meatbag

Recently I had to spend a month working on a massively important, yet incredibly tedious/repetitive, web dev project. I started with our company's standard-issue dev environment: Windows 7 running Sublime Text. I got fed up with the slow speed and having to make 3x as many mouse clicks, which add up to a lot of repetitive motions after a while. I switched back to KDE because I could use Kate with the "fish://" protocol. I was able to finish the project in 1/4 the time it would have taken me otherwise. This is not an exaggeration, though it may be a conservative estimate. Much less wear-and-tear on my hands, too.

I keep meaning to learn vim and, in so doing, finally become a [SERIOUS PROFESSIONAL COMPUTER MAN], but KDE, when configured the way I want it, is the perfect development environment for me. I keep coming back to it. I have used every major computer operating system, different flavors of Gnome, XFCE, MacOS, Windows, and Linux under various lightweight window managers. If I need an OS for an older desktop machine, then I generally prefer razor-qt though :)

I've mostly outgrown the whole militant-OS-partisan thing, but I guess I'm kind of passionate about KDE. Passionate enough to write a long-winded thing on the internet, at any rate.

KDE is far from perfect. It's a resource pig until you learn how to use it effectively. But, so is everything else. It does seem like KDE development will chase the latest trends, but I hold out some hope that they might make some concessions for those of us who just want a lightweight system with a few powerful features.

There's not enough information to explore potential causality here. All we have is the word of an aggrieved site owner who swears up and down that he was engaged in perfectly unimpeachable conduct. There's no evidence, just whining.

Can I get a green-screen terminal hooked up to the Internet?

6,310,000 old backlinks, many of which come from highly trusted sources, might have some effect.

It is presumptuous, and sets a possibly dangerous precedent.

"...the ranking makes sense." PR and rank are often correlated, but PR is not a good predictor of actual rank.

"How in the world Altavista has a PR of 9 is a mystery though." A large volume of natural links is probably the explanation here. altavista.com probably ended up in some trusted repository as well, which may render it relatively immune to "penalties" or other dampening factors.

If the software is important to you, because, for example, your livelihood depends on it, then yes, I recommend reading the EULA closely :) IMO the same applies to running a business that is reliant to a significant degree on traffic from search engines. Failing to at least achieve basic familiarity with what Google does and doesn't like is equivalent to neglecting vital market research before undertaking any other business venture.

Since we're focused on Google, logically the best strategic decision is to accept that you can't change the terrain on the battlefield, and adapt your strategy accordingly.

Consultants sometimes provide a Google Webmaster Tools verification file to the site owner in question. Once the site owner uploads this to the site's root directory, the consultant will be able to access Google Webmaster Tools data on the site through their own Google account. However I've never tried this with a banned site- It is certainly possible that Google will see the domain name and refuse to show any data. Also if the site has been banned for a period of time which is longer than Google's expiration date for stored data (I forget what the time increment is... 1yr? 6 mo.s?) there might be no data to speak of. This is still ok; assuming Google makes GWT available to banned sites, all we would be looking for is a reasonable description of the problem above and beyond "we banned you for some cryptic reason".

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" - nevertheless, there is always a cause and effect. Admittedly, in complicated systems it can be hard to find either.

Strongly agree with this comment. The "wounded indignation" tone is very familiar to me, as the online SEO community is full of these stories which don't seem to go anywhere and which hamper real discussion. Reminds me of alcoholics who are deep in denial - "I don't have a problem, you should have ducked when I threw that TV at you!"

Google is not required to provide customer service. If "SEO" is important to you, I recommend rereading Google's terms of service and landing page quality guidelines. Google Webmaster Tools is the best way to get feedback on your particular site, though I don't recommend using it on every site in your network.

All of the articles I've seen thus far on studiobriefing.net are scraped verbatim from another source, assumedly celebrifi.com. This is against Google's terms of service, and this activity is likely to result in a ban. Instead of whining about how Google is persecuting an innocent website, these guys should have an honest discussion among themselves about what they are trying to do with the website and why their activities might have pissed off Google. Or they should hire competent in-house SEO help. For a 2k monthly retainer, I might be available, as long as I can telecommute (I don't want to move to SoCal).

There's usually a reason for Google bans. It's best to address this reason directly and honestly instead of stirring up drama. If the entirety of HN became consumed with righteous indignation, Google still wouldn't reinclude a low-value affiliate spam scraper site.

I can't comment on "efficient" or "streamlined" but I would echo this recommendation to at least create a Google Webmaster Tools account before complaining to the Internet at large.

Is it just me, or are these insights superficial? If "social media" is a conversation, doesn't it already imply that listening is part of the process? Using social media for its intended purpose is different than retweeting Guy Kawasaki just because other people are doing it.

I don't want to disparage anyone's hard work in this space, but I wonder if the person most interested in "social media monitoring tools" might be the sort of person who hires a ghost blogger/tweeter because he/she is too busy to blog or tweet.

I agree, Ubuntu can be unwieldy compared with the solidity of other distros. I usually put up with some slowness or instability because Ubuntu automates stupid little tasks like uncompressing files (which I really should learn how to do on the CLI anyway).

Can't say for sure, but it also seems like Firefox behaves differently between distros, as if the code in the repositories differs drastically enough to offer a dramatic performance boost. Granted these are not scientific observations and I'd defer to someone who ran *buntu vs another distro on two boxes with identical specs.

No, it probably won't "work" out of the box, meaning that it requires configuration. With a fresh install, typically the first thing I do is plug in an ethernet cable, download all available updates (including wifi drivers and other software if needed) and then configure the wifi. I did this when I bought a netbook preinstalled with Linux, but I might not have needed to install anything, I probably just didn't find the "switch" at first.

A LOT of trouble can be saved if the hardware is confirmed to work with the OS. I bought a System76 Starling. Haven't upgraded it to Karmic yet - I figure I'll let more people tread the upgrade path until it is smoother.

An interesting development might be the emergence of services that effectively function as 80legs resellers. Shortly after 80legs's debut, some guys from my company approached a vendor at a conference who offered SEO-focused crawling services. The tool is in alpha and we are still waiting for an invite, but based on the data points that this tool is capable of harvesting, as well as the price point (very similar to 80legs) I began to suspect that their custom code relies on the 80legs backend.

It's stuff like this which makes me think that the release cycle for Ubuntu is just too brisk. I've just recently managed to get two 8.10 installs to the point where they're comfortably configured and stable. I'm still working out a few issues with Jaunty on a netbook. There's no way I'm going to upgrade that thing to Karmic for maybe six months or so. Granted, this makes me an LTS guy and not an early adopter, but I don't think my situation is unique.

Believe it or not, I've upgraded Ubuntu successfully several times through the GUI. Before Ubuntu 7.x this tended to fail spectacularly though. It's a very friendly process when it works, which admittedly seems contingent on the maturity of the release in question.

By the same logic, web designers are just web developers who are incapable of doing the other 90% of the job.

There's interesting stuff under discussion up there but I've noticed it doesn't seem to get a lot of attention - few blog comments, etc - was wondering why this was since there's other arguably similar gatherings (TED, SXSW, etc) that get a lot more attention.

It's also geographically close to me, if I didn't have to work I would consider going to Camden. Kind of a bizarre location really.

This submission implies that SEOmoz is at least slightly interested in peer review. Which would be a very good thing for them.

Some (cynical) possibilities:

1. To sell invites would be "unGOOGlich"; that is, it may hurt Google's perceived "do no evil"/not-just-in-it-for-the-money/faux altruism brand.

2. Scarcity marketing increases demand for an already sought-after item.

While for the most part I agree, I don't see why being concerned about the well-documented hazards of nuclear fission equates to "wacky", or why being flippant about these risks should equate to "non-wacky" for that matter.

It would be nice if the Twitter accounts that broadcast an HN feed also linked to the comments. There's a lot of value in these discussions. I've learned a lot from just lurking here.

from http://www.seomoz.org/linkscape/help/sources

    * Dotnetdotcom.org
    * Grub.org/Wikia
    * Page-Store.com
    * Amazon/Alexa’s crawl and internet archive resources
    * Exalead’s commercially available data
    * Gigablast’s commercially available data
    * Yahoo!’s BOSS API and other data sources
    * Microsoft’s Live API and other data sources
    * Google’s API and other data sources
    * Ask.com’s API and other data sources
    * Additional crawls from open source, commercial and academic projects

In my experience, the single most useful feature (main selling point) of the Linkscape tool is that it reports http status codes (for a price) so SEOs can detect 301 redirects, etc. AFAIK, dotnetdotcom.org has the only free, publicly available crawl data which also includes http status codes. Not sure about Exalead and Gigablast but I am pretty sure the other SEs don't release this information. To clarify: I don't have any proof, and things may have changed, but I've read some intelligent speculation (smarter than me) which claims that dotbot/dotnetdotcom.org provides the majority of the data (especially the unique info, like status codes) for the Linkscape tool.

I very much agree that it is an interesting bit of news, I've been meaning to download the dataset and play with it for a while now. The only point I wanted to make was that there is another side to this story. An adequate summary can be found here: http://sphinn.com/story/80142 - I read the HN terms of use and didn't see anything that specifically forbids promotional stuff, but this tool is associated with a company that develops linkbait for a living. I don't mean to imply that this would make dotbot less noteworthy/interesting, but I am suspicious of linkbait. I lurk on HN because, frankly, much of the information sources in my industry are crapped up with "social media optimized" thin content. Again, sorry if I overreacted. This is my second post here and I don't mean to make a nuisance of myself.

Draw a map of the WWW?