I’m suffering from a little bout of writer’s block these days. When you combine that with the fact that I haven’t been cruising the ‘net finding new and funny things, it makes for a dearth of new content on this site. I was thinking that it would be cool to display a single post from the archives at the top of the home page when there’s nothing new to see. Something like, “Hey! Sorry I haven’t posted anything new in x days, but check out this from y years ago …” I got as far as writing the SQL for it, but then I stopped working on it. I think it’s a good idea, though. Maybe someone will decide to write a plugin to do this. (Or, more likely, someone already has and I am just too lazy to find it.)

Read the rest of this entry »

I jumped on the Twitter bandwagon when someone mentioned it to me at SXSW2006, but immediately forgot all about it. I’m starting just now to pay attention to it. It’s nifty. What are you doing now?

I installed Akismet here at the beginning of the Fall of 2006. I really don’t know how I lived without it. I emptied the queue about seven hours ago, and when I got to the office this morning there were already almost 1500 comments, pingbacks, and trackbacks flagged as spam.

Akismet has protected your site from 380,243 spam comments already, and there are 1,471 comments in your spam queue right now.

I played Porter Valley Country Club with Kelly on Sunday. I shot a 55 on the front nine and a 54 on the back nine for a 109, tied for my best round ever. As usual it took me nine or ten holes to get to the point where I could put all the pieces of my swing together and really feel like I was hitting the ball well. (Kelly promises that will only last for about ten or eleven years.) We played the back nine with a nice couple, Dennis and Linda. (Dennis does “flutter testing” for a living, which means he takes airplanes on test flights to make sure the wings stay attached.) Next weekend I’m going to play in a “night golf” tournament at PVCC, so I’ll have to bring my camera and let you know how that goes …

I was very happy to see that the WordPress developers included the ability to “tag” posts. For a long time I’ve been using my own bastardized version of Bunny’s Technorati Tags to add tags to this site. A few days ago I decided to bite the bullet and convert to using the tag system that is now baked into this CMS.

Here’s my only problem: The standard WordPress tagging engine is designed so that clicking a tag on a post displays an archives page with all of the other posts tagged with that tag. (Confused yet?) I don’t like that. One reason I don’t like that is because I have not yet managed to transfer all of my tags from the old system to the new, so lots and lots of my posts have no tags. That means if you click a tag for “ovulating kleptomaniac”, for example, you’re not going to get any results. So I have hornswaggled the code a bit to make it so that on this site the tags link to search results for that tag instead. I think it’s a much more “visitor friendly” implementation of tagging.
Read the rest of this entry »

I just noticed that a few days ago was the eighth anniversary of this blog. It seems like only yesterday …

My buddy Bry has a brilliant new site: Stop Being Broken! (The exclamation point is not part of the site’s name, although I think it should be.) I’m not just saying that because I have repeatedly asked him for favors, eaten food with him, and met his wife. It’s seriously really good. Check it out!

The original Plaxo is a little address-book organizing tool that I had always liked quite a bit. It’s got an Outlook plug-in which lets it sit in there and pay attention to the email addresses of people who email me and the people I email. There’s some global information superhighway sort of thing out there that it uses to synchronize these email addresses with everyone’s profiles, so my address book has — for many years now — been more or less up to date. It’s cool.

But now, however, I am having second thoughts about this seemingly-innocent little company.

They’ve started a new Web 2.0-type program called Plaxo Pulse. (It’s in beta.) Plaxo Pulse is sorta-kinda a good idea. It traipses through your address book and emails people to tell them whenever you do something on the tubes. I am now being barraged with emails telling me every time any of my friends post a blog entry, change their cell number, move, post a photo somewhere, etc. I can only assume that the people who consider me a friend (and who use Plaxo) are receiving the same barrage.

That in itself is not so evil. The creators of Plaxo Pulse were wise enough to allow me to disable these email alerts.

Here is why this is evil, and why people should be getting angry: (1) Plaxo Pulse uses blog RSS feeds to import a user’s blog posts into itself and (2) Plaxo Pulse steals blog comments.

1. Plaxo Pulse uses blog RSS feeds to import a user’s blog posts into itself.

   That means every time I post a blog entry, the entry appear here on my blog (as it should!) and it appears again on the Plaxo Pulse site. This is bad. For years and years there has been a great debate over how Google feels about “duplicate content”. Most people feel that Google penalizes content which exists simultaneously in two places. Whether you believe in the Google “duplicate content penalty” is irrelevant. Google may very well not explicitly penalize one site for plagiarizing another, but there is definitely some sort of effect. Let’s say I write the world’s most brilliant post on the topic of swimming pyromaniacs. There are probably not a lot of other people writing about this. My website would theoretically start to rank highly in Google SERPs whenever someone searches for wet fire-lovers.
   Now let’s imagine that eventually lots of people start talking about swimming pyromaniacs. When other people post blogs about it, they naturally give me credit for exposing this insane practice by linking back to my site. My website receives a SERP ranking “boost” because it is receiving inbound links from other websites mentioning the same topic. (I also — again, theoretically — receive a “boost” because of the age of my post on the topic — I talked about it first — and because of the general popularity of my site.)
   I have advertisements on my site. I get paid when people click these ads. I have a vested interest in ranking highly in Google SERPs.
   But now the exact same content I posted about swimming pyromaniacs is appearing on the Plaxo Pulse website. Plaxo Pulse is a huge website with hundreds of thousands of pages and is growing like kudzu. Plaxo itself is tremendously popular, much more than David Gagne. It is very, very likely that the content I wrote which now appears on the Plaxo Pulse website will rank higher in Google SERPs than that same content on my davidgagne.net website. (When someone searches for swimming pyromaniacs in Google, the Plaxo Pulse link is going to appear higher than the davidgagne.net link.) The huddled masses tend to click what’s at the top in Google. That means that my ad will not be seen. That’s bad for me.

2. Plaxo Pulse steals blog comments.

   Even more nefarious is the fact that the blog entry which appears on the Plaxo Pulse website allows visitors to post comments to it. These comments are not posted to my site. They appear on Plaxo Pulse. This is wrong on so many levels. If I don’t ever check Plaxo Pulse (and, presumably, if I have all my Plaxo Pulse email notifications disabled) I will never know that someone commented on my eloquent dissertation on swimming pyromaniacs. If enough people post comments to the Plaxo Post plagiarization of my writing, it will most definitely appear to be more popular (as far as Google is concerned) than my original essay. In fact there will likely be people that read and comment on swimming pyromaniacs at Plaxo Pulse who don’t even know that davidgagne.net exists, much less that it / I was the author of the topic.

Here is an example:
My friend Bob has a website called Numenware. On January 1^st he posted a blog entry about an esoteric math news item. Bob’s original post is here. Bob’s content is plagiarized verbatim on Plaxo Pulse here. A savvy reader will note that someone named David Fotland has posted a comment to Bob’s blog entry at Plaxo Pulse. This comment was “stolen” by Plaxo. It does not appear on Numenware where it should. If I was Bob I would be quite peeved about this.

A map of online communities and related points of interest

What happens when a real celebrity has a real blog? There are a few mediocre celebrities that have pseudo-real blogs. (Zach Braff comes to mind. Aside from the fact that you can clearly see he’s high every now and then, he’s about the least controversial guy in Hollywood.) Few truly famous people are out there creating honest-to-goodness blog entries. Mark Cuban is one. Curt Schilling is another.

Schilling is a rock star in the baseball universe, and he has been since even before he helped pitch the Red Sox to the most amazing win in baseball history. He started a blog a few months ago and he writes from the heart, not just marketing drivel or media propaganda. It’s great reading. He writes about Spring training, about his team, about his life. He basically keeps a blog just like I keep this blog.

Right now Schilling’s under a bit of a media attack. Some jerk reporter has accused him (and his team) of doctoring “the sock” — exaggerating the amount of blood by adding ketchup or some nonsense like that. But Schilling — unlike most people who find themselves the subject of media scrutiny — has a blog. His reply to the issue is brilliantly-written and well worth a read. Here’s a snippet:

If you have the nuts, or the guts, grab an orthopedic surgeon, have them suture your ankle skin down to the tissue covering the bone in your ankle joint, then walk around for 4 hours. After that go find a mound, throw a hundred or so pitches, run over, cover first a few times. When you’re done check that ankle and see if it bleeds. It will.

All three of the televisions in my house are connected to either a TiVo box or a DirecTV box. Both of these systems give me the option of displaying a “guide” in a grid right on the screen. If I want to see what else I can watch, I click to the guide and browse until I find something I like. That way I can search all I want without changing channels and stopping whatever is currently being shown from being recorded. I love this feature.

My girlfriend fiancée hates it. When she is watching TV she never uses the guide. She just punches the code for E! or VH1 and goes right to the channel. This bothers me both because she sometimes stops recording something by changing channels and also because it just feels inefficient. Why not just use the guide?

I can’t really get upset about it, though, because her method is the same one I use to read my blogs. I just can’t seem to get into feeds. RSS is certainly cool and I dig the ability to subscribe to the feeds of the sites I like. But I never do. I have a bookmark folder in FireFox called “Blogs” and that’s where I save the links of my favorite online reads. About once a day I scroll to the (incredibly cool) “Open All in Tabs” link in that bookmark folder and pop open all my blogs at once. This is definitely less efficient than using an RSS reader — or the system included with Firefox — and only checking the blogs which have been updated recently. Why in the world do I do it this way?

Read the rest of this entry »

Two weeks ago was the seventh anniversary of this blog. I meant to do something exciting to celebrate the event but I completely forgot. (Does that make this site one year old in dog years? Or is it the other way around?)

From the Department of Nifty: If you have multiple tabs opened in Firefox and hover the mouse over one of the tabs, the mouse scroll wheel will allow you to scroll through the open tabs. This is cool. I have a folder bookmarked with all my daily blog reads, and I use the “Open all in tabs” feature to open all my favorites once or twice each day. Being able to scroll through them using the mouse scroll wheel is way, way cooler than using the left and right arrows on either end of the tab row.

Today marks my 2500th day of blogging. I can’t think of a better way to celebrate than with two lovely collections of elephant jokes. I love elephant jokes.
And while you’re enjoying these elephant jokes, why not make a donation to The Elephant Sanctuary in Tennessee? What a fine thing to do on a Wednesday afternoon!

One of my favorite sites is Metafilter (aka “mefi”). I found it way back in ‘99 and became a member in March of ‘00. For years it has consistently been wonderful. The users are infinitely more mature and intelligent than the ones at digg. It’s really quite incredible how mefi has managed to stay so respectable while digg seemed to get overcome by what are apparently mostly invective teenagers.

Read the rest of this entry »