I’ve made a couple of small changes to my site’s branding. These aren’t big things: I have larger changes planned in the next few months. But they address a couple of things that were bothering me, and hopefully won’t make much of a difference to the folks who visit.
I have updated the title of my site and the ‘favicon’ it uses.
(more…)My vast audience has no doubt noticed that the site has been sporadically unavailable, slow, or outright broken periodically for the past few days. I won't go into all the…
My site’s Google “PageRank” dropped in January, from a 3 to a 2, which is pretty much as low as you can go. Smaller numbers mean less “relevant”, at least as far as Google is concerned. I’d like a higher page rank but when I think about it doesn’t matter all that much to me. I’m more curious, however, to observe the impact of the ranking drop.
Google sent me an email the other day telling me that my site had “inappropriate” content:
As stated in our program policies, AdSense publishers are not permitted to place Google ads on pages with adult or mature content.
Adult? Mature? On *my* site? Hmmm, this required some further investigation. It didn’t take long to find the problem- Google even gave me a sample URL. Apparently, sometime in the last few weeks some comment spammer bot found my photo gallery and started spewing link-farm comments in random spots throughout. And of course, the only person who has to do more work in this process is me.
Mobile phones and “smart” phones have a ton of features: things like taking pictures, browsing the Internet, and playing games. Studies have shown, however, that only somewhere between 10 and 50% of the users of these feature rich devices know how to do more than make phone calls with them. Rich Miner of Google mentioned recently that the reason for this is mainly “bad UIs”. I think, however, that Rich is probably on the wrong track, at least for some users. Maybe even the majority of them.
I added Google AdSense to my blog in December of 2005. As I said back then, I was curious how it would work for me.
Apparently Google is taking Microsoft to task over the new search bar built in to Internet Explorer 7. The Googleheads are upset over the fact that this search bar defaults to using Microsoft’s own MSN search.
First let’s set aside the obvious fact that Firefox “defaults” to using Google, and no one complains about that. And then we can ignore the fact that Microsoft is the manufacturer of IE 7 and therefore somewhat entitled to give precedence to their own products. That leaves us with one slim thread holding up any credibility to Google’s concerns: that somehow, Microsoft is taking away a user’s “freedom of choice”.