• The Art of the Possible — Regulation: The Cause, Not the Cure, of the Financial Crisis
  Thanks, Paul.
  Tags: economy economics finance regulation
• Compare and Contrast: Dot Com Bust and Web Two Point Doh
  Are we doomed to repeat history, or doomed to make different mistakes?
  Tags: jeremiahowyang web2.0 economy
• An open letter to Phil Bentley, managing director of British Gas
  Funny, were it not so sad.
  Tags: economy oil power paulraven
• Broken Link Checker for WordPress | W-Shadow.com
  Handy plugin. It's already found several for me.
  Thanks, TDavid.
  Tags: wordpress plugin links seo 404
• 10 Programming Proverbs Every Developer Should Know
  11. "A bad cause requires many words." (German Proverb)
  Tags: proverbs programming development
• 19 Things NOT To Do When Building a Website | Josiah Cole dot com
  20. Java applets and ActiveX controls
  Tags: webdesign

• What are the security implications for Google Chrome? | IT Security | TechRepublic.com
  10 interesting talking points — but little is known yet.
  Tags: google chrome browser security javascript apotheon
• When the right price for software is zero | IT Consultant | TechRepublic.com
  When I'm the buyer?
  Tags: techrepublic consulting software
• Brian’s Threaded Comments: Optimized | The Marketing Technology Blog
  Doug removes one of my remaining peeves with this plugin. Installed on all my blogs. Let me know if there's trouble.
  Tags: seo wordpress plugins comments briansthreadedcomments dougkarr
• Should you give clients your IM account info?
  Sure. Have it answered by a bot that provides random responses, like "I'll look into it".
  Tags: consulting chat

• ACM Ubiquity – The Fallacy of Premature Optimization
  Misinterpreting “premature optimization” is the root of all evil.
  Thanks, Assaf.
  (tags: programming performance optimization development)
• Petzold Book Blog – Gay Rights and the Prosecution of Alan Turing
  If we allow government to abridge the rights of any member of society, we are giving government permission to abridge the rights of every member of society.
  (tags: turing petzold homosexuality liberty)
• Regex Tester – RegexPal
  Free, online regex tester to solve one of your problems. Thanks, Jeff.
  (tags: regex tools javascript)
• Coding Horror: Regular Expressions: Now You Have Two Problems
  I love regexen — but then, I like to pile on the hot sauce, too.
  (tags: regex programming codinghorror tips coding development)
• My Mixed Feelings about Ruby
  Ruby is not a pure and perfect language like Lisp — I agree with Reg that that’s sometimes bothersome, but on the whole I think it makes Ruby more of a human language.
  (tags: ruby raganwald programming design complexity)
• How to make sexy buttons with CSS
  Sizable and pressed/unpressed images, without JavaScript. Thanks, Doug.
  (tags: css buttons webdesign howto)
• popuri.us :: quickly check your site’s Google PageRank, Alexa Rank and more!
  Yet another “how popular am I?” tool — but this one’s quick and seems accurate. Thanks again, Doug.
  (tags: seo tools statistics pagerank stats analytics)

120 is the smallest 3-perfect (triperfect) number. The sum of its divisors is 360, which is 3 * 120.

Are you ready to upgrade from Vista to XP?

The best in programming profanity (thanks, Reg).

Or instead of swearing, just say Boo. An extensible language for the .NET Framework based loosely on Python (thanks, Arjan).

The true art of blogging? Jorn Barger (who invented the term “weblog” ten years ago yesterday) says it’s all about amping up the echo chamber (thanks, John Murrell). Naturally, Dave Winer claims prior art.

The many meanings of SEO. I like Mark’s own coinage best.

I unsubbed from TechCrunch months ago, mostly because I can’t respect Arrington personally. There’s more.

Me on TechRepublic: Top 5 programming languages (depends on how you rank them).

Me on Geeks Are Sexy: My Johnny Quest fantasy nears reality, the ultimate LOLcats, the Firefox detention hoax.

109 (decimal) is the smallest natural number that is palindromic in bases five and nine.

Kiltak pointed me to the Website Grader, from John Chow. Even if you’re not SEO-obsessed, this useful little tool can point out some things you may not have known about your site.  Check it out, it’s free!

Assaf provides a list of the do’s and don’t's  dos and don’ts  does and don’ts  things to embrace and avoid when striving for coolness by association.

Thank you, Dave Winer.  It’s about time.  Recently, Doc fixed his feed problems, too, by migrating to WordPress.  I’d like to say that they both finally listened to me, but I doubt they even heard me — and besides, I was probably just cheering on the inevitable.

Scott Adams notices an alignment between the characters of Dilbert and the pieces in the game of chess.  Coincidence, or something more?  If it’s a universal pattern, then what piece are you in your game?  Me, I’m board.  Must be my checkered past.

I’m not planning on cashing in anytime soon, but it could make me an easy $3.2 million.  Or so they say (thanks, TDavid).

Ah, the wonders of the old Reverse-Polish HP calculators!

Paul led me to 101 more reasons why I like being independent.  Of course, there’s always the down-side.

Ilker had me rolling out of my chair, beating the floor, and gasping for air twice with the Uncyclopedia and 13 unfortunate brand translations.

Thanks for the link-love, Doug, Arjan, and Brian!

Widget watch:  Babul Babul uses the tag cloud widget.

The sum of digital power: If you take each digit in the number 89, raise it to the power corresponding to its ordinal position, and sum the results (8¹ + 9²), you get 89.

Apotheonic neologism: coderspace.

Bugger!

Shelley’s new startups.  See, Web 2.0 doesn’t have to be all about happy, smiley neighborhoods after all.

TDavid questions whether Skype should be building a gaming platform rather than keeping their game face on for call quality.

Hiding from Google (in a cave).

Apparently Shel, for one, welcomes our new Google overlords.

Danielle and Michael responded to my tag on the Random 8 meme.  Michael’s #5 is me all the way.  Danielle’s #6 is nearly universal.

maxmnavarro, mad housewife, and Talk Aloha use my tag cloud widget.  Gracias!  Thanks!  Mahalo!

Carol links to Randy’s Ten Steps to Professional Blogging, and gives me some link-love as editor (though my contribution was minimal).

FWIW, this blog is now #37 on the Z-list on Squidoo, with a total of 1 point.  So, what’s the point?

• SOB: Scion Of Backronymics » a small piece of the social networking puzzle
  apotheon nicely summarizes the benefits and mechanics of mutual linkage.
  Characterization of trackback spammers: “unregenerate marketing blood flukes attempting to suck nutrients out of your precious weblog fluids in acts of drive-by parasitism.”
  (tags: linklove blogging trackback pingback)
• Sun Ray Blog
  The War on Terror as viewed from the Bourne shell. Thanks apotheon.
  (tags: humor geek bash politics iraq terrorism)
• SOB: Scion Of Backronymics » 2006241: links for 29 August 2006
  apotheon brings his own style to linkblogging
  (tags: linklove blogging)
• WebBlog – Meta Line
  Yet another user of my tag cloud widget — this one in Italiano and, um, stock Latin phrases?
  (tags: tagging tagcloud widget wordpress)
• Yahoo! Site Explorer
  Site submission and management for Yahoo! search. Thanks, Randy.
  (tags: yahoo seo search tools sitemap)
• Just Shelley » Data Shoeology
  Shelley compares data storage formats to shoes. Regarding XML: “Instead of creating structure, chaos flowered into a thousand angle bracketed blooms.”
  (tags: formats microformats xml sql xhtml html rss atom csv)

• Lorelle on WordPress » DIY Search Engine Optimization
  Great content on optimizing WordPress. I hadn’t seen this before, but Mike Koepke linked to me from the comments. Thanks, Mike!
  (tags: wordpress seo optimization howto blogging linklove)
• Dead2.0 » Why do I blog?
  skeptic picks up the “meaning of blogging” meme.
  (tags: linklove blogging blogosphere)
• The Assimilated Negro
  This guy is hilarious. Subscribed. via Hugh Mcleod
  (tags: humor NYC)
• Digg Tools
  All kinds of tools for Digg. via Lifehacker.
  (tags: digg tools)
• SOB: Scion Of Backronymics » ITLOG Import: Elegance
  apotheon imported his landmark post on elegance from his old blog ITLOG – definitely worth reading
  (tags: elegance programming language oop agile)

• Velcro City Tourist Board » Blog Archive » Don’t fear the future
  Optimistic thougts on AI and posthumans. I’m tempted to agree. After all, people of the nineteenth century would probably consider *us* “posthumans” if they could see us with all of our gadgets and communication.
  (tags: futurism ai posthuman)
• amperspective » Css Crib Sheet
  Good advice for CSS — we need it!
  (tags: css reference webdesign)
• TimesDispatch.com | Richmond Virginia Obituary
  Fred Clarks’ obituary
  (tags: death humor obituaries life)
• Google PageRank Checker – Check Google page rank of any web pages
  Simple
  (tags: SEO pagerank google statistics)

One of the ways I track referrers is via an RSS feed from ReefeRSS. I like it, because you can quickly scroll through all of the inbounds and see where they are coming from. You can also click on the link to the referrer to see where your link is on their page, which is particularly interesting for search engine results.

Search engine referrals also give you an idea of what people are searching for when they reach your site. It’s gratifying to see a search query that lands on your site where you know the user found the answer they were looking for (like ‘Google: wordpress tag cloud widget’). Sometimes I see queries that I know led to a disappointing visit, and these often inspire me to write a post to answer them, ex post facto (sorry).

Quite a few search engine queries landing on this post include some form of the question ‘what does bear poop look like?’ — a question that my post asks but does not answer. From browsing Google’s results, I didn’t think there was a picture of ursine feces anywhere on the Internet.

Then, today, Seth introduced me to Huckabuck, where you can adjust the mix of results from different search engines. Playing with the search tuner, I finally found (via del.icio.us) a picture that answers that unique question. It could not, however, answer the question of why it looks that way — bear poop apparently has no factors.