Monthly Archive for September, 2005

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Google’s 7th birthday

Published on September 27, 2005 in Google and wifi. Closed

In September 1998, Google Inc. opened its door in Menlo Park, California. The door came with a remote control, as it was attached to the garage of a friend who sublet space to the new corporation’s staff of three. The office offered several big advantages, including a washer and dryer and a hot tub.
Google Milestones

The baseline of the company might be “don’t be evil“, but it actually should be something like “dare to dream”. What Larry Page and Sergey Brin have done a number of times already, is realize the improbable and seemingly insane in a market, redefine the standards of how things should be done, and kill off most of the competitors in one go.

A very happy birthday to Google, and I hope they stay around a whole while longer so they can shake up the establishment.

Google & music? Google & movies? Google & hardware? Google & office software? Google & payment? …

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Brussels Bloggers Meeting on Oct 7

Published on September 19, 2005 in Belgium and Brussel. 7 Comments Tags: , , , .


(NL versie hieronder – version FR ci-dessous)

After the Geek Dinner (Jan 2005) and Blog Dinner (Jun 2005) in Ghent – organised by Smetty – it is now time for the Brussels connection.

I am organizing together with Bart VH the very first
Brussels Bloggers Dinner.

All you bloggers, vloggers, photo- and groupbloggers and other podcasters are kindly invited to mingle with your peers at the splendid International Press Center aka Résidence Palace. This meeting is rather casual and informal (no smoking required) and open for all Belgian-based bloggers (NL/FR/EN). It will feature some light and short presentations (topics still to be chosen – propose your own on the site!) and an equally easy-to-digest pasta meal (10 euro for pasta + water ad lib and a coffee). For those who work late or have other dinner appointments, you are still welcome to drop by around 22h and see what you’ve missed.

Subscription is required so we can plan the catering: you can add your name to the ‘WillAttend’ wiki page.

Be there or B²!

Peter

— NL (in ‘t kort)
Op vrijdag 7 oktober is de eerste Brussels Bloggers Dinner in de Résidence Palace, Wetstraat – Brussel. Een informele eet- en drinkgelegenheid waar u andere bloggers kan ontmoeten, een gezicht op de URL plakken en kletsen over van alles en nog wat. Alle details over de maaltijd (spaghetti), de locatie (gezet in 1923), de korte presentaties en inschrijvingsprocedure vindt u op de site.

— FR (en bref)
Le vendredi 7 octobre on organise le premier Brussels Bloggers Dinner au résidence Palace, Rue de la Loi à Bruxelles. Une occasion unique pour rencontrer des autes bloggeurs, pour coller un visage sur des liens et pour pappotter sur pleins de choses. Tous les details sur le repas (spaghetti), l’endroit (construit en 1923), les presentations courtes et la procédure d’inscription se trouvent sur le site!

De Standaard: down by popular demand

Published on September 15, 2005 in Belgium and internet. Closed

De Standaard is one of the better (Flemish) newspapers in Belgium, and the pioneer of building an excellent web site around a “traditional” medium (even making money from it). That is why it is so surprising that after all these years, they still haven’t figured out how to handle traffic peaks. Nor how to customize web server error messages.

They must have posted something really interesting again this morning (“Nieuw theoretisch rijexamen verrast“? “Belgen bouwen in China“? I can see these thanks to krantenkoppen.be) because their site is unavailable:

“The request cannot be processed at this time. The amount of traffic exceeds the Web site’s configured capacity.”

Three remarks on that:

  • “the Web site’s configured capacity”? Either add more servers (‘scale out’) or make sure your server can handle more traffic (‘scale up’). What kind of lousy error message is that?
  • Did you read this part on the 500.13 error page: “Open IIS Help, (…), and search for topics titled Monitoring and Tuning Web Application Performance, Performance Monitoring and Scalability Tools, and About Custom Error Messages.” Yes, I know it’s embarrassing but do read that part on customising IIS error messages. Create a custom page for all 500 errors that is worthy of a high-profile professional web site.
  • The site of a newspaper is rather static. Let’s say there is a new element on the homepage every 15 min at maximum, and most ‘item’ pages never change once they are created (apart from ads and promotions in the sidebar). This is content ideally suited for caching with a reverse proxy. Even if your server can’t handle 10.000 visitors per minute, a battery of ‘dumb’ caches before your servers can do that easily. If you have no idea what I am talking about, call me.

The Standaard Blog on the other hand is hosted on Typepad, and they sure use caches (look for “X-Cache = HIT/MISS from www.sixapart.com“).

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Blog search engine frenzy

Published on September 14, 2005 in Google and Search. 5 Comments Tags: , , , .


Exciting times in blog search country:

Question: can someone make a meta-blog-search-service (like an on-line Copernic for blogs) that :

  • searches all “who-links-to-me” blog search engines
  • filters out the doubles
  • creates a weighted combined ranking (a referer featured on 5 search engines ranks higher than a site only listed once)
  • can use a date parameter (“only show posts younger than 1 month”)
  • gives us some sexy graphics like Blogpulse does
  • offers its results via RSS
  • has a viral component, like e.g. a counter I can display on my blog – something like Feedburner’s Awareness API (which always makes me think of Jean-Claude Vandamme’s legendary “AWARE” theory)

Anyone aware of a service like this? Please leave a comment!