duncanriley.com » google

Age shall not weary them, nor the Google News forget

admin — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 00:16:21 +0000

Just for a change, I’ll bag someone other than the mainstream media.

Google News.

Its Valentines Day, Feb 14. 11:15am in the morning at I’m typing this.

And what is Google News showing in its latest Victoria news section? (hint, look at the dates of the stories)

Google Street View blurs my letterbox

admin — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 00:22:33 +0000

Google Australia has launched Google Street View locally (via Simon Goudie). Privacy issues perhaps, but letter boxes have all been blurred out. Here’s our house in Google Street View:

Here’s a close up of the letter box

Interestingly, they’ve really gone all out in the coverage of Street View. My old house complete with sales sign (so it would have to have been in December/ January), notably in Australind, Western Australia. You can’t really get more regional than Australind

note though that although they have the house, the satelitte images are still woefully old for that part of the world

Numbers + URLS

admin — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 02:41:41 +0000

So the good new is that The Inquisitr got accepted into Google News, least the tech stream did anyway. This is going to be a healthy boost in site traffic, although until we start appearing I don’t know by how much yet. I could be hundreds of page views a day, it could be thousands or even more. Its been years since I had a site in Google News, but I do recall The Blog Herald getting reasonable sort of traffic from it.

Now the bad news: I had to change the URL structure to be accepted. Google News will only index pages where those pages have a min 3 number unique identifier. The Inquisitr didn’t, with me having taken the SEO and simple URL route of inquisitr.com/postname. So I had to change the permalink structure of every post (it’s now inquisitr.com/postnumber/postname), easy, but that means a redirect of the old posts…easy, but because the posts didn’t have anything between the URL and name originally the site is now trying to redirect everything with that structure, including archive pages and static pages. The plugin I used for the redirect has an exception box, but how do you define the exception when there is no unique identifier in the first place other than the name of the page itself (and I tried that…didn’t work, it looks for a broader field). So for now the pages for QMeme, About and Content are now redirecting to posts with the same content until I can find a way of excepting these pages from the catchall 302 redirect. Did I mention that it caused me one hour of sheer panic as well?

Update: before I even hit publish my Google News vanity search email pops up with a hit

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