Copyright Notice

As it seems it is necessary, I am posting this reminder that all original works on this site are copyrighted by Michael F Ballard. A notice has been posted since the 1990’s regarding this, ever since a newspaper plagiarized three pages on this site and printed them verbatim, without my permission. It is still up …

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Site Update – Part 2

After figuring out what the problem was regarding this site not coming up in basic searches such as “Ridge Route” and “Santa Clarita Geology”, I am pleased to say that it looks like things are getting slowly back to normal.

The problems seemed to stem from “robots.txt” blocking search engines from indexing this site. I am not sure how or why that happened, as it wouldn’t be something I’d do, at least not on purpose. I corrected that and went back to Google Webmaster Tools to see what I could do. I used to have the site on there, but had been removed for some reason. After adding it back in and forcing a reindexing, I found a few more errors, which have since been corrected.

The meta keyword and description data also needed to be updated as WordPress deleted the information from my site, which it does whenever there is an update to WordPress itself. Modifying these has helped put the site out there a bit more.

I’ll stay more vigilant in my site monitoring to make sure this sort of problem doesn’t happen again. At least now I know what the issue is and can correct it. Thank you all for continued support for this site.

Site News

Well, Unbeknownst to be, this site wasn’t being indexed by Google and had effectively disappeared from searches. Now, after 24 years of work, being the first website to cover many things (the Ridge Route, US Highways 6 and 99, Geology in Santa Clarita, Wineries in San Diego County) it was rather disheartening to not even find the site after multiple pages. I think I’ve corrected this problem, only time will tell. I will not let all this work just vanish because of an error that can be corrected. I have also created a new poll for the site to help determine how people are getting to it.

Power, Fire, and Rails

It has certainly been interesting in southern California lately. Between fires breaking out on a near daily basis, sometimes hourly, it has been a bit difficult to keep up with things. One of the fires, the Tick Fire, burned very close to where I used to live in Santa Clarita. My father still lives there …

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Updates to Highway Logs

As a way to keep track of the immense amount of data regarding old highways, I created highway logs to store the data. They were originally designed after 1940’s state highway logs from the Division of Highways. I have made them available on this website on my Site Documents page. The logs for US 6 and US 99 have recently been updated and have been uploaded.