The Substantially Similar Weblog

My “Popular Search Strings” section has been entirely invaded by Paris Hilton. At the moment, I see “paris hilton video”—251 referers since Sunday. That is to say, 251 people searching on msn.com for “paris hilton video” came to my weblog. And were sorely disappointed.

I’ve noticed also that I do much better in MSN’s search engine for Paris Hilton-related searches than in google. Google, as it turns out, only returns results for my site when the person is actually looking for what I have to provide: e.g., my super popular fix for the CUPS client-error-forbidden error. MSN, on the other hand, is completely content to keep referring entirely irrelevant searches to my site, perhaps solely on the basis of the words “Paris Hilton” appearing here.

I’ll let you draw your own conclusions.

This blog is now syndicated on Planet Debian·, a site which aggregates the blogs of Debian developers and hangers-on (I’m somewhere in between, being at the very final stages of the Debian Developer application process). The site is modeled after Planet Gnome, a similar service for Gnome· developers’ blogs.

A lot of my blog entries are not specifically related to Debian although many relate to free software generally. I noticed Scott Dier started up a separate blog for Debian related entries·—I wonder if I should do the same.

For those of you who are reading this via Planet Debian, what do you think? Would you rather have Planet Debian be full of all sorts of ramblings by Debian Developers, or only those that are “on topic” for Debian? And how broadly would you define “on topic”?

Ironically, after banning Paris Hilton referers from my weblog, I’m getting more Paris Hilton-related traffic than ever. I can imagine this all turning into some great farce where the harder I try to dissociate myself from Paris Hilton, the closer linked we become. In fact, this entry itself will probably generate a bunch more traffic.

But in case you didn’t get it: you won’t find any Paris Hilton videos here! None at all! (if you don’t know anything about the Paris Hilton thing, just move on, there’s nothing for you to see here either).

Those of you reading this weblog through a web browser may notice the “Recent Inbound Links” list on the right side of the screen. This is supposed to track pages that link to this page when people click through to give you a sense of where I sit in the blogosphere. (but see Metadata Overfizzle· for a humorous treatment of this whole obsession).

For the past several weeks, “Paris Hilton” related inbound links keep popping up. When I look back at the sites listed, they don’t refer to my blog at all. So someone (or group of people) have figured out this “inbound link” tracking thing and are creating spurious inbound links—”spam referers,” so to speak. By appearing in the right column on my weblog, these spammers boost their visibility, particularly to search engines like google·, which determine the relevance of a site by how many other sites link to it.

So my piecemeal solution now is to ban any referer that has anything to do with Paris Hilton. If folks have other suggestions, please let me know.

(And, if you’ve been living in a cave for the past month or so: Paris Hilton is a socialite and heiress to Hilton Hotel fortune. An illicit homemade “sex tape” of Paris and her then-boyfriend· has achieved wide distribution over the Net and is apparently in high demand.)

I’ve been working on a few new features for this weblog. Aside from the search box in the sidebar, I’ve written a program that creates a local compressed cache of all outgoing links. This allows you to see a snapshot of whatever page I link to at the time it was linked, and also to see the content if the other server is down or the content is gone.

There is now a little dot following each link when there is a corresponding local cache file. For example, check out The Dick and Jane Reader for Advanced Students· from this month’s McSweeney’s· (parental discretion advised.) The dots to the right of those links should lead you to a local cache.

My weblog also automatically adds “titles” to outbound links—that means you should be able to hover your mouse pointer over a link and see the title of the linked document.

I’d appreciate any feedback on these new features. Particularly let me know if you notice any bugs, odd behavior, or ugliness with particular browsers. I haven’t had an opportunity to test with any Windows-based browsers.

I’ve started using blosxom to generate this weblog, rather than my own home-spun code. I considered making the transition invisible by keeping an identical layout, but the calendar looks better on the right. I’ve also spruced up the stylesheet a bit. I’ll be working in more stuff over the next few weeks, but most of the archives from the old weblog should already be here.

Immediately visible improvements include an RSS feed for those of you who prefer to read this weblog through an aggregator, as well as the ability to comment on individual posts.