The order in which things happen.
Those who say evolution is just a theory simply do not understand the meaning of the word “theory”. Evolution is fact. It just doesn’t explain everything (yet). Investigate further, rather than assuming that intelligent design is therefore right by default (a bizarre and illogical conclusion).
Google, in an interesting move, have released the Sitemaps protocol. Each sitemap contains information about what URLs have changed, how often they are likely to change, when the last change took place and how important that URL is relative to the rest of your site. The purpose? To increase crawler coverage and freshness by having web masters do the leg work of notifying them of new pages.
There are currently limits on how big a Sitemap can be (50000 entries or 10Mb), and how many sitemaps one site is allowed (1000), but they are far larger than most people will need at the moment. I’d imagine the 10Mb file size is going to be the real limit of the two.
I was going to rant about how this is Atom/RSS with some added importance functionality (stripped of content). In fact it seems silly to create a new format when either of those formats would have done and kept the file sizes down, with only recently updated items having to appear. However, it seems that Google are allowing, in addition to their own format, text files of URLs (one per line), RSS 2.0, Atom 0.3, and another standard that is apparently used by libraries. Good work.
The smart money says that search engine optimisation companies will be gaming this within the month (depending on how much Google actually end up using the system), Atom 1.0 support will be included once the spec gets finished, someone will suggest adding the value information into the core Atom spec or it will appear as an extension soon after, and WordPress et. al. will be adding support fairly soon.
Only 2 films this month in what turns out to be a sci-fi showdown. First up is Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy. Now the purists have already started complaining about the inconsistencies with the book. As has been pointed out, none of the separate versions (radio, tv, and book) actually fit together, so why should the films be any different? Judged on their its own merit, it does have some lacklustre points: the emphasis on the somewhat forced love story, the finale that isn’t very much of a crescendo, and the narrated moments from the Guide that are awkwardly shoe-horned into a universe that is visual enough already. Other than that, it’s a reasonable interpretation of Adams’ world. In fact, it features one moment of absolute genius, not seen in any previous incarnation of the series. Worth watching, but a cumbersome in places.
This months other film is (deep breath): Star Wars: Episode 3: Revenge Of The Sith. It can be summed up as follows. Good bits: lightsabre fights, Natalie Portman, space battle. Bad Bits: Hayden Christensen (oh dear), the clumsy handling of Palpatine’s turning of Anakin, Mace Windu’s bizarre and unfounded change half way through, Grevious being a coward (when he spends most of the Clone Wars murdering Jedi), did I mention Hayden Christensen yet?
Episode 3 is probably exactly what you expect, Hitchhiker’s is too. Hard to pick one this month, so I’ll go with Hitchhiker’s.
No entirely sure of what has been happening in music for the last month or so because my head has been in the books, but here are a few snippets regardless.
To complement their tour, Idlewild released the latest single from their new album. The track, “I Understand It”, is decent enough on its own but sits in a mire of mediocrity in the album. Unlike the B-Sides for the previous album (which were stunning), the cover, live track and bonus track on offer here are not worth getting. Shame they never included their cover of “I Wanna Be Sedated”.
Glasgow rockers Dead Fly Buchowski released their debut album through Beggar’s Banquet. Though I haven’t heard it, on the basis of the preceeding singles, it’s bound to be decent enough.
The Sparta/Mars Volta divide took an interesting twist this month. Both bands forming from the ashes of post-hardcore legends At The Drive-In after seminal album “Relationship Of Command”, it seems that Sparta guitarist has defected to the other side to replace the late Jeremy Ward. This means that the Mars Volta now have more members of the original band. We can only hope that someone sits Omar, Jim, Cedric and co down to convince them to patch things up and make the At The Drive-In revival dream a reality.
While I’m sure a lot more happened, that’s all I know.
Up until six months ago, I wasn’t living the dream that every Internet-savvy person with the slightest hint of narcissism has wanted. That’s right: I wasn’t the top result on Google for my own name. A brief and pointless tale as to why follows.
As Solitude came together, I was looking at different techniques to ensure that search engines got the right content from it. It seemed that from my past experiences of searching on other peoples blogs, the front page inevitably turned up, with the post in question have long scrolled off of it. Many sources suggested that the solution to this was to use the "noindex,follow" setting in your robots meta tag directive. And so I did.
That was fine, except for the fact that people link to your homepage when using your name. Because the homepage was set as "noindex" it didn’t get a Google PageRank associated with it (rightly). Rather a problem. In the end, the solution was simple. Just switch it back to allow indexing of the main page. Google is smart enough now to either show a permalinked page in results, or have the permalinked page as a sub-entry of the front page link.
This post, of course, means that my site will inevitably disappear from a search for my name. Such is life.