My wife’s parents are visiting for the next few days, so my weather report is “light posting, with a chance of sunshine.” Me getting sunshine, that is; I get outside more often when people visit. I’ve got a big batch of email that I’d normally sift through on the weekend, but that will have to wait for a little while longer.
I’m lucky to have good in-laws. When my wife and I showed up in Nebraska late last yea

Vanessa Fox tagged me asking 5 reasons why I blog. So that I can write something once, and then I’ll have a place where I can point back to it. You try answering “I started/stopped buying AdWords and my rankings rose/dropped. Is Google boosting/penalizing me for buying ads?” for the 732nd time, and you’ll see the value in that. The answer is no, by the way. I wanted to see what it was like to be a webmaster so I’d

(This post about creating passionate users is dedicated to Kathy Sierra.)
I think this new initiative is an interesting success on Dell’s part. Dell will embiggen their support for Linux by offering Linux distributions on some of their desktop and laptop machines. (What, you’ve never heard of “embiggen”? It’s a perfectly cromulent word.): Dell to Expand Linux Factory Installed Options
Since launching Dell IdeaStorm

April Fool’s Day is a big holiday at Google. This year you saw the toilet broadband service and of course the paper version of Gmail. A fun quote from that page: “Now that I have Gmail Paper, I understand the difference between labels and
folders. I had one message with two labels, but when I tried to stick the
paper version into two filing cabinets at the same time, it just wouldn’t go.”
Mayumi M., Associate The search

No, my blog was not hacked — it was April Fool’s Day!
I wanted something that would top last year when I switched jobs with Jeremy Zawodny at Yahoo. A fake hacking had several advantages:
- It was quick and easy to do.
- I didn’t have to coordinate with anybody in advance.
- It was believable. The Museum of Hoaxes has a list of the top 100 April Fool’s Day hoaxes of all time, and reading through that list, I realized that

My site has been acting a little slow and weird today. I checked my logs, and I’m seeing a lot of GET requests causing strange errors. Most of the requests have escaped Unicode characters, but they don’t appear valid. Sorry that the site is kinda slow; I’m going to be away from the computer until around late Monday, so I don’t have time to check it now, but I’ll try to track it down when I get back.
Update: The site

I upgraded my WordPress installation from 2.0.x to 2.1.x tonight, and I’m a little grumpy. Autosave is great and all, but does upgrading WordPress have to be so much of a hassle? The official way to upgrade is to unpack the latest zip over top of your current installation, which seems like a recipe for cruft to keep accumulating. Things like WP-Cache can get really confused in the middle of an upgrade, and then you’re stuck doing surg

If you blog, you should get the Linkify bookmarklet that Laurence Gonsalves wrote.
How does it work? It’s an easy 2 step process:
1. Drag the Linkify bookmarket to your personal toolbar.
2. Dang! There is no step 2! Sorry about that. I, um, got mixed up. There’s just one step.
Now how do you use it? Well, see the link I made to Laurence Gonsalves? To do that, I wrote the words “Laurence Gonsalves,” selected that text, and

Tonight I went to a meet-up of Bay Area Blawgers (a blawger is a law blogger). Why did I go to this, when I normally don’t do blogger meet-up kinda stuff and don’t know much about law? Well, the get together was just a little down the road at Santa Clara University. And the shindig was coordinated by Eric Goldman. I’ve mentioned before that I enjoy reading Eric’s blog for coverage of web legal issues.
I came in just before

In 30 minutes I’ll be on a plane back to San Francisco. Gawd, I wish they had WiFi on planes right now. Can you imagine 10 extra hours to surf, catch up on different things, and generally enjoy the web?
Maybe in a couple more years. Anyway, I’m sure I’ll be doing posts when I get back to talk about several of the interesting things (and people!) that I ran into.

Not so much blog posting this week, as I’m trying to get as much as I can from visiting Dublin. I’ll talk about more later.
Highlight so far include
- meeting lots of fantastic Google colleagues in the Dublin office. It was hard to tear myself away today because I was having such a good time talking to people.
- visiting the Guiness Storehouse.
- taking a short train ride to Howth this weekend.
I’ll try to get some pictures and comments about SES London up at some point.

Holy crap! I’ve only been in the UK for a day or so, and I already won their national lottery! They just alerted me by email:

Dear winner
We are pleased to inform you of the final announcement of the UK
National Lottery Online thunderball Programme with draw numbers(#625)
01, 18,22,23,,31 05

I’m at the base of Mt. Email. The summit looks very high (elevation of 400+ emails), but I know that I’ll never reach the top unless I start climbing. There’s no way I can reach the summit tonight or even in a week, but maybe I’ll get to a reasonable base camp in a few days. If you’re waiting for an email reply from me, it will take me a while to reach the peak; please be patient. If you’ve emailed from the outside world, I might ask Adam Lasnik for some help to take some of the email load off my shoulders.

Ah, that was a nice vacation. For the first time I can remember, I went off-the-web-grid for a week. I didn’t check email, read feeds, or do any blog posts. In fact, I turned my computer off and didn’t do anything online for a week. Normally on a vacation, I spend an hour or two each day triaging email and handling short-fuse situations

(Warning: Serious “my eyes glaze over” stuff ahead, but better to talk about it than not.)
Google has a way to store contacts in JSON form. JSON stands for (JavaScript Object Notation), and it means that data can be loaded and parsed directly by JavaScript. Unfortunately, a security hole meant that other pages could also access this contact data

Thanks to whoisgregg who pointed out in the webmaster group that my comments were utterly horked. Trying to view a thread gave the error message
WordPress database error: [Can’t open file: ‘wp_comments.MYI’ (errno: 144)]
SELECT * FROM wp_comments WHERE comment_post_ID = ‘538′ AND comment_approved = ‘1′ ORDER BY comment_date

Luckily, doing the Google search [Can’t open file: ‘wp_comments.MYI’ (errno: 144)] found this link at #1, and it gives the answer

[Note: I wrote this about five days ago, and I’m just now getting around to posting it.]
Okay, all the other search bloggers are sharing stats, so here goes. All this comes courtesy of Google Analytics. If you want to sign up and analyze your website visitors with around zero work, I highly recommend it

My family arrived tonight from Kentucky to stay for the next several days, so the blogging will be verrrrrrry light for the rest of 2006.

I first got to know Gary Stock because of his Googlewhack site (a “googlewhack” is a pair of words which, when typed into Google, return exactly one web page). As co-founder of Nexcerpt, he’s a good guy to know in general. Recently Gary got a spam email with my name in the subject field

I was going to read some Penny Arcade, but Robert Scoble invoked me. Jeremy points out that Google had an IE7 promo page that looked remarkably similar to a Yahoo! IE7 promo page.
I can only speak for me personally on this. If Jeremy looked into it and says that it wasn’t a template from Microsoft, I believe him

One more fun post tonight.
At this point, many people on the web have seen Ms. Dewey, the viral marketing site that encourages people to search using live.com. The nice Ms. Dewey looks like this:

But what happens if you refuse to search with live.com? Well, Ms. Dewey gets MMMMMAAAAAADDDDD!!!

It turns out that Janina Gavankar, the actress who played Ms

Last night was a Slashdot post. Right now a Digg post is hitting me hard. Of course that would happen right after I do a separate post with a bunch of images.
I’ve yanked my logo image and the post with multiple images to batten down the hatches. Let’s hope my industrial-strength hosting on pair.com holds up with the images gone..
Added: Oh, hello Techmeme, come on in and sit down. After Digg and Slashdot are done slagging the site, you’re welcome to pummel it too.

I’m ready to head to Las Vegas for PubCon tomorrow. I’ll be at the Google “Safe Bets” session Wednesday evening to help discuss Google products and answer questions. Then I’ll be doing a site review panel (with lots of other search big hitters; it should be fun) on Thursday, followed by the super session with four different search engines, also on Thursday

It will be like shouting in a thunderstorm for a while.
- today: nationwide elections. The House went to the Dems; how will the Senate go? Three seats remain open as I get ready for bed.
- Guitar Hero II also comes out today.
- Oh, by the way, Britney Spears got divorced today.
- this week: the Web 2.0 conference, starting today

Expect light posting for the next week or two. Why?
- I’m heading out to PubCon next week, and I’m trying to get ahead of my other duties. (Heh. I said duty.)
- I went off caffeine a couple weeks ago, so I’m only normal-Matt productive, as opposed to 130%-Matt productive. It feels weird, like watching the world in slow motion.
- Danny Sullivan is getting back from a couple weeks of vacation, and I’m sure he could use a little bit of quiet to catch up. Won’t someone think of the Dannys?

I was feeling grumpy, so I wrote a snarky review of Compete. Question: should I post it? Sometimes it’s fun to let loose with a rant. On the other hand, when I listen to the SearchCast lately, I wish Danny would rant less. Sometimes it seems like Danny is one of the few people in the search industry that stays above ranting, and you hate to lose that, you know?
Anyway, I’ll let the comments decide whether to post the write-up on Compete.
Update: the vote is overwhelmingly to post