So it’s a new year…have you forgotten anything?

Here’s a hint:

Ever see a site with a copyright statement 6 months out of date? Even big-shot corporate blogs make this mistake. But on a young, growing blog, it looks particularly bad.

Or perhaps you don’t have a copyright statement at all? Tsk tsk.

Why don’t we automate this, so we’ll never, ever have to think about it again? Here’s how to do it in WordPress:

1. Log in to WordPress, and go to Theme Editor.
2. Choose “footer.php”.
3. Delete your current copyright statement (if it exists), and insert the following code:&copy; 2008 – <?php echo date(Y); ?>…replacing “2008″ with the date you started your blog.
4. If you wish, put your name adjacent to the copyright, being sure not to disturb the php date tag. See mine below for an example.
5. Done.

Happy New Year! Anyone got a good detox recipe?

PageRank is one of the factors Google uses to determine how “important” a page is. This is key, since it needs a way to determine which results come up higher than others. For anyone in business on the web, this can translate directly into dollars, euros or shekels. For anyone else, it helps determine how much attention you get. Either way, it’s a big deal.

In essence, it’s a system of voting. When page A on the internet links to page B, it’s considered to have “voted” for it. So the page that gets the most votes wins, right? Well, not necessarily – for not all votes are created equal. A “vote” from a huge, important site is given much more weight than a vote from your grandmother’s blog. 

And what determines a huge, important site? It has more votes (links) to it, and/or those links themselves have more importance. But how are those links determined to be “important”? Start this paragraph over, and repeat endlessly.

Yes, it’s a very big, very complicated loop. Your PageRank is determined by the PageRank of the sites that link to yours, and theirs is determined by the PageRank of sites that link to them, and on and on, billions of times over.

But it gets even more complicated. Each of us only has a limited amount of PageRank to confer to others by way of links. If I link to you, my reservoir of outgoing PageRank is diminished by a small amount. If I link to 100 pages, each link is worth less than if I link to ten.

Now take it a step further down the rabbit hole. If the act of linking to you diminishes the power of the link I give you, how much is my link worth – its value before it existed, or after? And how can Google determine anyone’s PageRank until they’ve calculated everyone else’s PageRank? And how can they calculate those, until they’ve calculated all the others?

The answer is actually pretty mundane: Google just throws in a little “damping factor” and runs the calculations over and over until the difference in numbers gets so small as to be insignificant. Voila.

If you can stand some math, this is a fine explanation of the calculations involved, and this is a still-complex but slightly less math-oriented approach, which links to a very nice calculator you can use to estimate the effects of internal and external links on your own site.

Clicking on the a suggested related topic then returns the new results, and presents related queries for the new search. As you keep exploring related topics, the old searches remain onscreen, represented as the “tail” of your current search:

The related searches could use some work – so far I haven’t found them to be incredibly useful, and overall the Google Wonder Wheel is a bit of a toy. But what a toy it is – I’ve spent quite a bit of time enjoying it so far. Hopefully as the experiment continues, the results will get better.

Another less flashy, but more useful feature that comes along with the Google Wonder Wheel is the new Timeline view. A search on “baseball” seen in Timeline view allows you to zero in on results related to a certain year, and even month. For example, by clicking through to May of 1862, I can see that the Star Spangled Banner was first played at a baseball game on May 15th of that year:

The results aren’t perfect- some irrelevant content slips through based on passing uses of the search term – but for researchers and students, this will be pure gold.

Several other alternate views are included in the Google Wonder Wheel experiment as well, including longer textual excerpts, and a different type of image search which presents images from relevant pages inline with search results.

The Google Wonder Wheel has been dubbed an prototype, and is only available to some users. However, if you’d like to give it a spin, all you need to do is set a cookie in your browser to tell Google you’re participating. Here’s the trick:

Go to google.com. With Google loaded in your browser, paste the following code in your address bar and hit return:

javascript:void(document.cookie=”PREF=ID=4a609673baf685b5:TB=2:LD=en:CR=2:TM=1227543998:LM=1233568652:DV=AA:GM=1:IG=3:S=yFGqYec2D7L0wgxW;path=/; domain=.google.com”);

Nothing happens…at first. But now perform another search in Google, and on the results page you’ll notice a small “Show Options…” link just below the Google logo. Click this, and you’re off and running.

Now the question is: will this change the way you search, or is it just a toy?

For two weeks now, Google has been testing a behavioral targeting system on its partner sites and YouTube. Correction: according to this Google Blog post announcing the program, it’s not actually “behavioral targeting”, it’s ”interest-based advertising.” The words “behavior” and “targeting” do not appear in Google’s announcement.

The idea is simple: Google tracks your activity via a cookie, and if you are surfing pages about car repair or interior decorating, Google’s sites serve up ads that target you based on that behavior. Of course they make it sound warm, fuzzy and universally beneficial, saying that if you don’t mind “relevant” ads coming up based on your searches, you shouldn’t mind them coming up based on your other behavior. According to the post:

Keyword advertising has been so successful because it’s useful to users, advertisers and publishers — everyone’s interests are aligned. We believe that interest-based ads will create the same virtuous cycle, by giving users more relevant ads, while generating higher returns for advertisers and publishers.

I was unaware advertising was part of a “virtuous cycle”.

Fortunately, in apparent response to last month’s FTC report (.pdf), which warned the ad industry to provide privacy protections on behavioral advertising or risk government regulation, Google has provided some opt-out mechanisms. Of course, you’ll have to find them. And most people won’t, since they won’t even be aware their behavior is being targeted. 

However, if you want to stop Google tracking your behavior, here are some methods to do so:

1. Google’s Ad Preferences Manager. Under the ironic title “Make the ads you see on the web more interesting,” you can either choose categories of ads you specifically want to see (“Industries > Chemicals > Coatings & Adhesives”…oh boy!), or click the “Opt out” button. This button will disable Google’s tracking cookie. However, if you ever clear your cookies, this setting will be lost, and you’ll opt back in by default.

2. Google’s Advertising Cookie Opt-Out Plug-in. This browser plug-in will allegedly stop Google tracking, and is available for Firefox and Internet Explorer. Users of Safari, Chrome and other browsers are simply provided with instructions to change their cookie acceptance settings. This means these users must change a global setting that affects other activities in order to avoid Google’s watchful eye.

3. Google is a member of the Network Advertising Initiative, which provides its own opt-out tool for “targeted advertising”. This tool also requires global settings changes for users of some browsers. Ironically, since the opt-out is itself a cookie, usually you’ll have to actually loosen your cookie restrictions to get it to work.

4. Switch to Yahoo?  Sorry, no. They already instituted behavioral targeting last month.

Personally, I’m not going to stop Google tracking my behavior just yet. I think I’ll make a game of it. My browsing patterns are so bizarre and unpredictable, I’m a bit curious to see just what they think I’m interested in. Maybe I’ll even throw them off the trail on purpose…

And everyone knows what a wiki is for: letting anyone contribute, right?

Well, not necessarily. A wiki engine (the software used to create and run wikis like Wikipedia) doesn’t actually care if you use it to make a “proper” wiki or not. 

In fact, since wiki engines allow some users access to edit pages and stop others, what if you only allowed yourself access? Do you then still have a wiki? Or just a really easy-to-edit web site? One that you can edit from anywhere you can get to the internet?

But what about the plain-vanilla wiki look? What about the history/revision links, last edit information, and all the other clues that the user is looking at a wiki engine? 

Enter our friend the CSS stylesheet, and one of our favorite commands,

{display:none;}

Voila! Restrict access and hide the wiki features, and you have an easy-to-edit, open-source-powered web site. A few examples:

http://www.yanb.be
http://www.ifccc.org
http://nitens.org/taraborelli

OK, so they still look pretty plain, but they certainly don’t look like wikis. And with some CSS trickery, they can look like anything you want.

A wiki engine is simply that: an engine. And like any engine, it provides power; what you do with it is only limited by your ideas.

Here’s a quick tutorial to get started (specifically using the Wikka engine, but the concepts involved will work with most others):

http://docs.wikkawiki.org/InvisibleWiki

And a quick video tutorial:

How to run an invisible wiki from AcademicProductivity on Vimeo

It looks like the same people have set up accounts in about 30 major cities; @miamiescorts, @bostonescorts, etc. Altogether they have many hundreds if not thousands of followers. 

Presumably this has benefits not just in marketing, but also in recruiting new employees. Recruiting is vital in any business, and I hear prostitution has a lot of turnover. [Sorry, I couldn't resist that one.]

For the record, I think prostitution should be legalized, taxed and regulated. I’d say Health and Human Services was tailor-made to oversee it; just look at the name. And if we can have “sin taxes” on other things, why not on the big daddy of them all?

But for the moment it’s illegal, at least on paper. So, a Twitter account? One might think this would give law enforcement a “leg up” in finding this company (which doesn’t appear to be hiding anyway). But it seems they know the police care more about busting the hooker on the street than the pseudo-respectable “escort company”.

But how about the over 100 people following this account? Many of whom have apparently real names and faces on their accounts?

Hi Chris! Saw you on the internet!

Isn’t there a possibility that one might get in a little hot water with the wife/girlfriend/employer/potential employer/clients/friends/family for keeping up with the local hookers in such a public fashion?

And what about those being followed? As of now, this company is only following their other escort accounts. But unless I’m wrong, Twitter allows you to follow whoever you want. So don’t be surprised if you one day find yourself trying to explain why there’s a link to a prostitution service on your Twitter page.

If you do have that conversation, please let me know. I’d love to hear how it goes.

Required:

Hosting account with cPanel interface

Optional:

Addition FTP server for remote backup

YouTube made it a bit fuzzy, so I recommend full-screen viewing. If anyone has tips for getting YouTube to display closer to the original quality, please leave a comment below. Update: I’ve switched to Vimeo – the quality is considerably better.

How to Back Up your Site in cPanel from The Agitationist on Vimeo.

I host several domains on my account. One of these is bloglabs.net, a news aggregator for the blogging community. I haven’t had much time to put in on it, so yesterday I set to work. Almost immediately, I encountered a mysterious problem.

I set up the site to load quickly, so the only native image on the page is a thin blue stripe across the top. For some reason this tiny 4k image refused to load. I spent hours coding and re-coding the html and css, re-encoding and re-uploading the image, and getting more and more frustrated. I worked for years as a web designer, and I couldn’t get one lousy little gif to show up? It was downright embarrassing.

Finally I gave in to my lack of self-sufficiency, and at about 11:00 pm sent an email to AN’s tech support. Now, this image was purely decorative, so I didn’t mark the ticket as urgent, and I was not expecting a response until today. And quite frankly, my description of the issue was considerably less detailed than this post; nor did I inform them of the steps I had already taken to try and fix it.

Amazingly, I received a response within ten minutes. TEN MINUTES. If you’ve ever dealt with tech support of any kind, especially web hosting, it’s hard to describe how outstanding that is. I’ve had hosting companies take days to get to a routine problem like this.

The support rep (who is located in the United States, by the way) responded in grammatically-perfect English that he had re-built the image, and it was working on his end. He requested that I try it and report back. I felt as if I was communicating with a real person, who was actually taking my problem seriously. Hallelujah.

This was a logical first step, but he couldn’t have known that I already tried it, since I didn’t tell him. Tech support does require both sides to be communicative, and I wasn’t holding up my end. So I unfortunately had to report that the image still wasn’t displaying for me. Again, I did not expect a response until the following day.

And again I was pleasantly surprised when, about an hour later, they informed me they had found the problem. I was trying to link to the image across my hosted domains, but I had overzealously enabled “hotlink protection“, which only allows linking to a image from the same domain. Thus I had altered the mysterious .htaccess file, and was giving the server conflicting instructions.

Perhaps they found the problem by following the trail of smoke coming from the computer hosting my site, or by the robotic cries of “DOES NOT COMPUTE!”

But more likely, they patiently checked the many custom settings I had made in my admin interface until they found the culprit, tested and confirmed their theory, fixed it for me, and let me know everything was working perfectly.

Yes, they fixed it for me. They could have send me instructions, copied and pasted from somewhere, but no. They just fixed it.

And the tone of their emails was downright friendly. Not only did they solve the problem, they didn’t scold me about my error, like some support reps are prone to do. They simply included a helpful link regarding the use of hotlink protection, so I could use it appropriately in the future.

Finally, when I gratefully let them know it was working, they send back a friendly, non-boilerplate email that seemed genuinely happy to have the problem solved. It was 1:18 am.

It seems crazy to even have to point it out, but this is what good tech support looks like. If that isn’t what you’re getting, switch now. It’s $6.95 a month. The domain name is free. If you ask me, it’s a damn good deal.

p.s.: On the first sign-up page, scroll down and enter coupon code ”GOTAPEX-ROX-A-LOT” for 3 months free. Just don’t tell anyone else – this will be our little secret…

That’s the guiding principle behind the mashup – the assemblage of existing pieces into a new, derivative work. In the visual art world this is as old as collage; probably older. Video is another form well-suited to being mashed up, especially for comedic effect. And by now every one is aware that there are musician/DJs who do nothing but mashups.

In the 1950s William Burroughs borrowed his “cut-up” writing technique from the Surrealist découpage of the 1920s. Burroughs’ form consisted of writing a straight linear text, cutting it into pieces and rearranging it to discover new and surprising possibilities. This was a clever trick to generate ideas that might not spring up when the conscious and ego were busy getting in the way.

On the web though, mashups usually have the reverse intent. Instead of breaking down information to create new meanings, the web mashup aggregates data points with the purpose of finding the meanings and relationships hidden within.

Ever since Google Maps opened up its code for developers to play with, the web mashup world has exploded. More recently, tools such as Yahoo Pipes have opened up the possibility for non-developers to match up multiple sets of data in revealing ways.

All of which is a preface to explain why I love everyblock.com. Without that intro, it might sound rather uninteresting that the site aggregates publicly available information such as crime stats, building permits, and restaurant reviews, connects them geographically and allows the user to subscribe to a local feed. OK, it still sounds uninteresting.

Try this. How would you like to be notified automatically that the restaurant down the block failed its latest health department inspection? Would it be valuable for you to know that your neighbor was just issued a liquor license? How about a new real estate listing down the street, or a new foreclosure auction around the corner? Would it help you to know about what crimes are reported in your neighborhood? How about automatically receiving nearby business reviews? Maybe you’d like to know whenever a new photo is geo-tagged in your area on Flickr? Or when a crew is coming to film on your block, or a street is being closed off, or when a new bike rack has been installed?

Now, map all of those together, and have them automatically delivered to you as a feed. This is the beauty of everyblock.com. It’s like the old lady with all the neighborhood gossip, except that everything is factual (and it doesn’t judge).

And it is so incredibly easy to use. Just put in your address, zip code, neighborhood name, ward number, whatever you prefer, and click “Search”. Once you’re done admiring the results, click either “Custom RSS Feeds” or “Email Alerts”, choose which info you’d like in your alerts, and you’re done.

You are now that little old lady who knows everything. Thanks Everyblock!

As of now, EveryBlock is only available in 11 cities: Boston, Charlotte, Chicago, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco, San Jose, Seattle, Washington DC. The team behind it consists of a mere six people, and they are not a division of Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, etc. How about showing them some support by spreading the word?

Nameboy Domain Name Generator is the industry standard of domain name suggestion. Simply give it a primary word, an optional secondary word and click Go. You’ll quickly have several pages of possibilities using your desired keyword(s) in various configurations, adding common prefixes and suffixes, as well as numerous compound words you might never have thought of. Availability is shown for the top six TLDs (Top Level Domains), and when you see something you like, you can click through and grab it immediately. Highly recommended.

Domai.nr is an interesting new tool which specializes in finding and checking the availability of “domain hacks“. Domain hacks are the unusual uses of sometimes exotic country code TLDs to hack together meaningful words and phrases. The best-known example is the highly successful del.icio.us, but the possibilities are many: how about chi.mp? Or cr.yp.to?

If you’re really desperate, these can be combined with subdirectories to make even more words possible. For example, since my name Jason is taken in every top-level configuration, perhaps I’d consider buying ja.so and putting up ja.so/n?

OK, it’s a stretch. But Domai.nr is fun to play with, and if nothing else, it may give you some ideas. The site is built with AJAX, so you receive instant, auto-complete gratification as you type.

Caveats: country codes come with varying prices, rules and in some cases residency restrictions. Also, Domainr only tells you that a domain might be available – the negative side of instant gratification is questionable accuracy. Domainr provides links through to the registrars so you can check for yourself.

Domainsbot is almost a combination of Nameboy and Domai.nr, in that it provides instant feedback via AJAX and gives suggestions like NameBoy. It provides a higher quantity (though generally lesser quality) of choices, and is a good back-up source when the others don’t come through. It isn’t reliable for domain availability information, so alway verify this yourself with another registrar. Also, if it doesn’t recognize a word, it will sometimes think you’re asking for Italian or German, which grows old very quickly.

Bustaname is another combination of these concepts; it uses quick (though unreliable) AJAX availability checking, but adds another interesting twist. Instead of a list of standard English prefixes and suffixes, you provide your own list. It takes a little more brain power and a lot more time, but you can come up with some solid names – in fact, this is where I came up with the name of this site.

Caveats: Bustaname is easily overwhelmed when your search returns too many choices, and frequently chokes on its own features. Start with fewer options checked, and slowly add them. The domain availability checker is so inaccurate as to be useless. Also, they try to shoehorn you into using their preferred registrars – don’t do it. If you find a good idea here, take it over to Nameboy or your favorite registrar and grab it there.

Finally, these and several other domain-oriented services are all together on one page here: http://www.free-webhosts.com/domain-name-tools.php. It looks cheesy, but it’s one of my most-used bookmarks. Just goes to show you – looks aren’t everything. Be sure to take a look at some of the others I haven’t mentioned here, and let me know if you have any favorites I missed. Good luck and happy hunting!