Category: Navel-Gazing

My never-ending fascination with Google results continues. Right now, I’m number 8 when you Google for "always be closing". Probably not the link people are looking for, there. What’s worse, Google returns my trackback and comment links rather than the actual blog entry. Suboptimal.

I learned about this effect from Phil Ringnalda, who has some extensive thoughts on the topic. I note that I do have single page entry archives with the title of the entry in the <title> tag, and Google still likes my TrackBack and comment pages more than the main entry page, so I don’t think Phil’s quite gotten to the bottom of the topic. Still, he’s mostly on target. Similarly, while Andrew Orlowski is mostly off-base, and is certainly ranting, he does pinpoint an issue Google needs to deal with.

Teeny little new feature over on the right, entitled “Recent Leisure.” If your browser supports title attributes, you ought to get a nice little mini-review when you hover your mouse over the links (or whatever the remaining lynx users of the world do to view title attributes). I like PHP.

War’s not over (you wouldn’t want to visit Mosul without an escort just now) but I think it’s about past time to stop scouring the Internet for news. Nothing’s gonna happen suddenly at this point, and if something does happen suddenly it’ll be big and someone will walk down the hall and stick their head into my office to tell me so. So: the war blogroll goes back to whence it came, and some of the blogs wind up on my other blogrolls, and I continue on my pensive way.

Yeah, they really were called the Beaneaters and the Pilgrims.

I pulled the Agonist from my war blogroll and added Stratfor; this won’t do anyone without a subscription much good, alas. Sorry about that. I’m pretty sure I had good reason, though.

When Sean-Paul Kelley admitted he was pulling stuff from Stratfor without attribution cause of “time constraints” I chalked it up to newbie enthusiasm. It’s one reason I decided to get the Stratfor account — I’d been reading their reports for free over on the Agonist, which made me feel a touch guilty. However, it now seems that he misattributed several Stratfor bits in order to gain credibility. In other words, he wanted people to think he had insider connections so he copied some Stratfor pieces and claimed they came from secret sources.

Thanks for doing the image of the Internet all kinds of good, Sean-Paul.

And lo… the new feature is live!

OK, so it’s not really that exciting. But I like it.

My exciting new weblog feature debuts in three days. But you won’t get the full monty until the 17^th.

Phew. Sorry about the outage; that’s what I get for trying to upgrade MySQL to 4.0. Looks like we’re back to normal now. Go about your business.

The new War News sidebar on the right is because I got tired of typing in URLs by hand; I’m gonna be glued to the news for a while and I may as well admit that and make it easier on myself. It’s not a permanent feature.

I’ve mentioned most of those sites. Flit belongs to a former Canadian military guy (vague, but that’s all I know) and has some excellent unbiased analysis. Sorry about the namespace collision.

My little RSS project has foundered on the shoals of RSS parsing woes. If you have a raw apostrophe in your RSS feed, well-behaved RSS parsers will fail. Isn’t that fun? Amphetadesk works around this by just using XML::Simple directly, which I suppose I could do, but I’m kind of lazy. Mark Pilgrim wrote a nice ultra-liberal RSS parser but it’s in Python. Learning enough Python to make use of it would be easier than writing my own code using XML::Simple, I think. Maybe not. Not tonight, anyhow, either way.

Actually, what would be ideal is if everyone redid their tools to provide me with valid RSS… no? Well, OK.

Hm. (You can tell, perhaps, that I am talking out loud here. You may wish to cross to the other side of the street.) You know, somewhere in my parsing process something is unescaping the escaped apostrophes. Oh. OK, so upgrading to the current version of the XML::RSS module does help a lot. Perhaps I’ll write some HTML generating code to go around it. There’s hope yet.

Also: I am slowly experimenting with using Brad Chote’s Textile adaptation as a text filter. It’s pretty cool so far, but I’m not sure it’s necessary. I’d need to hack MT a little so that links showed up in the proper format when using the bookmarklet. It’d be healthy for me. But not tonight.