If you haven’t visited The Google Graveyard yet — you need to go there and leave a flower or 40 — before your read this Google Keep review. I admit I’m wary about investing even one second in Google Keep because of the company’s rotten history of starting neat products like Google Reader and Wave and then killing them while you’re in the middle of loving them.
Continue reading → The Google Graveyard and where a Keep is Kept
Imagine, if you will, a person who is down on his luck and has neither home nor income to help secure a place to live. A person, as it were, who is so poor that they wonder how they will pay for every meal, not to mention being careful not to damage the shirt on their back as it may be their only one. Now imagine that someone tells this individual that they have a job for them to do and it is simple. All they have to do is stand still and hold an ashtray in front of them so that people at a party who are smokers will have a place to flick their ashes.
I have written at length about the obnoxiousness of mobile phones and the damage they have done to interpersonal communication in our modern age. It is an age in which people create social bombs to force in person conversation and talk shows tell the audience that mobile phones are prohibited just to get a pleasant show experience. On occasion there is a story that really reaches out and touches you ever so and reminds you that between all of the bad there is the occasional good thing that comes from mobile phones.
Continue reading → The Heroism of a Two Year Old and a Mobile Phone
Janna is currently in Iowa visiting her mother. I miss her heaps, and I am happy to help whenever the call for assistance arrives from the Midwest into my Google Voice Inbox via SMS. Janna has her iPad with her and her creaky, water-soaked-and-barely-usable, iPhone 3G. Her 3GS was stolen. We skipped the iPhone 4 in indignant principle. We will move up the iPhone 4S or 5 or whatever it will be when it is announced.
UPDATE #2: September 6, 2010
At noontime Eastern, I heard from Naoko again and she confirmed robots.txt has been upgraded site-wide on WordPress.com!
I had to change the privacy settings on all my blogs — and then back again to “public” — to force the new robots.txt file to update. The plan worked.
All 13 public blogs are now set and updated and ready for Google and the rest of the indexed search world to remove our proprietary Movable Type search results.
Here’s a screenshot of the new robots.txt file disallowing the “/cgi-bin/” directory. I highlighted the new addition:
Yay, WordPress.com!
THANK YOU from prying us from the rock!
UPDATE:
The moment I published this article today at 12:24pm Easter time, I followed up with WordPress.com support and gave them the link to this article in an attempt to better explain — with screenshots — the problem I was trying to solve.
At 2:12pm — less than two hours after I wrote to WordPress.com — Naoko replied:
Hi there,
I was waiting for this to actually go live, but a change has been made in our code.
User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin/Will be added to robots.txt (not visible yet, I need to check back with the developer).
Fantastic news! That solves my proprietary Movable type search results problem across all 13 of my public WordPress.com blogs! Here is my reply:
Hi Naoko!
Oh, that’s great news! Is this change on a per-blog basis, or is it site wide?
If it’s side wide, are there plans to include robots.txt proprietary search disallows for the other blogging services?
I will update my article to reflect the information you provide.
Thanks!
Best,
db
I will keep you updated!
I don’t see the “/cgi-bin/” disallow yet on any of my blogs in robots.txt, but the moment it goes live, I will go back to Webmaster Tools and specifically ask that the “/cgi-bin/” directory be removed now and forever from all my blogs.
As well, because of this robots.txt disallow addition, I will now be able to effectively venture into Yahoo! and Bing to see if I can get the same directory deleted in those services for all my blogs.
Thank you WordPress.com Gods!
ORIGINAL ARTICLE:
I recently discovered a terrible Movable Type artifact that still remains festering and alive within me — via Google Search Returns — six months after I became a Six Apart refugee and gave up my expensive, self-hosted, standalone, blog hosting and returned to my first blogging home: WordPress.com. You can see an example of the problem below in the third search return in the screenshot. That “Memeingful: Search Results” link takes you to a proprietary Movable Type search return that has been dead for six months. Click on that link, and you’ll be taken to a “Not Found” error page on WordPress.com.
Continue reading → Dead Search Returns: Caught Between a WordPress.com Rock and a Google Hard Place
At the Passover Seder, things are structured in such a way to incite inquiry in the minds of the children who are present. The sequence of the meal is different than that of any other meal. Foods are dipped into salt water, which is never done. There are times during the meal when everyone leans a certain way while drinking or eating. All of these things are done partially to stimulate the question of why we are doing things differently. In Missouri, the idea of inquiry leading to better learning is part of a new initiative.
Continue reading → Owning Information Through Inquiry in Missouri
We are a nation of masks — we repress our true feelings and protect our basic being. On the surface, we claim we are all equal and that skin color doesn’t matter and that technology is agnostic, non-atavistic, non-discriminatory and non-evangelistic. Today, we have been forced to know better by peeking out from behind our masks to divine the reality before us.
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