I’m starting to get thoroughly discouraged about the usefulness of the Google API. I just ran a couple of tests. I searched for “greg perry” “san diego” using the Google API and got a ranking of 183 out of 483. That’s significantly lower than the previous 35 out of 594, but when you have a PageRank of zero you have to take what you can get. Since last time Google was picking up the search terms in a discussion of mine about using them, and that post has since moved off the front page of my blog, I have to assume that some consideration is given to how deep in the website hierarchy the terms are found when determining how relevant Google thinks your page is. As a matter of fact my SDF site showed up significantly higher in the same search – I spotted it in my debug printouts.

But then I ran a http search on Google and got entirely different results – 56 out of 732. I noticed before there was a small difference between the Google interface results and the API results, but this is ridiculous. It makes me think that the API, and therefore my program using the API, is worthless.

I’ll have to give some thought to this. I recently discovered how to use PHP to parse the results of URL’s. I was thinking of using it to pull my Host report out of my stats and run the IP addresses through a whois to make a more readable report. Now I’ll consider whether I should ditch the API approach for my Google Fame plugin and parse the search results from a http call to Google. If the code is economical, it would be a better idea, as the user would not have to sign up for an API key.

Posted by Greg as My Website, Programming at 14:28 PST

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I guess I’m not the only Republican who has felt betrayed by George W. Bush.

Some conservative observers have, however, begun to think the unthinkable, and have begun to question the priorities and policies the Bush presidency, and consider whether these advance or undermine the essential conservative values of limited government, fiscal responsibility, personal liberty, and sound, effective national defense.

Read more.

I’m still sure that these folks would have differences with me on my positions on individual liberties where they conflict with social mores, but at least we are on the same page as far as fiscal responsibility and opposition to international adventurism goes.

My apologies to George F. Will. Apparently he has established a clear track record in opposing the current administration on matters of principle.

Posted by Greg as Politics at 17:04 PST

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For some reason I Googled “google API” and quickly saw that I was not the first to think of my “Google Fame” concept. It was predicted ar least as early as April 2002 by Rael Dornfest, and someone’s trying to charge $150 a year for a commercial version. I wonder how they got Google’s permission for that?

There are stand-alone pages that will do this sort of search for you – I remember now finding them before. But there is no existing plugin for WordPress, so my project will be the first to do that.

Posted by Greg as My Website, Software at 11:35 PST

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That little Google Fame placeholder is a nagging reminder to stick with my project, which is a good thing. So to better illustrate my concept, and prove I’m working on it (and I guess this documents my idea in case somebody else beats me with a finished product,) I am providing some sample output. Here’s a recent run:

SEARCHING FOR: "greg perry" "west chester"
Estimated unfiltered total is 50

CYCLE STARTING WITH 1
10 of 10 requested records returned
1 http://www.enquirer.com/editions/2003/10/04/loc_GTHAllen04.1.html
2 http://radio.weblogs.com/0113501/2005/03/01.html
3 http://radio.weblogs.com/0113501/2004/05/29.html
4 http://www.icpug.org.uk/national/archives/040207ar.htm
5 http://www.thetimesherald.com/news/stories/20050121/localsports/1897786.html
6 http://fl.hfu.edu.tw/~hb/msg00188.html
7 http://pdx.brickfest.com/registration/whosattending.php
8 http://www.drc.state.oh.us/web/BADNewsletter2.pdf
9 http://www.cnpbook.com/link/res/search/040624-1/4155.html
10 http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0789726270?v=glance

CYCLE STARTING WITH 11
10 of 10 requested records returned
11 http://amiga.czex.com/history/5_01e.html
12 http://www.indesignmag.com/jump?jump=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2Fexec
13 http://www.peachbelt.com/baseball/baseball%20records.pdf
14 http://ronsilliman.blogspot.com/2005/05/only-few-weeks-left-before-school-of.html
15 http://ronsilliman.blogspot.com/2004_03_01_ronsilliman_archive.html
16 http://www.gregrperry.com/
MYSITE FOUND
17 http://www.ncaa.org/news/1985/19850522.pdf
18 http://www.ushistory.org/betsy/guestbook/betsyguests1997.htm
19 http://www.ushistory.org/betsy/arcguest1997.html
20 http://www.herdzone.com/sports/baseball/05media.pdf

"greg perry" "west chester" ranks 16 out of 50
2 calls to Google API.

Basically, all this output is for debugging purposes. The only things that count are the search terms used, which will be pulled from the database, and the ranking results that are returned, which will be stored in the database and accessed by the display in the sidebar. I’m going to use a back-end interface to enter the search terms and either a timed event to update the search results or a “Run Now” button that will only appear when I’m logged in. Conceivably, I could create little graphs to show the rankings over time as well, but that might be too much data to present in a sidebar and I don’t yet know how I would create and show graphics.

Posted by Greg as My Website, Programming at 09:07 PST

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Today is Flag Day, which in itself isn’t much of an occasion to me, but it serves as a reminder every year that this is the anniversary of my gaining US citizenship, the first in my family to do so. I’ve now been a US citizen for 16 years.

Posted by Greg as Posts About Me at 16:30 PST

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Yesterday I got sick of coding and wanted to get out. The San Diego Chargers were having their free, open-to-the-public minicamp this weekend and it was a perfect opportunity. I took the kids (yes, Chelsea wanted to go, and Boo didn’t have a choice) and went down to Chargers Park, the training fields behind the Charger’s administrative offices, which, as it turns out, is only a couple of miles from my home. It wasn’t as crowded as I was afraid it would be. We moved around a bit, watching the various squads work out, but we ended picking a space between the bleachers that opened into a small grassy area as home base. A lot of little kids were playing in the grassy area, and Boo was having a ball running around with them and playing with his little football. I was able to keep an eye on him, with Chelsea’s help, and watch the scrimmages at the same time. Our fourth draft pick, Darren Sproles, looks great! He’ll be used as a kickoff and punt returner, but he makes a great running back, too. The whole defensive line is looking much better on the pass rush, even without our number one draft pick and training camp holdout Shawne Merriman. He better get his butt here fast or he’s going to get the Phillip Rivers treatment!

It’s going to be a great year for the Chargers. We came out so strong last year, and it looks like all we’re doing is getting better. We’re filling in the pass defense holes that held us back, and our run offense with LT is superb, and if Brees doesn’t turn into a flash in the pan, he’s got a lot of great receivers to work with. Brees showed off some excellent long range accuracy, so it’s all looking good!

Boo watched some of the players and showed some real interest. I asked him if he’s decided what position he wants to play, and he seemed uncertain. Of course, he can’t talk yet – he’s only 14 months old. I suppose I shouldn’t try to bottle him up in one slot yet. He has time.

Chelsea braved some of the crowds that I couldn’t manage because Boo got upset, and managed to get LaDainian Tomlinson’s autograph on her football. I got real close to Drew Brees before Boo got panicky, and nothing was worth subjecting him to that. Still, I saw a lot of the players up close. All in all, it was a great little piece of NFL to keep me going through the summer. Only 59 days to the first Chargers exhibition game of the 2005 season!

Posted by Greg as Family & Friends, Football at 14:29 PST

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I had some personal free time this weekend, and I spent most of it (staying up way too late on Friday night) writing code for my Google Fame WordPress Plugin project. I knew I had had previously written about this project, but as I search my blog I don’t see anything about it, so it must have been the post that imploded on me that I refered to in my June 1st post.

On my right sidebar is a placeholder I put in for the plugin. Basically, I’m going to stop reporting how my site places in Google search terms and create a metric that will fit in that little space, with maybe more column length. My goal is to use the Google API to create a script program in PHP that will search Google, then search through the Google results to find any reference to my website and give a “X out of X results” rank, using a couple of search terms. Yeah, it’s a vanity feature. But my WordPress blog runs entirely on PHP, as does the Mambo software I am playing with to set up my entire site (plus one for NACE and one for my daughter’s high school color guard,) and I want to learn how to work with it better, which means practice. In my experience, it is a lot more satisfying to learn how to code in a new language by working on a project, and not a simple one, and building subroutine after subroutine as you get more familiar with it. I just can’t stick with learning from a manual.

So far I’ve created a PHP script that takes a hard-coded search term and manages to find the X out of X part. That’s a far cry from what I eventually want, which includes storing the search terms and results in my online database, creating an Administrative interface to control it, and a front end output. (The “front end” refers to the webpage you are reading right now; the administrative part, or “back end” is the control interface that only I can get into that I use to create and manage content and website appearance.) My next step is to create an interactive interface, using XHTML forms and PHP. That’s what I was working on this weekend. I had never worked with forms in HTML before, and XHTML is even more strict, so most of my time went into learning how to create a form and take its input and use it in the program. It sounds simple, but the devil is in the details. I think I have the form stuff down but I didn’t get to finish the code for the interface. After this, I’ll work in fetching the input from a database and storing the results there.

Posted by Greg as My Website, Programming at 14:03 PST

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Rodd sent down a couple of photos and I decided to post some of them. As it turns out, he’s not the greatest photographer – nearly everything was backlit.

I was wondering how to deal with this and I must have lucked out on the search terms I used because I ended up at the GIMP tutorial. I use GIMP for most image manipulation (since I’m too cheap to fork out for Photoshop,) but most of its functions are a complete mystery to me. So while browsing through the list of tutorials I was titillated to see some of the topics there, like Changing Background Color, which I could have used a little while ago, and found what I needed in Contrast Mask. I knew this sort of stuff was possible from seeing Bert Monroy’s Photoshop tutorials on the late, great TechTV’s “The Screensavers.”

***Pictures Removed***

God, I’ve gotten fat.

Posted by Greg as Family & Friends, Posts About Me, Software at 16:49 PST

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No kidding, you say. I mean the icky, achy, coughing up buckets of phlegm-type sick.

I’d love to blame my illness on that Mexican restaurant I ate at earlier this week, but it’s kind of hard to attribute a chest cold to food poisoning. I missed two days of work and probably shouldn’t have come back in today, but with the baby around it’s almost more restful to be at work.

Web commented on my last post how similar my blog entry was to his about our meeting, and he’s right. I’m going to try to include a trackback to his post, but since it’s on Yahoo’s 360º, which is in beta and I don’t think has trackback capability; and since this is the first time I’ve tried using a trackback, I guess this is an experiment, which means I also have to put this post in the “My Website” category as well.

As I understand the trackback system, my trackback sends a “ping”, or a little notice, that I have written a post that he might be interested in, rather than putting in a comment on his website. This way, I retain editorial control of my comment. The ping is supposed to include a text excerpt and a link back to my blog post. So if the Yahoo 360º truly is incapable of trackbacks, I guess it means that my ping won’t get posted as a comment on his post. I don’t expect it to work – in order to comment on Y360 blogs you must be signed in to Y360, and it’s still invitation only. I guess we’ll see.

The other interesting thing about trackbacks is how they affect search engine rankings. The Register reported last October that trackbacks were messing up Google rankings. While this sounded like an appealing way to boost my own website visibility by setting links back to my site on other people’s sites, surely the expert spam commenters and other web marketeers figured this out a long time ago and tried using it to improve the visibility of whatever they were trying to sell. The Google system doesn’t seem to have collapsed yet, so I’m going to have to assume that their wizards figured out a way to filter out the influence from trackbacks, which means it won’t help me.

Ha- I guess I can see for myself what happens by also including a trackback to my own, unused Y360 site. I have it only so that I can comment on Y360.

Posted by Greg as My Website, Posts About Me at 11:35 PST

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So on to my evening with Web. We were both early at the appointed meeting spot, and I unexpectedly spotted him from a distance as he walked up, and he seemed to recognize (surprise!) me. I can’t remember whether he came to Andy’s funeral, and if he didn’t, it has been probably 22 years since I last saw him. I figure I’m supposed to be the hard one to recognize – in 1983, when I graduated high school, I was 6′ 4″, weighed about 145 pounds soaking wet, and had glasses and hair down to my shoulders. Now I’m 6′ 5″, weigh 270 pounds in the morning before eating or drinking and after a trip to the bathroom, cut my hair whenever it is long enough to, wear contacts, and sport a van dyke/goatee (authorities quibble about the definition) in a vain attempt to de-emphasize my non-existent primary chin and hide my all-too-plentiful second (and possibly third) chin(s.) I was surprised at spotting him, because at 6′ 5″ you don’t get much practice spotting people in public – they have a tendency of spotting you first. I guess I was saved by the fact that Web hasn’t changed much in appearance except for losing the Prince Valiant haircut he carried all through high school.

So we’re outside this English pub, which I had given him shit for suggesting, considering his Irish Republican blog rants, and I asked him if he liked microbreweries. He denied being a pub rat and responded favorably to my suggestion of going to the Mission Brewery that I had passed coming in. I knew the Strauss brewery/restaurant was nearby, but am not called upon often to entertain out-of-town guests, so I wasn’t sure where it was. So we go to the Mission Brewery that I saw, and it turned out to be a redeveloped office complex (the real Mission Brewery is apparently across the Bay in Coronado.) Giving up on that idea, we went to Old Town, where I knew there were some decent Mexican restaurants with generous drink servings. Of course, this was before the state re-leased every restaurant concession in Old Town State Park, and the new concessionaires, Delaware North, are a bunch of stumblebums who must have slipped a huge kickback to our former governor, Gray (insert critical epithet here) Davis, in order to boot the perfectly competent people who had been there for 32 years. Do I rant? The food was terrible, only ameliorated by the dismal service.

Luckily, we had some catching up to do, and being sufficiently fortified prior to the meeting, I was able to relax and enjoy the conversion. I only had to duck out to the patio for a smoke once. Pauline – don’t worry – your Web done good. I was presented with the obligatory cassette of filial photographs in a timely manner, and based on blog readings I was able to get pretty close to Web’s sons’ names – Cathan instead of Cathal, and Micheal instead of Matthew. Considering my luck with names, two triples in a row. I still think my suggestion for his most recent born was better – some obscure Irish name that had two dozen letters but only two syllables and actually sounded like a name – and Web expressed his interest and said it was reserved for the next son.

The banter was enjoyable, and somehow I was able to get through recounting the sorrier parts of my life without shame or fear of embarrassment. Maybe it has been the practice, but more likely it was the sense of comfort that comes from talking to an old friend who has heard the most ridiculous stuff you can ever say – that of a sixteen-year old – and continued to be your friend. One of the juicier parts was when Web revealed some old gossip of my own sister’s past antics. Apparently, she and Web’s sister, Margaret, had been friends after I had finished high school and left, and he was familiar with some of their mutual activities.

A slightly distressing part was when Web mentioned that he had read my technical posts and found them to be “way over his head.” I’ve tried to be expository, if not pedantic, with my technical posts, and Web is a smart cookie. If he’s not following it, I’m making some big mistakes.

Posted by Greg as Family & Friends, Posts About Me at 01:49 PST

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