Archive for the ‘Technology’ Category
Tuesday, August 21st, 2007
Yesterday, I was updating my website sitemaps in Yahoo! Site Explorer and came across a post in their blog called, “Webmasters Can Now Auto-Discover With Sitemaps.”
This got me thinking, so I did a little more homework. Basically, this semi-new feature allows search engines to auto-discover website’s sitemaps. The syntax looks like this…
Sitemap: http://www.example.com/sitemap.xml
All you have to do is to add this line to your robots.txt file, or course, with your URL inserted instead of the example one above. This helps, because there are many search engines that now recognize Google sitemaps, but have no idea where yours is. Ask.com is a big one.
I found some resources and decided to list them here for you…
- Sitemap hint in robots.txt
- Sitemaps XML format
- What’s new with Sitemaps.org?
- Robots.txt Checker
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Friday, August 17th, 2007
Along the same lines as my previous post, I decided last night that a web store should be added to my G site. I already have about twenty stores, but they are all on brand new domain names (less than a year old). My kwaree.com domain is about seven years old, so the crawling, indexing and respect given by Google should be substantially better.
If you would like to take a look at it, there is a link at the bottom of the regular kwaree.com website, or you can click here.
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Friday, August 17th, 2007
I was thinking last night that I need to add some more websites to my portfolio. I get this way every so often. I was doing my usual search for ideas and I came across a bookmark script called Sabros.us. I decided to install this script on my G site because that domain is nice and aged like a fine wine.
Now, the question is…why did I install this script? I have no idea. It is a personal bookmark script for my own use. I put a link to it on the bottom of my main site. The script is open source, which I like. That means that a “community” can work on it.
Right now, only I can add my personal bookmarks. I am hoping in the future the developers will add functionality that will allow other users to register for an account and add their bookmarks, just like Del.icio.us. One step at a time, I suppose.
The very cool part of this script, the feature that I used last night, is the “Import from Del.icio.us” mechanism. This saved a lot of time and populated the script with all my existing favorites.
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Friday, August 3rd, 2007
I don’t know where the heck I’ve been. I am usually on top of these types of things.
Well, anyway, I was fiddling around with my blog last night and I noticed that I had accidentally placed more than one AdSense link unit on one of my pages. The strange thing is that it showed up. I was a bit puzzled, so I checked the set up page and well, well, well. It now states that publishers are allow three link units per page.
I did a Google search on it and found this guy saying the same thing. He seems like a nice guy, right?
If you are interested, you can read about the policy change on Google’s AdSense Blog.
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Wednesday, August 1st, 2007
Sometimes I come across different and interesting sites out there in this world of ours.
Today, I bumped in to one while doing a little research on another one of my sites…it’s called Rankmon.com. Here, take a look over yonder…
I think you can get the picture once you click the link. Plug in your own site to see where it lies with various keywords and then click the “Competitors” tab to see where you measure up with the big boys.
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Saturday, June 30th, 2007
I noticed a while ago that whenever I turn on my BRAND NEW HP laptop, the battery indicator say something like, 83%. I say to myself, “What the heck is that about? This laptop is brand new and the battery was charged to 100% when I used it last.”
Today, when I turned the laptop on, it said, “Plugged in, not charging” and the power read 8%. I thought that was odd, because it was around 80% when I turned it off. Is there something draining the battery when I am not using it? That’s really not cool. I mean, I haven’t turned the laptop on for a few weeks, but that’s no excuse to drain the battery.
Today, I looked up the “Plugged in, not charging” phrase in Google and a few good results showed up. Apparently, there are quite a few people that are having similar issues with their laptops when Windows Vista is installed.
When the laptop was on, I noticed the little lightening bolt was blinking. I read that if you unplug and then re-plug in the power cord, the battery will start charging again. Well, I had to turn the computer off first, before I unplugged the power cord, because if I just unplugged it, the computer would go dead.
What is going on? Is this a Windows Vista power management bug? Does it have anything to do with power management at all or just that the people at Microsoft who created Vista don’t work on laptops?
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Sunday, June 24th, 2007
I told you a few weeks ago that I purchased a laptop and a desktop, both with Windows Vista as the operating system.
I heard it from all angles during my purchase process. The most frequent argument I heard was, “Don’t get a computer with Vista on it…nothing works with it yet.” I love that argument, mainly because I heard the exact same words as I was purchasing a computer with Windows XP installed on it. When I buy things, I tend to purchase what’s going to be popular, not what currently is popular. When I asked the people what doesn’t work with Vista, not one of them had an answer for me. The most common answer was, “I don’t know.” Well, that makes sense. It was almost like one person out in this big world said that nothing works with Vista very loudly and everyone heard it.
Just to let you know, the only thing that didn’t work with Vista was my Quickbooks 2004 program. Everything else is fine.
Bugs…after a few weeks now, working with the operating system, I find that the computer (mainly my desktop, because that’s what I tend to work on) needs to be rebooted every so often. It could be every few hours, if I use it a lot or every few days. It doesn’t run for months like XP did. I seem to remember me having to do this with my old version of Windows 98.
There are a few other little bugs that will most likely be cleared up with updates, but the most annoying one is the restart.
My advice is to go ahead and get Vista. Don’t be one of those people who overthinks these things and gets stuck with a brand new computer that has an aging operating system installed on it for the next few years.
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Monday, June 11th, 2007
I receive a bunch of email from a bunch of politcal groups…they are all over the place. From conservative to liberal to just stupid. I like to see what people are pushing.
This morning, I received an especially interesting email from MoveOn.org, a liberal group. It deals with Liquid Coal, the current legislation in congress and that the bill should be stopped.
Here is what they said…
“The idea of turning coal into liquid to fill our gas tanks should just be a bad joke. But because the coal industry pours millions into lobbying Congress every year, this joke could turn into a real nightmare.1
The senate is about to vote on a big bill dealing with energy and the climate crisis. Massive subsidies for coal were defeated in committee. But we’re not out of the woods yet, since one of the coal-friendly senators could sneak them back in again as an amendment just before the final vote.
Liquid coal is a giant step backward in our fight against global warming—it produces twice as many greenhouse gases as conventional gasoline. Proposals to capture that pollution before it adds to global warming are still a pipe dream.2
We have to reduce the greenhouse gases already in our air to stave off the worst effects of climate change—disease, drought, rising seas—so you’d think a giant program to make liquid coal a cornerstone of our economy would be too outrageous to consider. But continued pressure from the coal industry means key legislators introduce it over and over again.
Even the Roanoke Times, in the heart of coal country, condemned government promotion of liquid coal:
Coal-to-liquid technology is expensive, harmful to the environment and inefficient. The federal government should take no part in subsidizing it…Liquefying coal is not the answer to either energy independence or a cleaner environment.3
Some senators are standing strong against this false promise—Jon Tester from coal-rich Montana has said there should be no liquid coal without proven ways to capture the greenhouse gases.4
But others are risking our future with dirty energy bills instead of supporting clean and affordable alternatives—like solar and wind.”
I thought this email was interesting because I never even heard of liquid coal, and I have heard of a lot of stuff.
Apparently, the jury is still out on this technology. Some people like it, such as these guys, but others don’t think that it can be produced without making a bigger mess than we are already in, such as…
- David Roberts – MoveOn fights liquid coal
- Stop Liquid Coal: Sign this Moveon.org Petition
- Liquid Coal is A Really Bad Idea
So what’s the deal with liquid coal? Is it a good idea, but just a bad process to create it? I heard a while ago that ethanol was a great idea, but actually uses more energy to make is than it can produce. I gave that one a pass because I think the creation process can be better in the future.
What’s your take?
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Saturday, June 9th, 2007
Here is what my admin panel tells me – “Akismet has protected your site from 26,240 spam comments.” That’s pretty good. Since I began using Akismet, very few blog spam comments have slipped through and very few legitimate comments have been caught as spam.
Lately, as in the past few days, I have been receiving about 10-15 spam comments per day. These comments have slipped through the Akismet filter and have shown as legitimate comments. This strikes me as odd. Have these people found a new technique?
On a side note…any recent blog program uses the rel=”nofollow” tag for any link placed in a comment. It’s my humble opinion that spamming blogs probably isn’t the best way to go, if you want to advertise your mega cluster of websites. Hey, I may be wrong.
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Friday, June 8th, 2007
Paul sent me an email this morning about the Math Function he added to his Wiki. Here is an entry that shows the result.
Paul did some lengthy and frustrating research trying to get this thing straight. He says, “It is called mimetex, and if you have a shared server, it may be the only way you can use a TeX markup to show your math formulas. Your server needs to be able to run a CGI script, and you need to create a cgi-bin/ director in the root of your webpage. All the installation directions are located here. There is also a wordpress plugin, which is really cool. You can find the user’s manual here.”
Well, thank you Paul. See, I told you he was a good researcher.
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