The Vagaries of PageRank

I was mentioning to Matt very late at Denny’s in Belleville that Google wasn’t giving my blog a whole lot of love. I’d supposed that was probably because nothing actually links to it, but he suggested that I try [Google Webmaster Tools](http://www.google.com/webmasters) and see if there’s a problem with the crawler. (Matt’s generally more up on web stuff than I am these days. My web skills have atrophied a bit).

It turns out there was nothing wrong with the crawler; nothing actually links here.

I figured, though, that I could possibly take advantage of my (considerably depleted) influence on the webs and put up some links.

I finally put up a link from [my homepage](http://darcy.flyingsquirrel.ca/), something I’ve been really reluctant to do. But I figured, what the hell? At the moment, I’m less embarrassed about the blog than I am about the homepage.

I also figured I’d slip in a sly link onto the [Abslom Daak](http://www.dalek-killer.net) site. It was then that I realized that I let the domain name expire. For two months.

Oops.

Fortunately, I was still able to renew it. So that was nice. That’s the only site where I have any pagerank at all (and probably quite a bit less now). *\*sigh\**

Anyway, I think I’m going to make a project out of redoing the homepage sometime in the near future, to make it a bit more professional and a bit less 1996 university student.

Also, I wouldn’t be offended by a link to the blog (or the homepage) if you’ve got a site somewhere. (Also, I know of at least one person who’s linking to my livejournal when he should really be linking to [the blog](http://www.flyingsquirrel.ca/). I’ll probably have to pester him in person, rather than leaving a parenthetical note at the bottom of a blog post…)

Blogging tools

I’m pretty sure I’ve mentioned before that I use [Markdown](http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/) for blogging. I love Markdown. It’s awesome. If I had my way, I’d use it for all my writing.

After spending years making web pages, I can’t be bothered writing HTML anymore. I hate WYSIWYG editors–they’re way too fiddly and distracting and it’s all too easy to end up with inconsistencies.

The way it works is I type up my blog entry into WordPress in Markdown and it saves it in Markdown, exactly as I typed it. It only converts it to HTML when it’s displaying it. This is sane and reasonable and obviously the way it should be.

I’ve been trying to find some sort of offline blogging tool. Web apps are great and everything, but I don’t trust them. I’ve lost too much work to closed tabs and browser windows.

I’ve always really liked [Semagic](http://semagic.sourceforge.net/) for Livejournal…

Uh, hold on, there goes the point of this post. Apparently (as I’m reading that link, having just retrieved it), Semagic supports the MetaWeblog API now. So I can use that. Or at least I’ll have to try it when I’m on Windows at work tomorrow.

Huhn.

Anyway, this was going to be a rant about how while there are many, many offline blogging tools on Windows, including and especially [Windows Live Writer](http://windowslivewriter.spaces.live.com/), and most of them have an HTML code editing mode, they all very irritatingly strip the whitespace before saving.

Strip the whitespace! That’s outrageous! While HTML parsers have no need for whitespace, people coding HTML absolutely do. And it’s part of the syntax in Markdown.

Semagic doesn’t strip whitespace, though. So I’ll have to give that a try.

Well, that turned out better than I thought it would.