Breast Cancer Awareness Month

General

October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month around the world and is an easy opportunity for every day citizens to lend a hand to the research efforts that take place around the world to find a cure for breast cancer. In line with the normal marketing strategy that the National Breast Cancer Foundation has, I’m going pink for the rest of the month in support of the cause. October 23rd is also Pink Ribbon Day here in Australia, so if you get a chance to donate or buy a pink item, make sure you do – it’s a great charity.

[Edit]: It turns out that I wasn’t the only one thinking of going pink on their web site in support of Breast Cancer Awareness. If you’re putting on your pink, bounce a link back to Pink For October to show your support.

WordPress Plugin: Subtraction Style Archives

Blogging, Database, Programming, Software

Subtraction Style Archives, a WordPress archives plugin which emulates http://www.subtraction.com/archives/Looking for a new way to display your WordPress archives page? Look no further, you’ve found the Subtraction Style Archives plugin. The Subtraction Style Archives plugin provides functionality which will allow you to generate an archive page similar to that on Subtraction.

There is a permanent page for the plugin which describes:

  • where to download it
  • how to install it
  • how to implement it in your own web site
  • some notes on the plugin
  • a changeset for the plugin

If you have any questions, problems or suggestions about the plugin; feel free to drop a comment about it.

Lavina Williams Out Of Australian Idol 2006

General, TV

In an amazing turn of events, Lavina Williams was voted out of Australian Idol 2006 tonight. Lavina Williams is the older sister of Emily Williams, who was the runner up in the 2005 series of Australian Idol. Lavina showcases, what is now a recognised high power singing style which took her older sister to the final two last year. Throughout the 2006 series of Australian Idol, Lavina has been a bright and shining star; delivering consistently high quality performances.

Lavina being voted out of Australian Idol tonight drives home, what I would consider an irrefutable fact; the voting strategy which the Australian Idol show implements is fatally flawed. If you look back through the years, there have been mistakes year after year:

  • 2005: Anne Robertson was voted out in the final six, when it should have been her and Emily Williams in the final.
  • 2004: Ricki-Lee Coulter was dropped in the final seven.

To prove the point a little more, in the 2004 series of Australian Idol the winner Casey Donovan struggled to sell a record. How is it that the ‘Australian Idol’ — someone who received millions of votes struggles to sell a single? Hang on, what if the voting system was broken. What if all the people voting aren’t the people that are going to actually buy the records and they are voting for other reasons? Stay with me here, what if a significant number of the votes for the Australian Idols are made up of 16 and under teenagers? Sure, they’ll spend $0.50c to send an SMS – I seriously doubt that they’d spend the $25 on the actual album though.

I’m disappointed to see Lavina Williams go out of the competition tonight, I think there were far more deserving contestants who should have had that fate.

Google & Pingomatic Sitting In A Tree

Blogging, Internet, Search, Software, Websites

Following on from my previous post about Google Blog Search accepting pings, it appears that Pingomatic is already sending ping messages into the Google Blog Search service.

By default, WordPress only sends pings into Pingomatic, which then distributes them to a lot of other services. To verify that Pingomatic has already been updated, the previous post title and URL were amended. A few minutes later, you could do a search using the Google Blog Search and the newly amended title and URL were visible in the results.

I love a good service.

Google Blog Search Accepting Pings

Blogging, Internet, Websites

Google have recently announced that their Blog Search service is now capable of accepting ‘pings’.

For those that aren’t aware, the ping I’m referring isn’t the first half of the game or the network utility; its a notification message. Traditionally indexing services such as Google or Technorati periodically scour the internet looking for changed content. Due to the ever increasing size of the internet, it is taking longer and longer for these services to complete each run. The knock on effect to publishers, is that it’s taking longer and longer for newly published content to show up in the search indexes.

To try and reduce that problem, the search engines have been introducing more features and services to the community. As an example, some time ago Google released a simple service known as Google Sitemaps. The idea behind the Google Sitemap is that the website owner provides Google with an XML file of their sites content and what they consider to be important within it. This then allows the Googlebot to pick up the Google Sitemap on its scheduled run and only retrieve content which is new or changed since its last visit; drastically reducing the number of pages that the Googlebot needs to reindex per website.

Following on from that, Google are now allowing website owners to proactively tell Google when they have added or changed content. Google accepting a ping when publishers add/modify content, means that the Googlebot can come back to your site more frequently, knowing that there will be new or updated content to index. Having the Googlebot revisit your site should also mean that your newly added or modified content should show up within the search index much sooner than the scheduled indexing cycle.

I wonder how long it will be before Google allows a ping for normal content and not just blog style content.