blog.radsy.com

I saw a giant ad banner in the mall today at lunchtime. It was your typical perfume ad – a banner four storeys tall, showing a laviscious woman in the arms of a hunky guy, with a picture of a perfume bottle and some sort of pretentious tagline. Then I read the name of the perfume – Lamb.
I thought to myself – what?? Then I saw that the woman was holding a lamb chop and the tagline was something like “the sensual scent of lamb” and I thought “the perfume industry’s really lost the plot this time”.
It didn’t occur to me that it was actually an ad for lamb – the meat – and they were taking the royal piss out of the perfume industry. I laughed until I peed a little bit when I found out.
http://campaignbrief.blogspot.com/2006/05/can-lamb-drive-women-wild.html
Well done aussie advertisers!

I took an interesting phone call today. A friend of mine – let’s call him Ritchie (after all, that’s his name) – wanted to know why my blog kept appearing in the top ten Google search results for his own name when he’d been killing himself trying to boost his own search position using all sorts of internet guru-type strategies. Let’s deal with the fact that he’s Googling himself later – there are more immediate questions.
Particularly irksome seemed to be the fact that out of 436 entries on my blog, only one – I counted them twice – mentioned Ritchie by name. One entry on a not particularly well-respected rant-mag and I rocket into the top ten? As Professor Julius Sumner Mills would say: “Why is it so?”.
My initial thought was “Well, it’s because I have excellent grammar and my opinions are highly sought-after by the internet community at large.” This was shortly followed by the realisation that this was complete bollocks. Apart from the grammar bit.
The real answer was much simpler: I use the right technology, I’ve been blogging for a long time and I link a lot. Let’s look at those one by one.
Technology. Have a look at the URL in the top of your browser reading my blog. What does it say? If you said “http://blog.radsy.com” you’d be right. If you said “http://www.askaninja.com” you’d be wrong, but it’s still a funny site to visit. Now, click down there at the bottom of this post where it says “[link]“. Notice the difference in the URL? Most importantly, notice the last bit: 00000436.htm. That is the key to Google position. Allow me to enlighten you.
My blog runs on Greymatter. The two most important qualities that Greymatter possesses (in terms of Google position) are that it is old, CGI-based technology, and that it is not a big blog provider.
Because it’s based on CGI, every separate blog post is generated into a distinct HTML page, which links to the home page and is itself (for a while) linked from the home page. That means that this little blog now has almost five hundred totally separate HTML pages. Google likes this. It sees five hundred distinct HTML pages that begin with “http://blog.radsy.com” and it thinks in its little Googlatron brain: “this person really has a lot to say, and lots of other pages find it interesting enough to link to.” Bingo. Page One.
Now compare this with a site using a newer technology (e.g. PHP) which stores new entries in a database. It has one home page (let’s say http://someguy.phpblog.com) which is the home page. This is dynamically updated from a backend database with the latest five entries. The link to a specific entry’s page will look something like this: “http://someguy.phpblog.com?postID=22″ which dynamically retrieves the content for post #22 from the database. The whole blog site consists of two pages. “Cool” I hear you say. Well, cool for the pointy-headed power geeks, not cool if you want good Google position. Google looks at this and sees “Two pages? Who cares?”. You see, I’m pretty sure that Google doesn’t treat request parameters (the bit after the ?) as separate pages. So it starts to ignore you. You slip down the ratings. Nobody ever finds your site on Google. Baby Jesus cries.
Got it? Lots of pages = good Google rating. Now, of course the big names (Blogger etc) know this, and they structure their pages the same way – each post gets its own HTML page. But the theory is that Google knows they know this, and doesn’t necessarily want lots of stupid blogs like this one cluttering up that all-important Page One of results, so it does something to their ratings. I don’t know what, but searching for my mate Clever Bob by name doesn’t bring up his Blogger blog at all. QED. OK, that’s not much of a sample, but this is pretty well known and doesn’t really need a totally biased research project from me to prove.
The other two points help out, but the single-page-to-a-post thing is the kicker. To refresh your memory: blog for a long time and link a lot. My blog’s been around for years, so Google knows I’m not some fly-by-nighter and probably have something interesting to say. I also link a lot – both to my own content and offsite. Every link to one of my blog pages is like a little ray of sunshine for Google’s crawlers and the more I create myself the more there are. Linking offsite seems to reinforce to Google that I’m not here just for my own edification, but that I’m a good linking Netizen helping to spread the word about the great stuff the Net (and thus Google) has to offer.
That’s it. Of course, if your content is interesting enough to be featured on a meta-blog such as Digg or Slashdot, you’ll get a lot of traffic and some other people with blogs might link to you, helping out your rating. But the real kicker is to regress that technology to give you LOTS of pages and to stay off the big blog sites. Run your own. Get an old PIII server from eBay, install Debian on it, hang it off your ADSL and run Greymatter. Google will love you. Whether the blogsphereizens (I made that up) do as well, I leave up to the quality of your content and penmanship.
One final tip: get an RSS feed. if someone likes what you have to say and subscribes, they’ll know as soon as you update your site again in the future and will come back and (hopefully) link you. Or you can just sit back and hope that they’ll remember to visit you now and then. Yeah. As Mr T would say: “I pity the fool”.
By the way, Ritchie’s site is here and his blog is here. Can you figure out why his Google results aren’t as good as they could be?

While I was editing my latest machinima movie, I decided I needed a microphone stand and pop filter for some dialogue I was recording. So, I bent me up a coathanger and made a pop filter out of a magnifying glass frame (you could also use an egg ring, or a needlework frame?) an old sock (the missus didn’t have any spare pantyhose) and some gaffer tape. It works beautifully.
A pop filter (or pop shield) filters out the hard percussive sounds that can ruin an audio recording (like the letter “p”).
This entry was featured on Make:Blog today! Sweet.

Right – what the hell is a Microsoft TV/Video Network Connection, why did it install without my consent when I installed my new webcam, why can’t I disable it and why did it prevent my wireless connection from getting a DHCP address? Huh? You’ve got a lot to answer for, Logitech.
Secondly, why in the name of sweet Moses is every picture of food on a food container a “serving suggestion”? Why can’t they just write “this is just a nice picture of some food”, or not write anything? Does anyone actually look at the picture and think “Hey! You know, if I served that with some green beans and potatoes, it WOULD look pretty nice, just like the photo!”. Are they afraid of litigation from people who live on frozen veal cordon bleu and get sick from vitamin deficiencies brought on my never eating vegetables? “But your honour, the defendant never suggested that I should serve vegetables with my dinner, it’s their fault I’m dying from pommes noisette poisoning”.
Bollocks.

You’d think of all companies, Microsoft would know well enough to avoid crippling Windows when you uninstall a Microsoft piece of software. I made the mistake today of uninstalling Microsoft Visual Studio – of course, it took a whole bunch of important Windows files with it so many important Windows programs (defrag, service manager etc) that rely on MMC didn’t work any more. Tops!
I found the answer is to manually re-register MSXML3.dll with regsvr32, but that’s not the point. Why the hell did Visual Studio de-register such an important component when uninstalling in the first place? Peanuts.