Yet Another Blog

Ah – Google must’ve received a few complaints about the DMOZ move (unless mine was that important 🙂 – they’ve switched back to using their usual text extraction.

This is a new one to me. It looks like Google is using DMOZ descriptions of sites in their results. Searching for ‘blog’ brings up the following results:

All these descriptions have been taken from the directory (copy+paste the description back into Google to prove it). Google would have previously either quoted a block of text from the site or taken the meta description text (if memory serves me well).

It’s all well and good but (and here’s why I suddenly noticed it):

…..they’re also taking descriptions from non-English editions of the DMOZ! Eek, I’ll email Google and see if I get a response. No idea how else I’ll ‘fix’ this.

http://www.dallaway.com/sloppy/

Sloppy is a very useful tool for testing websites over 56K modems.

It simulates slow connections (configurable from 9.6K to 512K) and runs as a proxy so you can see how fast your site will appear on, say, a dial-up.

Simple idea worked with great effect, and a must for web developers who all-too-often work comfortably on high-speed connections without realising how painful their glorious designs are to load on dialup.

Best of all, it’s a Java Web Start application – runs right from the website, and in various operating systems.

How to pitch an idea (ta, Matt)

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/4174519.stm

Somebody at the BBC’s having a laugh, right?

For those of you that haven’t seen it, Look Around You was a fairly odd set of 10-minute episodes on BBC Two a while ago, basically mocking the old 80’s-style science programmes that we used to get force-fed in secondary school. Each episode featured a different topic, and was made to feel very authentic.

In fact, if you were completely gullible you could be led to believe they’re serious programmes, but they’re absolutely anything but. The really drab, boring voiceover bloke (so authentic!) reminds the viewer to ‘have your copybooks ready’ for every little experiment, as the on-screen demonstrator proceeds to prove that, by attaching an iron pyramid to the mains and a battery, a pair of scissors will be projected in the sky for a few seconds.

Most of the time, the reaction is ‘what the….?’ – but there seems to be a lot of that lately and it’s normally a good laugh. (if you’ve seen the Armando Iannucci Show you’ll know what I mean!)

Anyway, the real gist of this post is to let you know that the second series begins in early Feb:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/comedy/news/2005/01/10/16413.shtml

http://www.opendemocracy.org/themes/article-8-2277.jsp

Thoughts from Bill Thompson on why the World Wide Web is clumsy and inadequate!

Grrr. A while ago I started getting comment spam on Blogwise – the review section where visitors can put up descriptions about blogs gets quite a few spam posts daily. All sorts of websites are advertised, and it’s rather annoying (although thankfully they’re not in any unmanageable quantity).

Changing the field names for the reply form this week appears to have done nothing to stem the flow. Within a day I’d gotten more spam. Essentially what I’d done was change the name field to something like wiejfoijweoij3903, and similarly renamed the comment field. To no avail; they still come. I have, however, removed the ‘website’ field and disabled direct linking in the comments form. The pages on which comments appear are also labeled with a NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW directive for Google. Those bastards aren’t getting any pagerank or clickthroughs from me.

Can’t remember where I saw it, but a while ago somebody suggested an ‘endorsed’ attribute tacked onto <a> tags – that’d be neat. The principle being that only tags with that attribute set would affect the Pagerank of the destination page. How long before that’d be circumvented though?

UKGoods (via Simon Jessey) is an importer of common British goods to the United States. Great for expats, or people who just like lots of tea and biscuits. Speaking of which, check out this site, where it’s sensible kettle month and this week’s biscuit of the week is delicious Graham crackers. Nice.

Matt Mullenweg has announced the start of development of some new forum software, bbPress. It looks good, and his description of it only makes it sound sweeter.

" bbPress is not going to have avatars, or put post counts next to your name, or give every user 80 options about how they want their dates formatted " – yes yes yes! This is precisely what has always frustrated me about the likes of phpBB and many of the other big forums out there. In cases of a large well-knit, largely computer-literate community avators and signatures are a nice touch (although some are ridiculously over-used). When you just want a forum to start threads and post replies – particularly with a group of people who’ve never really encountered forums before – this is all superfluous fluff.

Similarly I’ve never really gotten the point of private messaging in forums. What does it achieve that email doesn’t? The only benefit I can see from it is a sort-of anonymity, protecting you (the author) from exposing your email (true identity?) to the recipient. Since I tend to deal with users who have no reason not to expose their email addresses, this system is complete bloat. Fortunately phpBB allows you to turn it off, but I’d rather it not be on in the first place.

The first thing I do with a fresh phpBB installation is remove most of it again.

I hope/think Matt might have the right formula – for my needs at least, he’s very clear that it might not be for everybody! – If you can start with a basic, straightforward piece of forum software, with enough flexibility and extensibility from the start, then it must surely satisfy many people’s needs whilst allowing for various other tastes through plugins. The important thing is to get the basic forum running – all the fluff can come later as an option! Good luck to Matt and his team with what looks like a very interesting project.