to make sure your website works properly on the iPad. Specifically make sure it doesn’t end up re-directing to your mobile site. It seems the iPad user agent string contains the word ‘Mobile’ in it, not terribly helpful, thanks Apple. My site was re-directing to the mobile version. You have to look for ‘iPad’ in the user agent, but it will also contain ‘Mobile’ so put some logic in your code to make sure you handle it properly. Kind of annoying, but an easy fix.

The iPad user agent string is:

Mozilla/5.0 (iPad; U; CPU OS 3_2 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/531.21.10 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.4 Mobile/7B367 Safari/531.21.10

Time for another round of ‘Why did you cancel your account on DateHookup.com’?

WARNING: This is completely un-edited and un-censored. Sometimes people say some highly offensive things so if you are easily offended you should not read this.
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Cute, aren’t they? What if I told you these little icons held the key to success in online dating? What if I told you these little graphics determined whether you would get a reply to your message or not? You might think I’m crazy, but it’s true! For fun I decided to do some number crunching on message data for DateHookup.com (okay, maybe it wasn’t FUN, but interesting).

The question: Does sending virtual gifts to people help you get more replies?
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You ever wonder why people cancel their accounts on dating sites?  Well, I don’t!  I get to read this stuff everyday.  On DateHookup, when someone cancels their account, I ask them why they are canceling. Below are the reasons people gave.  This is from one day’s worth of cancelations.  This includes the people that liked the site, hated the site, and everything in-between.

WARNING: This is completely un-edited and un-censored.  Sometimes people say some highly offensive things so if you are easily offended you should not read this.
(more…)

The best thing about a website is it’s on 24/7.  That means you can make money in your sleep, in the shower, when you are on vacation, etc.  It’s extremely awesome.  But it also means it’s on 24/7.  That means your site can fail at any time for any number of reasons, leaving you permanently on edge, waiting for that dreaded text message alert saying your site is down.  Such is the life of a webmaster.

One of my servers’ network cards decided it had had enough of this life and promptly died, leaving me scratching my head as to why my site went down.  I mean who would think the network card would fail right?  I spent an hour trying to figure out what the hell was wrong, why can’t I connect to this server!?!?!!  Then eventually I noticed the little green light next to the network card was blinking.  I am not sure what that means other than it ain’t working, so I switched to the secondary network card and viola, fixed. 

I had bought a couple of new servers and was configuring them this week, and wouldn’t you know it, one of them has already had a hardware failure.  What the hell, 2 failures in one week?  I hadn’t had a hardware failure in the previous 7 years, so suffice it to say I am a bit paranoid at the moment.  My plan is to make sure for every process I have at least 2 servers that can handle the job, so if one fails I will be able to move the process to another server.  As soon as this new server actually works I might be able to implement this plan.  Yeah I know it’s probably not the ideal way to set up redundancy, but it should work pretty well.  Networks and servers are not my strong suit, plus my cabinet is a bit cramped and I am not going to be moving it to a new rack any time soon (what a pain that would be, I shudder to think about it..), so no super fancy load balancing or replication for me right now.  I just figure that would be one more thing that could fail anyway.

Do you hate servers as much as me?  Someday they will just work, everything will have 10 backups built in, nothing will ever fail.  Ahh, that would be the life.  I eagerly await that day.

So I went ahead and filed for a trademark on DateHookup.  You know, it wasn’t as much of a pain as I thought it might be.  I went to LegalZoom.com to take care of it.  I just had to fill out some simple forms, pay like $169 (plus the fee to file the trademark with the government) and they handled the rest.  Super easy.

It’s actually a good thing I went with them.  Because it turns out a trademark is a very precise thing.  There are some specific things you must do if you want your application to be approved.  One is to have the little (TM) next to your mark somewhere on your site.  I had to go back and forth with customer support.  Eventually we got it all figured out.  They were very helpful, no automated customer service bots.  Actual people (I know, amazing isn’t it?).

So is it all done?  Nope.  It could take over 18 months for the government to get around to approving or rejecting your application.  I am confident of its approval, I have been using the mark since 2002 and there were no  real conflicting marks to deal with.  The main reason I did this was so advertisers on Google AdWords could no longer use my name in their ads, thus bolding the text on their ad and leading users to their crappy websites instead of mine.  Fortunately, Google does not require the trademark to be approved.  You can submit the filing number to Google and that will take care of it.  Now if you type ‘datehookup’ in Google you won’t see the term ‘datehookup’ in any ads.  Their click-thru-rates will drop and most likely the ads will be dropped by Google, or at any rate my users won’t be fooled into clicking on them.

If you own an online business, I highly recommend filing for a trademark.  It’s pretty easy.  You can have your attorney do it if you have one, but that will cost you a lot.  I would just use LegalZoom.

File a trademark application:
http://www.legalzoom.com/trademarks/trademarks-overview.html

File a trademark complaint with Google:
https://services.google.com/inquiry/aw_tmcomplaint

Another Valentine’s Day, another surge in traffic for DateHookup.com.  Or is it?  I can never really tell what months are up and what months are down with my traffic.  Every year has been different.  The reason is I always make changes.  Last year I made some changes that really increased traffic to the site, right around Valentine’s Day.  Was it solely my changes or was the season part of the reason for the increase? 

I am crossing my fingers, hoping there will be a nice increase in traffic over the next couple of months.  January was higher than December, but it wasn’t much higher.  I was hoping for more.  So far I am not really seeing much of a change leading up to V-Day.  I made some changes again too that are definitely going to raise traffic, at least in the short term.  I like to really confuse myself so I never know what the hell is going on.  So again, I probably won’t be able to tell if the season leads to more traffic or not.  Hopefully it will lead to a crapload of traffic and I will know once and for all.  I mean Valentine’s Day, online dating, come on those are pretty related.  People should be looking to meet someone, which should mean more traffic to dating sites.

Come on people!!! Come to DH!!!

So I’m browsing DH the other day and guess what I see?  This ad, which Zoosk was running on DateHookup.com through Google AdWords.  Seriously?  You run this ad on DateHookup and you don’t think I might have a slight problem with it?  WTF??? 

Needless to say I disabled this and a few other ads, luckily they just started running them the same day.  Lesson for the day: Always remember to go to the Ad Review Center in AdSense every once in awhile to see what ads companies are running on your site.  Keep in mind just browsing your site is not good enough as an advertiser can customize their targeting by location.

Only slightly less insulting is this ad, which one will see if they type in ‘datehookup’ into Google:

Cute isn’t it?  Not only are they infringing on my trademark but they are talking crap about my site too!  Nice.  Well until I get my trademark officially registered I guess I can’t do anything about it.  Weak.

Do you own a dating site (or any site for that matter)?  Type your name into Google and see which a**hole companies are putting your name in their ad.  I know Zoosk does this with other dating sites.  It’s one thing to advertise with your name as a keyword, but it’s quite another thing to stick the keyword in the ad.  Not cool, and not really legal either.