More Googlebot Flailing

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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 /about/ URIs, and that’s Typepad. 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 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 . . .

It’s Not RSS

Asides

New formats called RSS that don’t work with anything else, specifically referring (I assume) to the “RSS 1.1” effort. (Where RSS stands for RDF Site Summary.) The name of RDF Site Summary is a mistake in the first place, they should take this new development effort as a chance to correct it. (Also, publishers are getting tired of supporting the format du jour. Maybe it’s “easy” for aggregators to support the latest permutation, but the last thing I want to do is bloat WordPress with support for Yet Another syndication format. Four is enough.)

Divine Command Theory and the Euthyphro Argument

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As always, this is best appreciated as a PDF, but for the rest of you here’s the text:

The divine command theory is the view of morality in which what is right is what God commands, and what is wrong is what God forbids. This view is one that ties together morality in and religion in a way that is very comfortable for most people, because it provides a solution to pesky arguments like moral relativism and the objectivity of ethics. Continue reading Divine Command Theory and the Euthyphro Argument →

Typepad Switches Atom

Asides

I think that Typepad may have just switched it’s Atom feeds from .3 to 1.0. How do I know? Because two blogs I read just popped up with 10 new entries (none were new) and each one was broken in Bloglines. (Which is the single largest aggregator in the world, at least according to WordPress.com feed stats.) Here is Seth Godin’s as viewed by the feed validator. This is a bold move, but I certainly wouldn’t want to be their support department tomorrow. This could also just be my misunderstanding, as some feeds like this one from Marginal Revolutions (one of my favorite blogs) seems to be on Atom 0.2.

On Rita

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Houston is the 4th largest city in the entire United States. The neighborhoods that flood the worst are the poor areas, but that doesn’t sound like it’ll matter with the magnitude of this hurricane heading to my home of 20 years. My parents have been on the road for 10 hours now and haven’t made it out of the city yet. Many other members of my family are staying, along with my Grandmother who is too sick to travel. After Katrina there was a rush of people metasearches and directories, NOW would be a good time for Amazon, Yahoo, Google, and the other giants to pool their resources and get the infrastructure in place to help before it hits. This one is hitting much closer to home for me, it’s hard to think about.

A Summary

Asides

I guess the problem with a long piece is many just skim it, and the more words there are the more chance there is for the meaning to be lost. I’ve given a lot of thought to putting things as succintly as possible: Knowing what I knew then, I would probably make the same decision; knowing what I know now I wouldn’t even consider it. Not thinking through all the ramifications was a big mistake. So was not having more community dialog from the beginning, which would have caught this earlier. I am extremely sorry for both, and it won’t happen again. Thank you to everyone who has been so supportive. Amazingly, WordPress has gotten more donations in the last 4 days then it has in the past year — what an incredible community.

iPod Supports Standards

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Standards like MP3? Nope, web standards. Go to the iPod sub-site and toggle your stylesheets using a favelet. Notice anything? Now check out the source; still crufty in places, but a giant step forward from Apple’s old code, which is still viewable on other parts of their site. Great!

I noticed this because I was on the site to check out the iPod Mini. Yes, I know that for $50 more I get 11 more gigabytes, but even the largest iPod still wouldn’t hold all my music. Realistically, I don’t 10,000 songs in my pocket. About a thousand should hold me for a few days between syncing. I thought the Minis were pretty silly until Elissa dragged me into an Apple store the other day and I saw one up close. My goodness those things are small, making the iPod feel gargantuan in comparison. Size does matter, a lesson I learned from my old 16.1″ Sony laptop, bulky digital camera, and the Visor Prism. My only concern about the Mini is I wouldn’t be able to use accesories like this voice recorder. That’s probably for the best though, as I need to stop recording concerts and such on hardware not meant for it and break down and get (another) MiniDisc recorder and a decent microphone.

While at the site I noticed the rollovers were so fast they had to be CSS, and checking under the hood I found not only a mostly-CSS layout, but pages just a few simple mistakes away from validating. It’s good to see a company that “gets it” in many other areas finally maturing in their web presence.

UPDATE: Apple properties which seem to be on the bandwagon:

This is obviously a work in progress becuase you have pages like this antivirus page which is very much old-school markup. Can’t wait to hear more about this, or an official word from Apple with more information about their new-generation markup. Are there any bloggers inside of Apple?

Travel Troubles

Personal

By the way, I’ve never been happier to be home. It’s the little things — like using a mouse and a real keyboard. Unfortunately getting here took the better part of 19 hours. They actually had the hood up on the plane that was supposed to fly me overseas, which was a long delay. I overheard someone say “if they get out the duct tape I’m staying here.” The connecting flight in DC was very missed, but after 45 minutes in line I got the last seat on a direct flight to SFO leaving in about two hours. Then I spent more than two hours in line trying to get a boarding pass and through security, the height being my ticket was once again tagged SSSS which mean I got the “special” treatment at security with my flight set to take off in 8 minutes. (I swear I’m on some sort of list.)

The very worst was I had bought some matchbooks for my sister (who collects them) and they were in my suitcase. The guy asked how many there were and I said “two” because that’s how many I bought at souvenir places. He found another (a free one from a hotel) and another TSA guy came up and said “which two of these do you want?” and took the third one away from me. I was shocked, and said “Are you going to keep that?” and he replied “Well you’re not getting it back.” I stumbled away to the shuttle and ran to the gate, 10 minutes after it was supposed to leave and all the doors were closed but luckily the plane hadn’t left yet. I finally got in around 1 AM and it was too late for BART so I just took a cab. Now I’m home and warm and dry and clean and being back after travelling so intensely makes it seem that much better. Time to disappear under some sheets…

Spring Ping Thing

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Now I know what you’re thinking. It’s Spring and time for me to stop teasing and come forward with something dramatic.

Announcing Ping-O-Matic, the automatic pinging fanatic that handles the pinging of almost a dozen different update services. Erratic server responses making pinging problematic? Bookmark the Ping-O-Matic results page and let us handle the dirty work.

With the dream team of Dougal and yours truly, you knew it was going to be cool. What you see is just the beginning. Think a unified XML-RPC interface (One Ping to rule them all, One Ping to find them…), think ping queueing, think quality of service and response graphs, think different, think global blogtimes, think update aggregation, think Ping-O-Matic.

So spread the word from here to Beijing. More than just a fling, we’re committed to being the Kings of Pings. We take this ping thing seriously, so you don’t have to.

Bing!

Image Toolbar Header

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I’m doing some code cleanup around here, and I came to a line in my <head> that is soley to work around an Internet Explorer feature I don’t want on my site.

A highlighted example of an Internet Explorer image toolbar.

Here is the standard way to remove it:

<meta http-equiv="imagetoolbar" content="no" />

Since the http-equiv attribute is meant to be simply a document-level replacement for real HTTP headers, and I have the ability to send out real HTTP headers, I decided to try out removing this line and replacing it with this bit of PHP, which according to the spec is functionally equivilent:

<?php header ('imagetoolbar: no'); ?>

Looks funky, but according to the HTTP 1.1 specification user agents should ignore headers they don’t recognize, so there’s no harm. However in my testing I was disappointed (though not terribly surprised) to find that Internet Explorer did not respect the header. I have trimmed other parts of my markup quite a bit though, and I’m willing to sacrifice this one line.

MusicBrainz

Asides

I remember reading about MusicBrainz forever ago but I’ve really started using it in earnest today and it’s totally blowing me away. Running a little slow though, this might be the application that gets me to upgrade my computer. Why don’t these guys have every music site and VCs pounding down their door? Fantastic, moderated metadata plus collection management? That’s hot.