Search engine rankings are one of the concepts that I think is vaguely understood. It’s amazing to me how a subtle change in a series of search terms (or quoting a pair of words) can so drastically alter the results. Let’s say you’re searching for discount shoes, there’s a difference between a search for discount shoes and “discount shoes”… Of course, if you’re hosting your own site…. it’s awfully nice to be able to get an idea of where you turn up in the search results for given terms. The biggest problem is…. most search engines give a chance for you to see if pages on your site are found with the terms, but that doesn’t tell where in the rankings you compare to other sites. The hard way of course, is to type in your search term and go from page to page until you finally encounter your site. This can be painfully tedious though.
Tag: time
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Time to start cleaning out sites – the internet’s getting too full….
Or at least Google may be…. stories here and here. The way the Register puts it is that Google is in an arms race with blog spammers, with tools out that can create 100 blogs in 24 minutes and shops that can provide mass numbers of private label articles, they contend that google is drowning in the spam so to speak. I can’t help but connect it (as they do) with the changes related to the Big Daddy update which really seemed to mark a drastic change in search rangings for some of the pages on this site. Search terms that had for a time done quite well for me (page 1) dropped an average of 3-4 pages almost overnight (literally over two nights).
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Translating web pages
I don’t know if I’ve mentioned it before here, but languages are one of the things that fascinate me. I’ve studied Spanish, German and French. Although right now I would barely be able to recognize a handful of words in German and French. Of late, spanish has been the language I’ve focused on *(3 1/2 years at this point.) My goal was to spend at least 5 years reading/listening to *just* one language (in addition to my native English…) anyway, I’m at a point where I feel like I have a very good understanding of written spanish, pretty good understanding of much spoken spanish (depends on the accent/pace/pronunciation of the speaker, but in some cases I feel that way with English as well…….) From time to time though, I’ve used web tools to automatically translate a page or a bit of text to see how well I’m understanding….
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Clamav and Firefox updates
In the last couple days there have been new security releases of both clamantivirus (0.88.2 is now the current) and Mozilla-Firefox (1.0.3 is the current release over there). If you use either of these programs you should be looking to update. I’ve been busy looking at getting src.rpm’s recompiled here for various Mandr-ake/iva’s and if time allows I’ll even upload the latest. It sure feels like firefox has been getting rebuilt about every week or two lately though.
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Google Calendar escapes into public use..
There have been rumors for (years?) a long time at least, that google was preparing something known as cl2 which would be a calendar with full gmail integration. There were screenshots, many of which were photoshopped from another web calendar, but there were others that were more convincing… well, as of late yesterday Google Calendar has escaped in to public view. http://www.google.com/calendar. I first tried logging in through my gmail account thinking I might see info there, but I didn’t, so I went to the above link and answered a question about what time zone I’m in, then got to see the main interface.
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WordPress plugin stattraq speedup
I’ve made mention I think that I use the stattraq plugin for wordpress as one of the ways to see where traffic is coming from on the site, etc. etc. etc. I think I mentioned it as one of my stat tracking tools about the time Google Analytics limped out of the gate… Anyway.. one of the things that had bugged me about it for some time was that it was SOOOOO slow to pull up any information (maybe a minute to pull in the page?) I had noticed a performance tip from the author…
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OK – just fresh off the 5 wordpress install updates and now clamav…
So, I spent the better part of the evening doing WordPress updates to get 5 blogs up to v. 2.0.2 and now….. clamav has multiple vulnerabilities …………… oi…. now it’s time to rebuild clamav to install on 2 machines……
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WordPress update to 2.0.2
I had undertaken an update earlier this evening to a “sister site” here…. the onlineradiotv.com site had started out as a wordpress 2.0 site and I thought it would likely be the easiest to upgrade to 2.0.2 which is a security upgrade and therefore high priority, but I’m just now getting to it. I know why I’ve put it off though… I’ve spent the last 2-3 hours struggling with an issue after the upgrade process finished that gave me a message like this “You do not have sufficient permissions to access this page.” on logging in.
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April Fools…. not observed here….
I remember a time when I enjoyed April Fools – when I was real little I’d try the outlandish “there’s a tiger in the front yard” kind of stuff, later, perhaps more subtle…. but I’ve NEVER been a fan of the idea of a news reporting organization putting out an april fools story. Every day we have to gaurd ourselves to take every email that comes in with a grain of salt, watching for signs of phishing attack or social engineering. It really bugs me though when supposedly trustworthy sources burn some credibility on April fools day…