Archive for May, 2007
Hi everyone.. I write this from LA airport – presently waiting for (delayed) return flight – 3.30am departure.
Don’t fly qantas… on the way here, plane was delayed 8 hours, then they lost my baggage, and took 6 days to find it 🙂
Now due to a crash with a baggage trolley, flight back is delayed too… also by 8 hours,,,, oh well – what can you do 🙂
I’ll talk to you all soon.. lots photos
The rest of this post is an experiment (trying to pull my page about how to get out of the supplemental index out of the supplemental index – it’s called irony – how to get out of the supplemental index) – there – done – back on the front page – now do your thing, googlebot. Oh – and another one – http://www.naturalflare.com to help out someone on the webmaster forums.
May 27th, 2007
Hi everyone –
Just a really quick note –
I’m heading overseas for a big business meeting in the morning – I’ll be away for a week.
Wish me luck!
Cheers,
Matt
May 19th, 2007
Just a quick note to let users know that they can safely upgrade their blog to wordpress 2.2 (download wordpress 2.2 here) without any adverse effects – Blix Krieg, unlike Blix, is fully wordpress 2.2 compatible.
Blix Krieg is a ‘drop in’ replacement for users of Sebastien Schmieg’s Blix theme who are having problems with compatibility after an upgrade of wordpress. Installstion is quick, hassle free, ad Blix Krieg adds the option to automatically incorporate adsense into your blog if you desire (a popular addition – as adsense is a great way to make money from your blog).
You can learn more and download the wordpress 2.2 compatible blix theme here.
All the best,
theDuck
May 19th, 2007
Hi Folks,
A little while back I asked the following question on the Google Webmasters help forum:-
Is it OK to duplicate content in a different language?
Nobody could really give me a solid answer at the time. At the risk of setting off a new wave of ‘language spamming’, it seems it is. The following pronouncement from Matt Cutts (Google) seems to confirm it.
Matt: Having content from two different domains isn’t risky if they are in different languages (for example, Chinese and English), but if you have the exact same content on two different domains, it’s better to use a permanent redirect from the duplicate domains to a single preferred domain.
(see this interview with Matt Cutts for the full length version.
Language Spamming ??
What do you people think about that? To me, it’s a very significant admission of a potential major future web-spam weakness, given the availability of (relatively accurate) online translation tools like Babel-Fish etc. It also presents enormous SEO possibilities for crawlers / spammers.
Apart from the obvious inferences, I have a few others:-
- Can Googlebot ‘understand’ foreign language words in an english site?
- If so, what effect do these foreign language words have upon a site’s ‘relevance score’…
- hmmm…
Bye,
doc
それは別の言語の内容を重複させることは良いか ?
它是好复制内容在一种另外语言吗?
Ist es OKAY, Inhalt in einer anderen Sprache zu kopieren?
¿Es ACEPTABLE duplicar el contenido en una diversa lengua?
May 9th, 2007
As you folks prob mostly know, I’m right under the pump at the moment.
Got about 10 balls in the air and trying to juggle them all at once without dropping any..
What does this mean? Writing – loads of writing.. reams and reams of writing – writing coming out of my ears.
Apart from the fact that I’ve rediscovered that the hardest thing about writing anything is writing the first sentence, I’ve also rediscovered the fact that a little background music can help keep you on task and make the hours slip past more quickly and more productively.
With that said, after a week of qualitative experimentation, my thoughts on ‘working music’ (will probably say more about my horrible taste in music than anything else) :-
- 6am – Start the day with something relaxing – I’ve found chill-out albums (depeche mode, coldplay) great for the first hour, then gradually working up – coldplay is another fave.
- 9am-12pm – up the ante – a bit of vivaldi, something classical – this is the best time for writing anything academic.
- 1pm – dinner – avoid the 2pm sleepiness curse – something faster works for me – I hate to admit it, but I’ve rediscovered Kylie Minogue for this purpose.. Sheer volume of written output increases exponentially relative to the BPM of the music, quality perhaps diminishes in same ratio (caution – if you share your office, use headphones during this phase if you want to avoid being shot) 🙂
- After dinner – this is coding time – I find an eclectic mix of low BPM vocal / instrumental is great here – a bit of Dave Matthews / Paul Simon / James Reyne (he’s an Aussie artist folks) early on, followed by something more soothing around 1am to slow down the mind ready for a refreshing 3 hours sleep is great 😉
- Special bonus tip – a mate and I used to combine socialising with study by holding ‘pub-write’ nights – kind of a ‘carrot-stick’ arrangement whereby we’d take our laptops to the local pub, and reward ourselves with 1 beer for every 3 pages written. The net result was usually an enormous volume of writing done, but inevitably said writing tended to become ‘creative’ after ~ 30 pages.. at least one of our joint 1000 page assignments was sporadically ‘sketchy’ as a result 😉
Other tips – if you find yourself lacking inspiration or slowing down, either change the record or take an hour off to hit the gym, then come back and proof read what you have already written – the break does the mind good, the proof-reading gets it back in the groove…
ALL SUGGESTIONS GREATLY APPRECIATED..
M
May 8th, 2007
Hi folks –
I’m currently designing a crawling script – aka a scraper, robot, whatever you want to call it. It is perl based, running off ubuntu linux.. Don’t worry folks – I haven’t headed to the darkside – this is for research purposes only.
My aim is to crawl a large forum consecutively, and essentially save a copy of every page I find in a mysql database..
The script was going fine for about half an hour, and then it stopped – hit with a captcha to continue, with a message like “We have detected you are an automated script, if you aren’t, please enter this number to continue”..
Now, I’m thinking that the target server may be seeing a strong, steady load from my IP, and that’s what is causing the problem..
Logically, I’m hoping that if I add a random delay (10-30 seconds) between crawling pages I might get around this issue…
Problem is.. how to implement this in Perl?
I’m thinking something along these lines..
$oldtime = (time + 10);
while (1) {
if (time > $oldtime) {
&sub_to_call;
$oldtime = (time + 10);
}
}
But I’m damned if I can remember how to make a random number in perl.. If anyone has any ideas, please offer them up! if not, I’m gonna have to send my requests through TOR, which is going to be a headache..
Cheers,
Matt
May 6th, 2007
Since I’m in a nerdy mood (trying to rememember PERL) I just wanted to see if this magic number would crash my server too… oh the traffic… {doc does his best salivating homer impression}
For those of you who missed it, here it is again in H1 –
09 f9 11 02 9d 74 e3 5b d8 41 56 c5 63 56 88 c0
Wow – that’s ugly.. perhaps it will look better in h2…
09 f9 11 02 9d 74 e3 5b d8 41 56 c5 63 56 88 c0
nope, still ugly, let’s try h3..
09 f9 11 02 9d 74 e3 5b d8 41 56 c5 63 56 88 c0
Nope… it’s still just an ugly number. It’s a pity I can’t show it in high definition, perhaps that would sex it up a bit?
Do you know what the hell I’m talking about? Digg-it… 🙂
First correct answer gets a share of the inevitable billions I’m gonna make in adsense booty on this post….. 😛
HINT:- It is not Hurley’s magic number from the hatch.
Today’s cryptic comment proudly brought to you by dockarl..
May 2nd, 2007
