More mucking about with analytics
I’ve just signed up for 103bees. Ed sent me. Or at least hearing about it from Ed sent me….
Archive for Project
Upgrades and props
I’ve been doing some housecleaning this morning. A few long-planned enhancements, some infrastructure, and some moderate structural changes and widgets have cropped up here. Let me know if there’s a problem with any of them!
As of this writing: Plazes badge in sidebar; added some ads, about which I am obliged not to speak by license agreements; lost cutesy but bot-annoying category hierarchy in sidebar; added del.icio.us linkbog in sidebar; cropped Garage Sale listing from eBay (reload for more, or visit the store please!); still swearing at Amazon for not including categories or tags or any organizational tools whatsoever in their over-priced store scheme (lazy bastards); rerouted feeds to FeedBurner.
That last one might be the first to break anything. Let me know if you have an issue, alsjeblieft, bitte schön, &c.
Away for a bit
Family medical emergency.
Update, Nov 7 2006: It’s difficult, especially when there are loved ones gravely ill, to find the time to pay the bills and feed yourself, let alone opine on ephemeral public affairs or join in with the self-created world of academic discourse.
I had the opportunity to attend and present what turned out to be a slapdash talk at a fascinating conference in Chicago these last three days, but in light of family stresses I’m afraid it played out less as an opportunity and more as a distraction from Real Life. I will try to recount and respond to the many fascinating conversations I had — it’s my professional responsibility, of course. It’s what I do for work, this conference-attending, this collegial engagement and gentle interdisciplinary academic prodding, this insistence on thoughtfulness among my colleagues and betters in the world.
But insofar as I need to be away from work to care for family, it will be a while before I’m able to thoughtfully respond and recount here. In the meantime, Im hopeful that some of my new correspondents might stumble along to my blog (Google will send them). So let me add some links to previous work that still applies, and that may help frame things I’ve said for those I met in person these last days, who in most cases I’m sure are not regular blog readers:
- “Wind and Chaff and the Laughter of Yokels”
- a link to a pertinent discussion of participatory culture
- “How much for a subscription to history?”
- “Digitize This, Library Boy”
- a wonderful example of collaborative republishing
There are others. I’m busy, I’m ragged, but I’ll be back.
On the dangers of spidering badly
Somebody who lives at 208.101.36.2 decided late yesterday to run their l33t script they cobbled together for their sixth-grade class. If that person actually comes by to read this: U R such a n00b. Scat.
When writing a spidering bot, do not attempt to serially follow every link on a content page without a substantial time delay between requests. In modern websites especially, such links often represent javascript-driven disclosure effects, not actual hyperlinks. By spawning 5760 stupid links in a few seconds, your dumb bot is not merely going to collect a lot of redundant data, but in addition will seriously piss off the admins.
If you apply this stupid fast spidering technique to a dynamically-generated site, you will find that something bad will almost certainly happen.
Eventually these bad things will happen to you.
Thus beginneth the lesson.
Two new plugins
This WordPress install now sports two new plugins for content management: AntiLeech—to solve the bitacle.org problem—and Ultimate Tag Warrior. I’ll gradually be adding and consolidating the tag cloud in the archives. Hopefully, as time passes, older content will be tagged and cross-linked that way. The categories I started with some time back (subject, verb, adverb) now seems hopelessly convoluted. Tags will hopefully replace most of these soon. [tags]website administration,bitacle.org,tagging,meta,wordpress[/tags]
Open Thread: “One cannot step into the same logos twice.”
I have a title. You there: append comments that make it sensible. No need to be too philosophical.
Blog plugin I would like: Similar Old Books
Say I write a post. This one.
The plugin (which may suffer from CPU and storage issues, but screw that) compiles a trigram-based linguistic vector of the post. That is, it counts how many there are of every 3-letter substring in the entire text. It also notes the length of the post. Or maybe it creates some other sort of computationally linguistic indexing key, like a Statistically Improbably dohickey, or a discrete wavelet alphabetotron. One of those.
The plugin then takes this trigram frequency vector (or whatever), and scans the entire corpus of Project Gutenberg text files for the most similar passages of the same length.
So in the end, you get a link like “Public-domain eTexts which may be interesting,” and it links to the eText, with a same-length passage.
Maybe a few processing and storage considerations. Like I said. But offline processing would work….
Considering AdSense
I’m considering AdSense. Is there any positive or negative aspect I should take into account?
[later] From actual bloggers?
Consider the theme from M*A*S*H
Wordpress Administrivia: I need to clean up the links list. There’s no interface for deleting and replacing links in Wordpress 2.X, so I downloaded wp-suicide.php.
Hope it works….
later …and it does.
Kudos for the Scariest Wordpress Plugin EVAR.
I particularly like the final dialog box: “For the love of God, are you sure?”
Not for the faint of mind.
Back from Not Home
We now resume our typical bursty mode of posting lots of stuff occasionally.
Online, online, and back again online
The last couple of weeks have been filled with a stew of cognitive dissonance here: mornings spent in classes where I’m fumbling with basics, followed by afternoons spent in Expert Engineer mode; one day proving to my mentors that I may be qualified to pursue a degree in my chosen field, the next day at an invitation-only workshop catching up with luminary friends and old colleagues who do scientific and engineering work my previous day’s mentors [apparently] can’t imagine.
But, qualified or not, expert or not, friend-of-cool or not, it is summer. Nobody pays me now, and I can get back to the writing, the button-pushing, the Actual Work, and above all else the thankless task of thinking out loud.
Hell, thinking will be a welcome change.
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