Trip to Topsail Island
Posted 6:02 AM

Since it was a beautiful day, we woke up and said "lets go to the beach", and drove down to Topsail Island. Stayed at the Jolly Roger inn, which has a great fishing pier where most people seem catch Spotted Sea Trout, but you really can catch anything (30lbs or more, and they ask to put your picture on the wall). A 9-year old ran up to us and showed us a porcupine fish he found washed up on the shore. Real estate on the beach is so expensive.

Labels: north carolina, vacation

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Google is too dependent on DMOZ
Posted 5:48 AM

Google uses it's venerable PageRank algorithm to rank websites included in its search engine. However, when it comes to manually reviewing websites, Google defers to DMOZ, a volunteer-run community that publishes a directory of hierarchically categorized sites.

Without DMOZ, Google would rely largely on blog entries for site reviews. Unfortunately, it is ridiculously easy to create a fake weblog which fools Google's system. In fact, tricking Google (also known as PageRank optimization) is now considered an "industry".

In other words, without DMOZ and the thousands of volunteers that work to insure its integrity, the quality of Google's search engine would suffer tremendously.

I'm writing this because DMOZ is, and has been, broken for a few weeks now. It is a project notiriously short on cash, plagued with internal feuds and corruption.

Interesting to see how a multibillion dollar company like Google could suffer from the downfall of a volunteer-run website like DMOZ.

Labels: google

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Favorite Text Editor
Posted 7:50 AM

On Windows, I use an old version of Textpad, which is far, far better than the latest version. It has a tiny footprint, no installation is required, great regular expression support, block editing and fills, and simple, functional UI and options screens. I've looked for many, many years for a replacement, since the old one is no longer maintained, but I haven't found a comparable one.

Labels: software, web development

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Google Checkout Bug
Posted 7:23 AM

Only yesterday, Google admitted to a bug which placed checkout badges next to all of their advertiser's ads. Today, Google's checkout.google.com (GCO) website was briefly redirecting to a page that looks like this. Which looks like a hack, but probably was just an internal error.

My personal experience with GCO, as a merchant, has been that the system is a bit confusing for customers. It fails to adequately prompt for shipping addresses; is extremely slow to approve orders; is occasionally slow or broken; and the API is more complex than any other I've worked with.

The upside is that the GCO support group has been extremely responsive and helpful on every occasion. That one fact is what sets them apart from any other merchant processing service I've used. And of course, there's the free processing. Which is the best (only) reason to use them at this point.

Labels: google, web development

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