We wish you great health, great careers, and great relationships for the new year! Happy new year, everyone!

(We’re a bit busy with the holidays and all but expect regular updates by January 2. Oh and we still have a lot in store for you in 2008.)

As the year draws to a close, we’d like to reminisce the year that was in the context of this blog. It was a really wild ride for us here. Here are some of the more memorable events that our site went through for the past year. For auld lang syne…

Bloggy Network acquires LifeSpy

LifeSpy was the child of David Peralty. A few months old and our boss, Jacob Gower, decided to acquire it and place it under the Bloggy Network banner.

Alex starts blogging for LifeSpy

Okay, so it sounds really pretentious referring to myself. But I guess it’s a highlight for this blog. I started to write for LifeSpy, January this year. That meant that LifeSpy has a full-time blogger to update the blog several times a day, at least five days a week, for the whole year! Michael (over at Apple Gazette) started writing for the blog too but he went back to concentrate on Gazette and our other sister blogs.

LifeSpy gets a redesign

Ever miss that green theme that we used to sport? It was a bit crude. The font was too small and the green wasn’t all too reader friendly. So we decided to give the site a makeover last March (which was also around LifeSpy’s birthday). With the Elena’s (Design Disease) magic we ended up with this current theme. Blue, white, and a bit of red and black. Oh, and yes, the pair of sexy legs dangling from above to match. Spiffy!

Google hates us

There were also a few downsides this year. I guess even a great year can be messed up by a few things. And all of them were caused by our favorite search and engine, Google. Sometime July, Google AdSense penalized us for writing about topics concerning intimacy and some the mature entertainment industry. That meant that we weren’t earning any dough from the site for around three weeks. Then they decided to mess with us again earlier this month by flagging our site as a malicious one trimming our traffic by 60%. No explanations but we’re guessing it’s because of the “spy” in our name.

Don’t get us wrong. We love Google since around 60% of our traffic comes from search results. But those two events sent us reeling. And we haven’t really recovered from the last one.

Illacrimo theme release

As a value-added service from our end, we sponsored a free WordPress design theme dubbed as Illacrimo. It’s probably one of the best blog themes available today. I don’t have the figures of the number of downloads but I guess there would already be at least a couple of thousand blogs using the theme.

Traffic up by 2000%

And finally, as the year closes, we’re still going strong and hopefully things would still go our way next year. So right now, our traffic is up by 2000% from the start of this year and we hope to make the same push for next year.

And for all of these (except for the Google fiasco), we thank all of you loyal readers who spend time each day browsing our posts.

Happy holidays from all of use here in LifeSpy and Bloggy Network!

I really don’t know if I’d thank Google. But all they did was rectify a mistake that shouldn’t have happened to the first place. I guess, it’s more of a relief for us not having that “This site might harm your computer mark” under all of the search results pointing to our site.

It’s really crazy I tells yah. I believe the site got cleared around 9 AM this morning. The most obvious clue is that the traffic has been up to its usual before the site got flagged. Too bad we had to suffer five days of having minimal traffic (25% of our usual, meaning 75% of our traffic comes from Google search results).

Good thing we’re accessible via Google search again. And I hope the traffic keeps up. We obviously lost a great deal of revenue from AdSense due to traffic loss for those five days.

If there’s one thing that this site aims to do is to help people and not harm you guys. We just love our readers too much.

And this I don’t get. Checking our daily stats showed a staggering 85% drop in readership for today. Since we know that we place quite well in Google search rankings and get most of our traffic from Google, we checked how the site is currently doing. And it’s crazy we tells ya.

Our friendly little site is now flagged by Google as a malicious site. Piff.

As far as I can tell, we haven’t really done outrageous stuff to be classified as malicious (except for that phase when we lost our AdSense ads since Google considered our posts about intimacy as adult content. Our page’s code doesn’t contain any malicious scripts and the only thing we have for download from our end is the Illacrimo theme. Can’t really understand why we’re being flagged. If it’s because of the “spy” in LifeSpy being the same three letters you have in “spyware”, now that would really be crazy.

Now if Google could just review us and clear our name…

After the long wait of knowing why the heck the ad units weren’t showing, Google informed us that it’s because of the “mature” content that we had on the site. As a compromise, we took down all the posts that mentioned “s*x” and “p*rn.”

For those of you still interested on these articles (if you stumbled on a link somewhere pointing you to some of them), you may contact us, as we have local copies of those. But in any case, we’ve seemed to have appeased the Google AdSense gods and we’re now back in business. As a precaution, we’ve also added a “NSFW” category just in case.

Uhm, okay. We’ve written a lot of stuff about the adult movie industry and its contribution to the high-definition video wars and a few on intimacy tips. But we’re pretty sure we haven’t featured anything that technically qualifies as hardcore. Probably we shouldn’t have used the common four-letter or three-letter words a lot on this site.

In any case, to be back in Google’s good graces, we might have to do away with those things for now. So if you are trying to search our archives for all of those posts containing the four-letter word for “adult entertainment” and the three-letter word for “physical intimacy,” we had taken them down. Rest assured we have kept local copies of these articles just in case some of you are looking for them for reference and research. We’ve had a pretty decent number of linkbacks especially on the debate on the high-definition wars.

So please, Google, bring our ad units back!

Spreading some homegrown city love around the United States, Bloggy Network launches is My Home – a mini-network that’s all about cities. Currently the site features nine cities – Atlanta, Chicago, Columbus, Dallas, Houston, Indianapolis, Memphis, Nashville, and Philadelphia.

So if you’re looking for that distinct local flavor for each of the cities, is My Home is the site for you. It’s all about the city from the passionate city dweller’s point of view. It’s a great guide for those who live in the city and those who are just plain curious about other locales.

Oh, by the way, Bloggy’s not stopping at nine cities. We’re still looking for good writers to blog about their city (US only, for now) send Bloggy an e-mail at local@bloggynetwork.com.

Yes, that’s correct, as of this post, there are now 1,000 posts in LifeSpy’s archive.

And we have to thank you, our dear readers for giving us the reason to churn out more articles for you to read every day.

Let’s see the stats: 1,000 posts, 451 comments, more than 100,000 unique eyeballs, and with around 500 feed subscribers. Yes, truly a momentous occasion for us here at LifeSpy.

And again, thank you for reading. Get ready for a thousand more new posts for you.

For all of you that have been wanting a Widget Ready version of the Illacrimo theme, it is finally here. It took some doing, and there are some limitations, but hopefully this will make most of you happy.

The limitations are only that the search box, and RSS links cannot be moved from their place. This would disturb the design, and the design is why you all like this theme, right?

Other than that, feel free to move around your favorite widgets all over both sidebars.

Check out the original post on Illacrimo for more details.

This theme, like all themes released by Bloggy Network are released under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License.

Grab the Download

Currently, you can check out a live version at Design Disease.