…andersonfam.org is back in all its glory and splendor….errr something like that.
The short version is that the OS hard drive of my previous webserver died a very hard death, and I was unable to salvage any data from it. Luckily, most of the data I had on the webserver was stored on a separate hard drive, which is chugging along healthily. The website is mostly back to it’s previous state, minus a few comments (due to my lack of adequate db backups) and minus search engine-friendly URLs (I need to figure out how lighttpd’s incarnation of mod_rewrite works). I know I won’t be able to get the comments back, but hopefully I’ll be able to get mod_rewrite under control in the next few days.
Oh – and the other thing I’m changing is the location of my photo gallery. I’ve moved my pics offsite, over to my smugmug gallery.
Very seldom do Slashdot stories grab any more than a few seconds of my attention and/or curiosity. Tonight, however, a story came through Slashdot that grabbed my attention. It was about Numbers Stations. In a nutshell, Numbers Stations are shortwave radio stations operated out of various countries around the world. These stations usually broadcast semi-regular strings of seemingly random characters (numbers, letters, etc). The presiding theory about Numbers Stations is that they’re operated by world governments as a means of communicating with their spies abroad. Using One-Time-Pad cryptography to mask the message’s true content, they’re usually broadcast using a human voice. Today, this voice is usually computer-generated, though in the past live voices were used. No governments have ever officially owned up to the fact that these are intelligence-related, though several of the transmission sites have been localized to government communications centers. Another piece of evidence that these stations are run by the government is the fact that, though operating illegally per FCC laws, these stations are never taken down. Many of the stations interfere with other “legal” radio communications – if a civilian was doing the same, the FCC would come after them with a vengence.
Read more…
For several years, I’ve been trying to convince web surfers and domain owners that the “www” that prefaces most web addresses is now completely unnecessary. The practice of putting “www” before domain names for web pages was started in the early nineties to help web browsers distinguish HTTP-protocol web pages from other protocols such as gopher, ftp, etc. All modern browsers assume that you want to use the http protocol unless you specify otherwise, so the “www” is not necessary. Unfortunately, the vast majority of corporate marketing departments (probably out of ignorance) are still plugging their respective domain names prepended with www. Along with that is the fact that *many* clueless webmasters/sysadmins out there will only serve up their website of you go to the “www” form of their domain name. Ugh.
Anyway – all that to say that I stumbled across no-www.org yesterday. They’re on a campaign to do away with the scourge that is www. My website now validates as a “Class B” no-www site. This means that if you accidentally happen to visit www.andersonfam.org, you’ll get politely redirected to andersonfam.org.
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
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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.
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:
You’re Safired! (kottke.org)
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