Googlewhack!

Popularity: 5% [?]

The PageRank checker I’ve got in my sidebar stopped working for a few days, so I downloaded this PageRank extension for Firefox. It works really well, but I found some weird stuff while playing around with it.

First, the homepage of TBOTCOTW has gained in rank (from a five to a six) at the same time that it’s dropped from the first to the fourth search result for “Matt Moore”. How does that happen?

Second, AdActors.com has a rank of four, yet barely gets any traffic at all. The site has 544 visits this month, with only 127 of those off Google searches. Also, how in the heck did it get a four, anyway? The only links to it are from TBOTCOTW, The World Wide Rant, and ResurrectionSong. I don’t think three links from sites that all have a PageRank of six should equal a PageRank of four.

Finally, the most bizarre oddity of all. Why does Vodkapundit have a rank of zero? Steve gets four thousand visits a day, there must be at least one hundred links to his site from high traffic blogs, and it doesn’t appear that he’s blocking the GoogleBot (he doesn’t have a robots.txt file or any meta tags that would block the scrapers). Very strange, and if Steve had ads on his site, it would be a real drag on his revenue.

Popularity: 5% [?]

I oppose the Miers nomination. She doesn’t have the background in constitutional law, the conservative judicial philosophy, or (judging by the leaks coming out of Senatorial offices) even the knowledge of legal precedent to be the nominee of a Republican president. We can’t even count on her as a reliable conservative vote (which would be the wrong reason to support her nomination, regardless) because we just don’t know if she’d be that reliable, or even on which issues she’s a conservative. A few days ago Glenn Reynolds linked to a description of Miers as liberal on economic issues and conservative on social ones (she’s some kind of anti-libertarian, evidently), which is precisely backwards from what I, personally, want in a public official.

Maybe those truly are her views, maybe not. Maybe she’ll call on some hidden reservoirs of constitutional knowledge and become a great justice, mabye not. We just don’t know. All we do know is that she was chosen because George Bush knows her well, and that he thinks we should trust his choice. But now is not the time for limp-wristed, easy cronyism, and I frankly don’t trust the President on domestic issues. He is, after the, the same President that signed McCain-Feingold into law and supported the protection of marriage amendment.

Miers should withdraw, be withdrawn, or be voted down by the Senate.

(If you’d like to be counted in NZ Bear’s poll of blogger opinion follow the directions posted here. Not sure if TBOTCOTW will be listed… I get an error every time I try to add the blog to the Ecosystem.)

Popularity: 5% [?]

If you see someone on teevee using a computer, it’s almost always a Macintosh Powerbook. Can’t really blame the producers for picking a Mac, they’re the most stylish and aesthetically pleasing computers around.^† How come, then, do they always try to hide the fact that it’s an Apple product?

I understand that they want to protect product placements and their adveristers, and giving Apple free time would be a bad precedent. But it’s not as if putting a sticker over the apple logo actually fools anyone, a Powerbook is a very distinctive computer. (Every time one pops I tell my wife, “Sidney Bristow uses a not-a-Mac!”) Do they really think they’ll get more ad money from Dell if they carefully position a lamp behind the “generic laptop” in every shot?

CSI: NY, for some reason, doesn’t buy into any of this. They constantly show the brandnames and logos of electronic products, whether it’s Dell, Toshiba, Apple, or Nikon. Anyone know why that is? I’m assuming that they’re not getting paid for each and every LCD monitor onscreen, so why is this the one show on teevee that doesn’t care about giving away advertising?

^†It’s the same reason that every cell phone flipped open in primetime is a Moto RAZR.

Popularity: 2% [?]

As long as you don’t use the word as a verb, whatever you do to your meat is fine by me.

Popularity: 2% [?]

“I imagine she’s a pretty nice girl, but she doesn’t have a lot to say.” What the hell was I thinking? Suddenly the title of that song makes a lot more sense.

Popularity: 2% [?]

Tamiflu resistant avian influenza? That’s bad news. Another Rocky movie? That’s even worse news.

My initial reaction: “There’s already been five Rocky movies? Five?!”

Popularity: 5% [?]

You’re an Amazon Associate, maybe you make a few dollars a month by linking to products you like, but you know you could make more if only it was easier to build the links. Or you’ve already found an easy way to automagically add your associate ID, but then you upgraded your blog or moved servers and broke all your links. I think I’ve got a great solution to both of those problems.

I like Brad Choate’s method, and I used a slightly modified version of that before I upgraded to 3.2. But during the upgrade I accidentally deleted my macros, and all my <amazon> tags^† became useless. At the time I was running TBOTCOTW as a dynamic blog, as well, and Brad’s code uses plugins that don’t work on dynamic pages (yet). On top of that, MTAmazon hasn’t been actively developed in years, and I wasn’t sure it would work with 3.2 at all. So I gave up and changed all my tags back to regular links to Amazon.com.

Then I switched back to static publishing found out that Byrne Reese developed MTAmazon32, so I wanted to start doing some macros again. I didn’t feel like changing all those links back to <amazon> tags by hand, so I decided to see if I could make things even easier. Could I take Brad Choate’s macros and make them interface with MTAmazon32 to add my associate tags to a vanilla HTML link to Amazon.com?

After banging at it for a couple of hours, I came up with a solution. First, you need the MTAmazon32, MTMacros, MTIfEmpty, and MTRegex plugins. Install them all according to directions (if you have issues with this step, just ask for help in comments).
Continue »

Popularity: 4% [?]

Michael Moore is such a miserable failure. *

Pass it on.

Update: Howard Dean? Also a miserable failure.

Popularity: 2% [?]

Colby Cosh trashes Joss Whedon and the Cult of Firefly for about a thousand words before admitting that he actually liked Serenity. His points about the creepiness of Firefly evangelists are well-articulated and correct (it is kinda creepy), but basically miss the point. Says Cosh:

The Browncoats want everyone to like “Firefly”. (Or, rather cynically, they want just enough people to like it so that studios will go on bankrolling it.) In the end it’s not clear that the show matters as much as being part of the group that watches the show.

The parenthetical, I think, is more true than the original assertion, and it’s a very different kind of evangelism (if it’s even evangelism at all).

I’m certainly not a Browncoat… I didn’t even know Firefly existed until it was off the air, so my views might not be typical. I don’t care if everyone likes my favorite shows, but if no one likes them, they’ll be cancelled. I don’t like stories to just end, with all sorts of loose threads and unanswered questions. I guess I’m just selfish that way. If I had $40 million to throw around I would have payed Whedon and company to make Serenity, even if they insisted that only I watch it. Sure, it’d be lonely not being able to discuss the movie with anyone, but I’d sacrifice that if it meant that I could find out what happened next.

But I don’t have Oprah money, so I just had to hope that there were enough fanboys out there to make the movie economically feasible. I have to believe that nearly all the Browncoats, even the proactive ones that used the Internet to cajole, feel the same way. So I don’t think that “being part of the group,” other than the economic power that comes with a crowd, is the most important element here. It really is about the story.

I’m glad that Cosh liked it, no matter how reluctanctly. After all, that’s another few bucks that the studio might put into a sequel. It also gives me another (ironic) opportunity to evangelize to an untapped market for Serenity: the Whedon-haters. If Colby Cosh, Whedon-hater, liked Serenity, you might too! Go see it tonight!

Popularity: 3% [?]