New Photos and Other Exciting Stuff

I finally posted the photo sets from last weekend’s country and city excursions.  Go make fun of my sunglasses :)

I also fixed a design flaw whereby I was getting zero hits from google or any other search engine for about 18 months.  Before sometime in the spring of 2003, I was getting about 200 hits per day, mostly from google.  After that, it dropped off to about 30 hits per day within maybe a month.  At the time, there was talk about google modifying their pagerank algorithm so as to de-emphasize weblogs in their search results.  (Or so I thought; maybe I fabricated that entire concept without realizing it.)

I figured that was the reason I stopped getting so many hits from google searches.  But I recently discovered that I wasn’t getting any hits from search engines because their spiders were unable to crawl my site.  My visitor-log system tries to log visitors based on things like their IP address, their browser’s User-Agent string, their name (if they enter one), etc... but since IP addresses sometimes change, and sometimes even change with every page requested, it’s helpful to give each visitor a unique ID and store it in a cookie.  The problem is that the search engines’ web spiders don’t accept any cookies, and I inadvertently failed to make a provision for that fact.  So every page on my site was saying "here, have a cookie, and then I’ll redirect you to that page" but the spiders were saying "no way, Jose."  The spiders are stubborn and so was my code, so after 10 such exchanges, the spiders give up and move along.

Last week I fixed the code, and I see googlebot and msnbot slowly crawling my site again.  Now I’m a popular destination for these searches:

Can you still feel the butterflies? Elliott Ness "are these all yours" the dingo ate your babies Script for the lullaby Little Yeshua

I’m especially proud to be #1 on google for "Script for the lullaby Little Yeshua," mainly because I have no idea what that means, and because I’m sure it isn’t on my site.