Tag: Meta

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…)

Back online

My server died. I didn’t really expect the site to be down that long. To my three (or perhaps four) readers, I apologize. I built this thing to be easy to rebuild, but I guess when you start messing around with the fatal combination of Linux hardware support and VMWare, all bets are off.

I’m still not entirely sure what I did to get it running again.

I’ve got a backlog of posts I’ve been wanting to write. Most of them likely won’t get written. First, I think I have to say something about this election thing. Then maybe I can find some fun things to write about.

I’m just gonna do this

After months of humming and hawing, I’m just going to switch over to this WordPress blog. Like right now. Today.

I want to copy over the archives from the [old blog](http://flyingsquirrel.ca/squirrel) here. But for now, I’m just going to leave it where it is. I’d like to preserve the comments, which means I’m going to have to become at least passingly familiar with WordPress database structure, it looks like.

There’s lots of stuff I want to do with this thing. While it was fun writing blog software from scratch, the bloom came off that particular rose probably about three years or so ago. It’s hard to update and stuff is broken. I just can’t be bothered messing with it anymore. So I might as well take something off the shelf. And WordPress is pretty cool. I played with it for my [nanowrimo novel](http://flyingsquirrel.ca/nanowrimo/). That worked out okay.

I have ideas for plug-ins and things. I think I’d rather be writing plug-ins than a bunch of stuff from scratch. But we’ll have to see whether the WordPress plug-in framework sucks or not. I’m not worrying about it. I’m just going to jump into this thing.