With the addition of my “Semi-interesting Links” sidebar, you may have noticed that the main RSS feed is getting polluted with my frequent link postings. So…if you don’t mind that, there’s no need to change. However, if you’d rather monitor separate feeds for the “real” blog posts and the links, you can subscribe using these links:
I recently signed up for Google sitemaps, which allows you, among other things, to get a listing of the top 15 search phrases for your domain and your sites’s average ranking in Google’s index for those phrases. Here are the results for andersonfam.org (as of March 2nd, 2006):
Search Phrase Average Ranking
----------------------------------------
1. erik anderson 5
2. drive 105 10
3. gmail domains 3
4. top40 music 6
5. hefewiesen 2
6. "erik anderson" 5
7. celsius llc 9
8. comnet mkt 1
9. scandanavian names 5
10. nickelback two songs 9
11. brian benson 23
12. erik s anderson 8
13. norther brewer 9
14. bethany lefse griddle 8
15. maria gibbons 14
Most of these results didn’t surprise me…except for numbers 3 and 5. First – when you search for gmail domains, not only does my blog show up in number 2 or 3 spot in the search results, but it shows up *above* Google’s own page for their beta of gmail domain hosting. Crazy! I guess that can put to rest the accusation that Google might possibly be artifically inflating their own pages in their search index. Now…onto the search for hefewiesen. In my testing, my page sits solidly in the number two position. Okay – I know that despite popular opinion, Google’s search spider doesn’t have too discerning a taste for beer, but honestly! There are *so* many other homebrewers and commercial microbreweries around the world that not only produce _more_ hefeweisen than I have (a measly 5 gallons), but produce a much better product as well.
Now – I’m not saying that I mind being this high in these search results – it just reveals some interesting “features” (shortcomings perhaps?) of their current ranking algorithm.
Edit…becuase Murphy’s Law states that as soon as I make the above points, Google will update its index and mess up my rankings, I’ve taken a screenshot to record this moment in history.
Via ZDnet.
They’ve apparently started either blocking or turning the QoS way down for Vonage VoIP traffic in some areas. Oh man – if they start blocking SunRocket, I’ll be *very* unhappy.
My sister-in-law Michelle is currently a sophomore at Cornerstone University, so this article (on Scot McKnight’s blog) really caught my attention when it came across my RSS aggregator. Though the details aren’t exactly clear, it appears that Cornerstone fired a recent hire in their IT department on account of his Catholic faith. The man that was fired, Tony Graves, fully disclosed on his application that he attended a Catholic church. They hired him anyway. Shortly after his hire, they (re)discovered that he didn’t attend a “biblical, evangelical” church and informed him that he must change his church affiliation or be canned.
I could see this being a big deal if this person were to be a theology professor or whatnot. But an IT employee? Give me a break. Who gives CU the authority to judge the character and faith of this guy whose church’s services might look a bit different than the “typical” CU employees’? The summary of my feelings on this issue are expressed very succinclty by one of the commentors at the bottom of Scot’s blog entry:
The school expresses by this policy; if your worship doesn’t look the same, and your prayer doesn’t sound the same, and your experience of God is not the same, then it is not legitimate.
I am disgusted and saddened.
I guess that I should respect the fact that this is CU’s policy, but it sure seems like they could have shown a bit more grace in this matter.
The debate over the origin of the word “blog” is a constant source of comedy at work, so I was glad to see that Kottke picked this up:
Recent Comments