Google Blogoscoped

Thursday, September 23, 2004

Fagoogle Banned

Fagoogle (the “gay Google”) got banned by Google. [Via InsideGoogle.]

Power Law Debate

Adam Greenfield thinks about attribution in the age of Google and RSS. What if someone’s idea is automatically included in another place, one which then happens to rank better in Google? [Thanks Joe C.]

Finding Links in a Page?

When I check who commented on one of my blog posts, or who put up any other kind of backlink, I follow services like Bloglines, Technorati, and Feedster (usually in this order – the Bloglines backlink checker is my current favorite). I guess many of you do the same, as it helps to keep up the blogspace conversation.

Now here’s a feature that would come in really handy: directly highlight links within a page that link to a certain page.

Currently after I follow the result from Bloglines or Technorati, I open the source code of the target page and search the HTML for the string “blog.outer” or similar... to then copy the text that appears in the link, close the source code view, and search for the copied text on the page. Of course this isn’t really as fast as it could be.

I think it ought to be possible to just write a user stylesheet to include in Firefox which would always highlight a backlink. So that one would configure the URL-start-pattern (“http://blog.outer-court.com”, for me). I am unsure if this is possible in CSS2 using the Mozilla engine, and also, how to include user stylesheets in Firefox to begin with. As alternative, I wonder how one could write a Firefox extension (or bookmarklet) to automate this process. Your help is welcome!

Update: It works! Thanks to Jamie in the forum (and Firefox being able to understand advanced CSS selector syntax) I now have a tool to hightlight all links to my blog. (You can implement the same by adding a line to a user stylesheet and downloading the web developer Firefox extension.)

Blogger Support Gave Up

Sadly, Google’s Blogger.com support gave up on my problem (every few days, new posts are shown not in reverse-chronological but random order; not on top, but somewhere in the middle). Being a programmer at my day job I wonder what happened if I told my client that I can’t further help him with his problem.

Yes... I can just change the post-time manually every time the bug appears, or leave the post where it is. But what’s even worse is that whenever I told Blogger.com about the problem, I got an email telling me “I checked your blog, and everything seems to be fine.” (And I even made screenshots showing the bug.)

After over one year of using their service – and having paid for it as Blogger Pro user – I would at least have appreciated not being treated like someone not able to differentiate between bug and feature. Still (as I have mostly good experiences with Blogger.com in the past) I won’t give up on this service and hope trouble will disappear in a few months.

2nd Place for Seraphim Proudleduck

Thanks to all those helping out, Google Blogoscoped has risen to the number two spot in the Seraphim Proudleduck challenge*. Keep linking, the top spot (currently inhibited by WikiBabe) is in reach! Again, I will pass on the full prize money of £1000 to one of those who linked to me if I win on January 1st, 2005 (if you didn’t already do so, please drop me an email to let me know of your link).

*Google’s spellchecker still suggests “seraphim puddleduck”.

CityCreator

If you (like me) are a fan of those isometric pixel cities, then you’ll like the CityCreator.

Ray Charles Google Logo

Today 74 years ago, pianist and soul singer Ray Charles Robinson was born. Google celebrates his birthday with a special logo.

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