I have solved The Case of the Mysterious Diet Pill Snake Oil Ad that appeared on my updates page. I was quite puzzled at first. I was pretty sure I hadn’t been hacked, because the ad only appeared on the updates pages (both current and archived ones) and it seemed to me that snake-oil-selling hackers would want to put it up on every page. But I figured it out and shall explain:
There used to be a Javascript widget that would show you if there was a current Amber Alert out, and provide the details scrolling across the screen. I had said widget on each of my updates pages. Some time ago, I have no idea when, it stopped showing up. It didn’t work anymore, I guess. But out of laziness, or force of habit, or whatever, I had left the code for it in the HTML files. Well, it would seem that the widget was appropriated by the snake oil company, and came back to life on my updates pages. Because I’ve got an ad block, I didn’t notice until you helpful blog commenters pointed it out.
So I went back to each HTML document in the domain’s /updates folder and removed that bit of code. Problem solved. Let me know if I missed anything.
(I changed my domain login password, too. Why not?)
The Charley Project Blog 