Try it out!

I’m in the process of compiling ht://Dig 3.2.0b4 to add full-featured search to this site. If you don’t have experience with it already, I would highly recommend checking out ht://Dig next time you consider making a search feature. I considered using a FULLTEXT MySQL search but that would ignore one of the largest sections of the site, the Photolog, which is not MySQL-driven (yet).

Back and forth. I like the economic slant, however I disagree with DeLong.

The Soundbug from ThinkGeek came in today, and I got to play with it a bit at House of Pies. So far I’m pretty impressed, but I’d like to try it out on more surfaces. I’ll put a full review up in the Toy section in a week or so. For those of you unfamiliar with the product, the Soundbug turns any surface into a speaker, and can attach itself to basically anything it can suction to. The volume is supposed to be able to go up to 75dBm, and you can hook two Soundbugs together for stereo sound. Pretty cool, huh?

I am proud to say this olde blog now features not only trackback, but also Pingback. I’m so proud :). Kudos as always to Michael, the very able developer of b2. I am running bleeding edge code here, so if you see any quirks anywhere let me know. Now I have some trackbacking to do 🙂

Thanks to the wonderful Kymberlie (isn’t that an interesting spelling?) I have been able to set up a Klipfolio for this site, which you can get by clicking here. I’ve also added an item to the menu, so if you put it off for a month and the entry has faded into the archives, they’ll be a convenient link where you can still get this channel. This is a very useful tool, and since I’ve started using it I have become addicted to the live updates that it delivers.

I just read an amazing article on Google called Pagerank: Google’s Original Sin. Now it brings up some interesting points about how PageRank technology works creates a reinforcing cycle of “rich” websites getting richer and bestowing their “riches” on partners and such. Frankly though, I think the article is a little whiny. If you can’t get a PageRank above 5, then you’re doing something wrong on your site. As a webmaster who has created about two dozen sites on as many domains, even with the earliest have decent PageRanks. If you write a page with good semantically meaningful markup and have useful content, people will find it even if the PageRank isn’t spectacular, and if people find it and it’s truly useful, they’ll link to it. Also most of the tips and tricks I’ve seen for optimizing for search engines also make sense for users. If your page is about a subject, but it in your title! Put it in the URI! Use real headings! Keep the most significant content above the fold! I guess it seems logical now, but I can’t say honestly that I followed all these rules when I was first starting out.

An example of what I consider to be meaningful markup and URIs would be Mullenweg.com. It has a ton of unique content and information (thanks to my wonderful sister), yet the front page has a measly PageRank of 5, and it goes down from there. However it averages 47 unique visitors a day, and the vast majority of them come from Google. Why? Because you find stuff there that simply isn’t anywhere else.

That said, PageRank can be frustrating for me simply because I feel trapped by it’s quantified measure of importance. While I don’t have any sites below 5, I also don’t have any above 6. Breaking the 6 barrier has been quite a challenge, and I don’t see it happening any time soon. Oh well. 6 is respectable, right? And she said PageRank doesn’t really matter . . .

To those of you who may have tried to validate this page in the few days may have run into a mess of errors! In reality, there was just one error, a missing end tag for a paragraph element, but it was causing the validator to throw several errors up. If validator error messages scare you and XHTML sounds like something from a Transformers episode, you might want to read Zeldman’s Better Living Through XHTML. Satisfaction guaranteed.