Google Realtime Search: Useful?

Official Google Blog: Google Realtime Search: a new home with new tools

This appears to be one of those projects that involve a lot of work and resources, but result in very little gain. I don't see the usefulness of Google Realtime for anything beyond checking for possible news information that hasn't been reported in the major media yet. For example, I may want to read about the incident that caused train delays today. At the moment, I am using Twitter search for this purpose and it seems to do what I want.

4 Hours to Create Email Account

One of my clients asked me to create a new email account for them. Their site is hosted on Network Solutions. In the past, this was not a problem at all. I just log into the account management system and the whole process is finished in under a minute. It is no longer so simple. I don't know when they changed it. They now have a notice stating that changes can take up to 4 hours. The email account that I created is still inaccessible a half hour later. This is unacceptable and I have not seen this problem with any other host.

DNS Issues

This is one type of failure that I had not been expecting. My sites have been down a few times, but it was always either the webhost failing or the webhost's ISP. I experienced a DNS-only failure today. I am reconsidering my reliance on MyDomain.com. I used them because they are inexpensive and give me the advanced controls that many others charge extra for. I thought it was a safe bargain, because I failed to realize the vulnerability of a DNS failure. Things have suddenly become a lot more expensive.

Changing URLs

I recently removed the hyphen on blog-stalk, changing the URL to http://blogstalk.com. At the moment, the old URL still has a decent search engine rank, but the new URL has a very low rank. I submitted a change of address request via Google Webmaster Tools, but this hasn't helped in any obvious way yet.

Related to this, I was experimenting with different URL structures for SEO. Google indexed my site several times while I was experimenting with different options. This has resulted in many indexed pages that have invalid links. My sitemap file has been updated, and the site seems to have been indexed again, but the bad version of the links is still in the database and the proper version is not. The URL removal tool seems to no longer exist, but help files still refer to it.

Changing Focus

I have decided to expand this blog to focus on more than just one project. This is going to be about all my web projects, and just what is involved in being a web developer, designer, and administrator.

New Design

After a whole year, I finally redesigned blog-stalk. I was reluctant to do it, but I was making significant improvements to the code while developing a new site with the same code base, and I wanted some of those enhancements on blog-stalk. Although I like the new look more, I was primarily hesitant to revise blog-stalk's look, because I knew that there would be some resistance from members, and I wanted more diversity when showing my portfolio to clients. Having two nearly identical sites really counts as one when clients look at my work.

I released a screen shot several days ago, and I was surprised by the positive responses. I did not get a single complaint until the actual update was released. Two members objected. They claim that it strains their eyes. I'm not really sure if it's their monitor settings, or if they are just trying to justify a purely psychological reaction by claiming a physiological basis. The majority of members liked the revised look. I compromised a bit by lowering the contrast, but now everything looks dull to me. For the new site that I am working on, I am retaining the high contrast.

CMS Garbage

While developing my latest site, I was reminded of why I had to code blog-stalk entirely from scratch. Joomla is garbage and Drupal is only borderline practical for what I wanted. If they had worked better, I might not have needed to do so much coding. It was a good learning experience. I may some day make my own CMS based on the blog-stalk code base.

First Anniversary

Blog-stalk was launched a year ago, but I'm not really in the mood to celebrate. I wonder if it will last another year. I always feel like it's on the verge of dying, but random flurries of activity seem to always happen.

I am currently focusing on other web projects. I'm developing a new site for my internet show and animations. I am also beginning to develop Facebook games. I am not abandoning blog-stalk, but I have become less enthusiastic about it.

Facebook patents the news feed

I'm glad that I procrastinated with this one. I had been planning to provide a consolidated list of blog posts, comments, and photo updates into a single list. That would infringe on Facebook's patent. My site probably already infringes on numerous other patents despite the fact that I created it entirely from scratch. This should not be a problem at all while my site remains small, but I had plans to expand some day.

Crisis

Four days before the 6 month anniversary of the start of beta testing, I had to delete a user account for the first time ever. It was a user who frequently deleted accounts and returned a few weeks later on other sites, but she had refrained from total abandonment of my site. She was an early adopter who joined on the first day of launch and was the most active member throughout most the the nearly 6 month period.

The next day, a friend of hers saw the public dialog preceding the account deletion, which had been a non-confrontational discussion about deletion. This friend then became extremely upset about the fact that I had not yet implemented a system for automatic account deletion. Under the current system, I have to manually delete an account if a user requests a deletion. It made sense in term of prioritization to not develop code for this yet. There are far more important things to develop on this site than features for soon to be non-members. It wasn't as if I had been overwhelmed by requests for deletion. It was in fact the first one ever.

This disgruntled user has declared a boycott of my site until I implement a feature for deletion of accounts. This poses a number of potential problems.

1) This is currently the most active user, which means a boycott by her alone will significantly impact the site.
2) It is possible that her friends will join in the boycott or leave entirely, although they sided with me in the public debate on this issue. Despite agreeing with me in principle, they may lose interest in the site if she is absent, due to the social nature of the site.
3) Allowing any single user to hijack site development priorities sets a terrible precedent. Others may use similar tactics in the future. Nothing good will come out of allowing this.

The boycott strategy itself is somewhat flawed. There are members of the site who definitely would not join her in the boycott. Although site activity will be reduced, it wouldn't really be a punishment for me. In fact, it's somewhat opposite, because someone who would publicly malign the site would be absent. Furthermore, a boycott would compel me to accelerate development of other site features, ones that will more likely bring in new members, rather than the one that she seeks to compel me to create.

New Realization

Women who don't join my site are not truly interested in me. Regardless of what they say or do, they are definitely not serious about a relationship with me if they don't join my site. It's a matter of being interested in me as a person. My site is something that I created and have an interest in. If a woman doesn't have an interest in my site, that implies a lack of interest in me.

I should have been aware of this much earlier. When I like a woman, I want to know absolutely everything about her. I want to immerse myself completely in everything about her. I have recently had a few interactions with women who claimed to be in love with me, but they wouldn't join my site or even look at it regularly. One turned out to be only interested in sex while pretending to be interested in more. The other wasn't interested in me at all. She just wanted some attention.

ADHD

The current site that I am building is still not complete, but I am already planning my next one. I'm not writing out detailed plans. I just can't stop thinking about it and I probably won't be able to get it out of my mind until I start working on it. I'm hesitant to make the switch, because I will probably leave blog-stalk.com incomplete if I start anything else right now.

Yesterday's Google Failure

Official Google Blog: This is your pilot speaking. Now, about that holding pattern...

The problem affected my sites, although not catastrophically. I have code for Google Adsense and for Google Analytics on blog-stalk.com. This caused the browser to never finish loading the page. Because Google was reachable but extremely slow, the situation was actually worse. The browser did not terminate the attempt to connect and just kep loading forever.

Main content on my site loaded properly, but users may have been confused and thought my server was sluggish. Also, pages could not be printed without forcing the browser to stop loading the page.

Automatic Discounts

One of the advantages of owning a website is the ability to enroll in affiliate programs. If I have a lot of traffic on my site, then I can generate some revenue through banner ads, but there is a benefit even if I don't have a single visitor. Because I get a commission on every sale, I automatically get a discount if I buy things for myself through the affiliate link. I'm collecting a page of the ones that I consider to be useful and making it publicly accessible on my site. I doubt that anyone else will use it much, but I definitely will.

Reblogging

Creating the reblog function required some careful decision-making regarding the editability of the original blog text. The problem with allowing the reblogger to edit the original text is that this gives the reblogger the ability to insert false text and images. I don't expect this to be a regular occurrence on my site, but I don't want that to ever be possible. Another potential problem is the original blog could be edited after it is reblogged. This creates similar problems. For example, a reblog could be made stating agreement with the original blog, and the original text could be modified to something that the reblogger doesn't agree with.

The solution that I developed involves saving a full copy of the original blog that neither the original author nor the reblogger can edit. The only disadvantage is the extra storage space that I need to do this, but I think it's a necessary cost that I must accept to make this function work nicely.

Beta Testing

My new site is still incomplete, but it's ready for some beta testing. Since there is no real deadline, I could just wait longer, but I think it's beneficial for me to practice more on updating a live site. Not having any "real" users on the site allows me to make very substantial revisions without any problems, but that isn't realistic when millions of people are expecting the site to be working 24/7. I have to get into the habit of testing on a separate test server prior to deployment. Without real users, there is no incentive to do that or to be careful.

Anyone who is interested can check out my site at blog-stalk.com