Tantek muses on contact information. One of my coding dreams has always been to sit down for a few months and write the perfect contact manager. I daydream about it sometimes and have a lot of the implementation worked out in my head. Imagine something like Plaxo, but distributed, not annoying, completely automatic, and with an infinitely flexible versioned backend. In fact, not like Plaxo at all.
More Googlebot Flailing
Now I’m seeing the Googlebot request /about/ pages relative to known blogs that don’t have any links to any /about/ URI. The last time the Googlebot flailed around like this it was fun to watch for a little bit and wonder what they had cooking in the labs, but then it got annoying. I don’t know if there are rules of bot etiquette, but requesting imagined unlinked resources while spidering can’t be a best practice.
There is of course one blog vendor who consistently has about pages at Now my question Google is: what should the rest of us do if we want our about pages indexed by this new system? Mine happens to be in the /about/ URIs, and that’s Typepad.about subdirectory of my blog, but what about people who have about.html or about-me.php? Should I set up a permanent redirect for every blog I have redirecting to the real about page?
(Note: That’s faux indignation. I don’t have any juicy conspiracy theories, and I’m not really that peeved, mostly I’m just curious what they’re up to. However juicy conspiracy theories are welcome in the comments. [As long as they don’t make fun of me for noticing these things.] )
UPDATE: It just requested a non-existent non-linked /contact/ URI.
UPDATE: It just requested a non-existent non-linked /stats/ URI.
DEVELOPING . . .
Ordered List
OrderedList.com v2.0, a very attractive site redesigns. I dig the curved navigation at the top. Good IA, good writing. Groovy motif. Reverse breadcrumbs. RSS and such a little funky though. Why isn’t this guy using WordPress? A blog to watch.
Gallery: 7-9-2004
Auto-imported from old gallery:
Candy-covered chocolates
Where the Heart Is
Typepad Error
Funky Typepad DNS error I ran into today. And what is up with every Typepad site having the same favicon? Ruins my tabs. ( I was trying to get to http://ditto.typepad.com/ the blog by the creator of RubHub.)
A Bit Better
Feeling a bit better than yesterday, thanks for all the well-wishes. Geof said I probably needed sleep and my body would make me have it one way or another. He’s right, I think I’m about to crash again. Had a meeting today I had to go to, and it went well. Generally trying to stay away from the computer though, however today has been an interesting day. Today has been a domain-registering day, which is always a sign of exciting things to come. 🙂
Between the Lines
Between the Lines is the ZDNet blog. Looks like WordPress to me. 🙂 (By the way, that page isn’t far from validation. It’s mostly pretty nice markup. Must be a staging area, because the main site has markup straight out of the 90s.)
Matt May on SVG
Matt May on Implementing SVG: “Hyatt is, of course, neglecting to mention that, alongside the KHTML engine Safari is based on, there is a KSVG engine. They wouldn’t have to reinvent the wheel to use that any more than they did to integrate KHTML.” My impression is they’ve put a lot of work into KHTML, but the point stands. Even a subset of SVG would be immmediately useful.
Download?
Someone just reported when they visit WordPress.org it tries to download a file instead of showing the web page. Can anyone recreate this?
Death of Windows?
I just tried to run Windows Update, and got a message explaining ActiveX to me and these instructions:
To view and download updates for your computer, Windows Update should be listed as a Trusted Site in Internet Explorer.
To add Windows Update to the trusted sites zone:
- On the Tools menu in Internet Explorer, click Internet Options.
- Click the Security tab.
- Click the Trusted Sites icon, and then click Sites...
- Uncheck the “require server verification” checkbox.
- Make sure the following URLs are listed in the Web Sites list box:
- http://*.windowsupdate.microsoft.com
- http://*.windowsupdate.com
Note: If you need to add a URL to the Web Sites list and the Add button is disabled, contact your system administrator.
What a usability nightmare! Perhaps this degraded user experience in the name of “security” will open the market for systems built on a foundation of security wrapped in an enjoyable and easy-to-use interface.
Sick
It’s official, I’m sick. Since Monday I kept telling myself this was just allergies but now my throat hurts and my voice is going and I need to accept the fact and start eating/sleeping/drinking in a manner consistent with getting better. Bad timing, but it always is. Posting will either be light or heavier than ever.
Wanted: CSS Luminary
Hot Blogs
Speaking of lists, I have a small list of well-designed WordPress blogs I’ve come across. I’m open to suggestions, so if you have a favorite that isn’t on the list let me know.
Moving Up
I noticed today that about a third of my updated blogroll is now powered by WordPress. This is a skewed sample, surely, but at least half of those I never would have imagined converting. I was remembering today when WordPress first got started and out of all the developers I was the only one running it. Mike and Alex were still on b2 because they had a lot of hacks that would be hard to transition, and Dougal was on some funky system he had previously contributed to. (MyPHPBlog?) You could count the number of WP blogs on one hand. That was about a year ago.
ZIMoBLOG
Free SuSE
Novell is giving away copies of SuSE Pro. Step 3: Profit!!! Hat tip: dented21 in #wordpress.
More Molly
Molly explains her move, an interesting read.
mod_validator
mod_validator offers several advantages to the W3C validator. Worth checking out if you run Apache 2.0.