By Kenneth Barbalace

Twelve years ago today, on October 22, 1995, I started what would eventually become EnvironmentalChemistry.com. I remember the day quite well. I was attending the University of Alaska Fairbanks as a non-traditional student and after relentless badgering from one of my friends, I had been finally goaded into creating a website. This was before the heady days of the dot com bubble. It was also the days before Internet Explorer had come onto the scene when Netscape Navigator ruled the web. I had no idea what I wanted to do with a website, but I knew my friend Del would not let the issue rest until I started my website.

In the beginning my website was hosted on a NeXT server run by the University of Alaska Fairbanks Mathematics Department. I wasn't a math major, but anyone on campus who had a clue knew the math department's NeXT computer lab the coolest computer lab on campus next to the Cray Supercomputers, and undergrads like me had a snowballs chance in hell of getting access to the supercomputer labs.

My original strategy was simply to throw stuff on my website to see what would stick. I was majoring in geology and fire science (with a specialization in hazardous materials), so it only made sense for me to add things related to those subjects on my site. Eventually, I had my first computer built for me (a Pentium 90), which I quickly upgraded to Windows NT4.0. The next year UAF started installing Ethernet connections in our dorm rooms, and with this I got the bright idea of hosting my website on my own computer running Apache.

As I was nearing the end of my college years, I moved my website off of the university network and onto a commercial web hosting provider under its own domain name (the less than creative KLBProductions.com). Over time, geology lost out on my site to the chemistry and hazardous materials and I began to take a stronger interest in environmental issues. In 1999 as the focus of this site revolved around environmental, chemistry and hazardous materials related topics, I had a spark of "brilliance" and registered the domain EnvironmentalChemistry.com. Over the subsequent couple of years I worked on rebranding my site from its quirky but non-descriptive title "YOGI'S Behemoth" (Yogi was my nickname at the time) to the much more descriptive and marketable EnvironmentalChemistry.com.

In the twelve years that have past since I was goaded into creating a website, a great deal has changed on the Internet. Netscape's iron clad domination of the Internet was broken by Microsoft's Internet Explorer. In time Internet Explorer rose to dominate the Internet with an iron clad fist only to see its death grip broken by a descendent of Netscape called Firefox. The dot com bubble grew and somehow missed me. Eventually, the dot com bubble exploded and left its shattered remnants scattered across the Internet. AltaVista and Yahoo came to dominate Internet search and directories only to be crushed by a new upstart called Google. Static webpages that had to be individually coded gave way to dynamic pages driven by databases and content management systems. Graphical banner ads and affiliate programs rose to dominate the business models of small web publishers like myself in the late 1990s, only to become second string filler to content targeted text ads provided by Google and others.

Over twelve years of evolution and revolution on the Internet, I have methodically nurtured this site, from a college hobby into a serious resource that is highly respected. All along I have strived to produce new articles and resources that I hoped people would find useful, informative and of superior quality. I have been slow to jump on the latest Internet fads preferring instead to take a long term approach to running this site. It is extremely unlikely that EnvironmentalChemistry.com will make me really wealthy in a financial sense. It has, however, evolved into a full time endeavor and I am able recruit scientists and professionals to write the high quality articles readers have come to expect.

Without the help of others, I could not have made this site the success it is today. As such, I would like to thank those who have leant their expertise to EnvironmentalChemistry.com. First, I want to thank my mother Roberta Barbalace, who has leant her many years of experience as an environmental professional and chemistry professor. Roberta has written many of the articles I have published, and serves as my technical editor evaluating articles submitted by freelance writers. My wife Julia also has my sincerest gratitude for all her efforts including copy editing articles before they are published. I would also like to thank all of the freelance writers who have written articles for EnvironmentalChemsitry.com. Finally, I would like to thank all of the readers who have linked to articles and resources on EnvironmentalChemistry.com and/or shared my site with their family, friends, classmates, teachers, and colleagues.

What does the next twelve years have in store for EnvironmentalChemistry.com? Only time will tell, but I hope to continue to raise the quality of the articles we publish as well as increase the frequency we publish new articles. With lots of hard work and the support of readers like you, I believe the next twelve years will be very bright.

By Kenneth Barbalace

Near the end of last year we partnered with CareerBuilder to bring our readers free career listings for environmental, chemistry and hazardous materials related careers. This partnership has been very well received by our readers and those I have personally talked to have absolutely loved our career listings pages.

What people may not realize is that each of the career listings pages on EnvironmentalChemistry.com is the result of a manual trial and error process to find what search phrases return the best lists of job postings. Well today I was googling the web to get new ideas for job titles and search phrases. I wanted ideas for new phrases to query against CareerBuilder's vast database of listings to create new "canned" career listings pages on EnvironmentalChemistry.com.

While working on my task of creating new job listing pages, I was stunned to discover that some career sites actually charge job seekers if they want access the website's job listings. For those who don't know, career listing services typically charge employers to post job listings, then in some cases they are turning around and charging job seekers to gain access to the listings the service is paid to post. Some how, this just seems very cheeky to me. Employers are paying for exposure and charging job seekers limits the exposure that job postings will receive. Charging job seekers for access to listing is a disservice to both employers and potential employees (especially when there are so many sites like ours that offer free access to listings).

In the face of all of the career listing services that allow job seekers to access listings for free, I really wonder how long those pay to browse sites can really last?

While I am on the topic of career listings; if you have not done so already, make sure to check out our careers section. You can even subscribe to RSS feeds for any listing page so that you can keep track of the latest careers you are interested in via your live bookmarks (Firefox or IE7) or your favorite customizable home page like "My Yahoo".

By Kenneth Barbalace

As part of the expansion of our partnership with CareerBuilder, we have added India to our list of countries that we provide career listings for. The list of countries we currently provide job listings for includes: Canada, India, United Kingdom, and of course United States.

If you are looking for a career that doesn't fall into one of our predefined listings, you can use our careers search box to create your own careers listing. Once you have found or created a career listing you want to monitor, you can subscribe to the RSS feed we provide for your desired listing via your favorite RSS reader or customized home page (e.g. "My Yahoo").

Happy job hunting.

By Kenneth Barbalace

Over the past few weeks I have been working with some freelance writers to formulate my publishing schedule for EnvironmentalChemistry.com over the next few months. If things go as planned (like that ever happens) we are hoping to publish articles more frequently than we have in the past.

This week we will be publishing the third article in our four series on prairie dogs. This article is in its final stages now and should be copy edited in the next day or so. Unless it is superseded by another article we have in the works, next week I expect to publish an article I have been writing on my experience with switching out incandescent lights with compact florescent lights. This article will also include a JavaScript calculator that will help readers predict how much money they might save by making the switch to CFLs.

In May we will be publishing the fourth and final part of our series on prairie dogs and are hoping for a food safety article comparing and contrasting the United States with the European Union. This article will be written by one of our really talented writers who is uniquely qualified to write on this subject as they have worked intimately with these issues both here in the United States and in Europe.

Also this summer I am hoping to publish two series of articles on two issues of concern to all of us. The first series will be on environmentally sustainable technologies. The second series will be on radon in the home, which is a much bigger concern than most of us realize. Both series of articles will not only try to formulate their respective issue in clearly understandable ways, but will provide solutions that the individual consumer can reasonably implement.

With so much coming in the near future this is a good time for you to subscribe to our RSS feed for EnvironmentalChemistry.com or our RSS feed for our "Editors' Blog", to make sure you don't miss any of the great articles that we will be publishing.

By Kenneth Barbalace

It has taken several days of work, but I have just about completed updating the layout of my blog and am now down to final details, like fixing the RSS feed. Once these last details are taken care of, I will update the top menu to link the main site and this blog together as well as begin to link all of the articles to their relevant blog post.

By Kenneth Barbalace

After over a year of toying with this blog, but not really doing anything with it, I've decided it is time to bring it up to the standards of my main site starting with implementing my main site's template here. I'm sure there will be a few bugs and glitches for a few days while I work out the kinks, but once this has been completed, I will be able to fully integrate this blog into the rest of EnvironmentalChemistry.com so that they actually look like they belong together.

By Kenneth Barbalace

It was delayed by my Google disaster on July 27th, however; I have completed one of my periodic updates to my Periodic Table of Elements. Every time I do one of these updates I wonder what I was thinking to put a periodic table on my site to begin with back in 1995. Updating and validating existing data on my periodic table takes a tremendous amount of work and over the years I've built up quite a collection of books and charts related to chemistry and the periodic table. I even have two books in Russian on this topic (I made my wife go through those).

One of the most important things I have learned about compiling my data has been to rely on or at least validate against printed sources like books and charts rather than rely on other online periodic tables. In part I do this because they often times used my table as their primary reference so in effect I would be validating my data against a partial copy of my data (not very wise). I have also found that data errors abound in periodic tables especially those published on websites due to clerical errors and omissions. Even books have errors but with enough printed references one can usually isolate out most bad data.

Some of the interesting things I learned during this update are:

1) The IUPAC (International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry) has now officially named elements 110 (darmstadtium ? Ds) and 111 (roentgenium ? Rg).

2) Contrary to popular belief plutonium has been found in nature. In fact, in 1970 Dr. Darleane C. Hoffman discovered traces of naturally occurring primordial plutonium-244 in Precambrian bastnasite. This means that plutonium is the heaviest element to have been found in nature on Earth. That should be of some use as a trick question on a chemistry test somewhere.

3) Although credit for the discovery of platinum is typically given to Antonio de Ulloa of Spain in 1735 or Wood in 1741, platinum (which can be found as pure/native nuggets) had been known to and used by the pre-Columbian Indians in South America long before its "discovery". This was one of many instances I found where social political or academic intrigue usurped the true discoverer or first user of an element. Zinc is another example where a European scientist took claim for discovering an element that had been known to and/or used by non-European people. Zinc had been known about in India and China since before the 1500s even though most sources try to credit Andreas Marggraf with its discovery in 1746.

I actually found the intrigue surrounding the discovery of some of the elements to be quite fascinating and I may delve into this side of the elements more in future updates. I have also having someone work on an article that helps explain why one can sometimes look at three our four highly reputable sources and get three or four different answers for a single data point on a given element. The inconsistency that is common with certain data points can be one of the more frustrating part of validating data.

If you haven't checked it out already, take a look around my periodic table of elements, it is one of the most comprehensive on the Internet (although I don't have any photos of elements yet) and I'm always working on adding data points not found on other online tables. Visit Periodic Table of Elements

By Kenneth Barbalace

On June 27th web publishers across the web woke up to discover their websites suddenly getting buried deep in Google's SERPs. Like so many others I was like come on, it?s the same old Google Dance vs. SEO (search engine optimization) arms race. SEO spammers try to game Google to get their lame MFA (made for AdSense) websites into top search pages for high advertising value search terms. Then Google does an update and those same sites tumble back down.

Year in and year out I have lectured the same line. If one wants to consistently do well in Google's search results, stop trying to game the system and focus on creating compelling and original content. The motto "original content is king" has served me well for over ten years. That is until July 27th....

One thing people can not accuse my site EnvironmentalChemistry.com of is lacking original or compelling content. For what will be eleven years come this October, I have labored away at creating mountains upon mountains of environmental chemistry related resources and original articles. Since the early days of Google my site has always done very well in Google's search results and new pages frequently climb rapidly to a respectable search position for related search terms. Like a locomotive building up a head of steam, I'd produce articles and resources, Google would index that content, and traffic would increase resulting in higher ad revenues. Higher ad revenues allowed me to pay more money for articles, which attracted better writers, which helped build status and credibility to my site.

Then came that fateful morning on July 27, 2006 when I awoke to discover the river of traffic to my site had turned into a trickle. To my horror my labor of love had fallen victim to a Google update and my pages relegated to very undesirable search positions. I don't know exactly what happened and my site has never fallen so far in search results. All I know is that suddenly a pure content site, that was started long before Google had come out of beta, had been lumped in with modern day MFA spam.

If there were ever a prime example of a Google update gone bad, EnvironmentalChemistry.com is that example.. There are no SEO tricks, no cloaking, no keyword stuffing, no link exchanges. There is just pure hard work and dedication to produce the highest quality content possible. It is the type of site that Google says it wants web publishers to produce Over years my site has attracted thousands if not tens of thousands of links and around 100,000 webpages beyond my control make reference of my site. It has even attracted countless links from .GOV, .MIL. and .EDU type sites.

I'm sure that in time my site will recover and regain its rightful position in Google's SERPs (search engine results pages), but in the mean time my primary source of income has been cut off and this will severely hurt my ability to pay writers to write new articles for my site. How I ask you, does burying a high quality site while junk MFA and content spam sites flourish in Google's search results serve the user?

Google is in a monopoly position and as such they have an obligation to tread lightly as they update their search algorithms. Countless small to medium web publishers like me make their living producing original content that users want to read and any massive fluctuation in Google's search results even if only for a few weeks can have a devastating impact. If independent voices like mine are to flourish, we must have a stable and predictable environment upon which we can rely on. Search results will fluctuate over time, I can accept this, but that fluctuation should never be so drastic that a site loses 80% of its traffic literally overnight.

Google has a social obligation to ensure that in their process of trying to weed out search engine spam they don't create so turbulent of search results that small players can not survive the unpredictability. They also have an obligation not to punish innocent publishers in their effort to get rid of the spammers.

---UPDATE---
After about 45 days of being in the "dog house" with Google our search positions and traffic levels recovered virtually overnight in mid September 2006.

By Kenneth Barbalace

It is starting to look like I won't be able to publish a new article in July. I had what was potentially a really good article lined up, but the process of peer review and reference source validation is delaying the article and is threatening to sink it all together.

This is one of the challenges with producing good science related content. It isn't enough to just publish a good sounding article with lots of references; one must also make sure that the references are relevant to the article being published and support the argument being put forth in the article. Sometimes this process can derail an entire publishing schedule and for me this means I might not be able to publish any articles in July - bummer dude. :(

By Kenneth Barbalace

As an experiment, I am now linking select articles on EnvironmentalChemistry.com to their respective blog postings here. For a long time I have been interested in giving readers of EnvironmentalChemistry.com the ability to provide feedback on various articles I publish, but have been concerned that such comments would quickly degrade to the lowest common denominator of trolling and rude posts as I've seen happen on so many news sites that have tried the same thing.

Implementing a blog directly on EnvironmentalChemistry.com rather than using a third party blogging service as I do here would take a great deal of work. I'm not keen on wasting huge amounts of trying to implement such abilities on EnvironmentalChemistry.com only to pull the plug on such an effort because of trolls who simply like to attack others and stir up trouble.

If this experiment goes well and I see there is real interest in posting comments to articles I publish, I may decide it would be worthwhile to implement an on site blog rather than rely on a third party service.