Despite having done almost zilch at the ODP for the past 6 months, I've received two nominations in the Spring 2004 mozzie awards. The two categories are "Editor I Most Want to Meet in Person" and "Most Congenial Editor".
I'll almost certainly not win either award but it's nice to be appreciated.
Via Google Weblog comes some screenshots of Google's new look. It does look good, and certainly makes the search engine look more modern than it does as present. It also takes the minimalism that partially made Google popular in the first place a step further.
One notable exception, however, is the Google Directory. If you look at the screenshots, there are no direct links to it, nor any categories shown in the search results, although I imagine the 'More >>' links would lead to it should you click on them. You probably know by now that the Google Directory uses data from the ODP, so as an ODP editor (albeit a somewhat less active one) you might think I have an opinion about that. And that I do.
As an ODP editor, you sometimes come across some real gems of sites, like this one. Would you stay at a hotel that can't spell the word 'accommodation'?
Through BlogPopuli I found a couple of blogs, both of which had suspiciously similar content about pensions and financial planning. More suspiciously, a lot of the links on the blogs pointed to the same site, which was showing as 'visited'. Indeed, I had visited the site in question - they'd submitted multiple mirrors of that site (a company offering financial management) to the ODP and I'd been clearing submissions from some of the categories that they had spammed. Compare and contrast the following (which aren't linked directkly to avoid referals, spammers don't like their tactics being publicised):
Of course, this isn't a new practice, but in the past it's either been unethical porn sites or... well... unethical porn sites that have been doing it (the latter has also been guilty of referer spamming too).
In any case, a quick check at the ODP revealed that at least one of those blogs had been submitted to us, but hadn't yet been reviewed. I can guarantee now that they won't get very far with them, but it's a worry
Over at the ODP, we're sometimes accused by our critics of letting our directory go 'stale' for a number of reasons. I won't dwell on those (I've written enough lengthy posts today) but one argument against it is that we are often pretty quick at getting categories up to reflect world trends. We had a September 11th category, with a whole pile of links and news stories, up on September 12th, for example. And we've had a Flash mobs category since mid-August - there's now even a German-langauge version of it too. I don't believe that we have a Flash-blogging category but then it seems to have come and gone, unless I'm mistaken.
Today is my fourth anniversary of joining the ODP, and, despite my predictions, I managed to hit 25 000 edits today too :-D. So I'm rather happy at the moment :).
Part of the 'explosion' of edits has been related to a co-ordinated attack on people who hijack domains - registerings domains that were previously registered but have since expired and become available, and then putting alternative content on them - Ultimate Search being one of the more prolific of these companies. It's a particular problem for us because our data is available for free to download - you can buy Perl scripts for finding ODP-listed domains that have expired - and because Google uses our data too. New tools have appeared lately and as such we have been able to zap several thousand expired domains into obilivion - I've been one of the editors playing a large role in tackling the problem. Obviously I can't tell you how we do it because we don't want the hijackers to find out and then make it harder for us to catch them, but I can say that they should be under control now.
In other ODP news, besides the six nominations I already blogged about, two of the categories I edit in have nominations: York was nominated for "Best Category (500 to 5000 sites)" and the editors in United Kingdom as a whole have been nominated again for "Best Editing Team" - we were runners-up last year.
Over at the ODP, we're starting this year's Mozzie Awards - normally they're bi-annual but technical problems have put a stop to that. Nominations have been open since Friday, and I already have 6 (count 'em, 6) nominations. :)
Currently, I'm up for
Whether the last one is an award or an insult remains to be seen, but I'm up against some good competition. Still, it's the most nominations I've ever had, and there's still 2 weeks until nominations close :).
I apologise for the fact that I'm blogging for the sake of sticking to my 'at least one entry per day' rule here, but I haven't found anything else that's interesting enough to post.
I've had a mostly quiet day - slept in until about 8:30am after an uninterrupted night's sleep. Spent lunchtime emailing a certain SEO to tell them to stop them from submitting mirror domains to the ODP repeatedly and then cleaning up their mess. The same company, which I will not name, also does web design, yet their pages do not work properly in Mozilla and the markup has some bizarre tag attributes that I've never seen before (47 errors when put through the validator). The site is also totally inaccessable as the main navigation system is done entirely in JavaScript - only the email links use standard anchor tags. I wouldn't touch them with a barge pole personally, but it seems several other unfortunate souls have.
That's my rant over and done with. No real plans for this afternoon but I do have a final coursework essay in for Friday that hasn't been done yet, so I might do that.
Man, I'm exhausted. Six trains in one day is a lot :).
The meetup went well - I got to chat again to some of the editors I saw last year, and also got to meet some new faces who I'd previously only known by their user names. It's always fun when you first meet people and meetings like this trying to work out who people are :).
There are a couple of photos: 1 and 2 - regular readers will probably recognise me.
Plan for this evening are to catch up on a day's surfing, possibly play Worms, and then sleep. Not very interesting but I don't feel capable of doing anything else.
I'm going to Cambridge for the day to meet some people from the ODP, like I did last year in Birmingham. It should be fun, but I only have just over half an hour to get ready :-o.
A couple of links for the morning: not only can you rent Chris Pirillo's chest, you can rent his mind, too. Payment via PayPal.
And Jake has linked to a SearchEngineWatch article telling you how to do well on Google. I don't necessarily agree all with it (not mentioning your company name in the title tag is silly in my opinion, as it defeats the point of having that tag in the first place), but there are some good tips, so it's well worth a read.
And now if I don't get a shower, I'm sooo going to miss my train. Toodles.
The ODP is largely down this weekend for long-overdue server upgrades (we're moving to Linux baby!) so I've found something else to pour my creative juices into in the meantime.
As you may have gathered from my blurb, I also write for the ODP Weblog, a community blog run by ODP editors. The thing is, the design is rather tired. It's loosely based on the existing ODP design, and coded in HTML 3.02, which leads to a rather dull design built on somewhat scruffy code.
So I redesigned it. It's now up to valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional, and all formatting is controlled by CSS. In fact the stylesheet is derived from the one I used for this site, since it works alright.
I haven't got through to Ciaran yet to see if he can incorporate this new design into his blogging software, but I imagine he'll find out sooner or later.
By the way, thanks for the positive comments/emails/ICQ IMs about the previous entry, I really appreciate it.
The blogroll may look slightly different today, as Richy C is now listed in 'Other' rather than 'ODP' - he is no longer an editor with the project, unfortunately. We'll miss you, Richy.
Happy St. Patricks Day!
The general lack of entries over the past couple of days is testiment to the fact that I've not really done much, other than editing at the ODP. I found several pages of site listings on another site that I've been slowly working through - about half were already listed but many weren't. It's also the first big editing stint that I've done for a while, as evidenced by the fact that North Yorkshire had been teetering around the 2220 site mark since December. It's now beyond 2260, and is about to overtake Somerset, which stole the lead a few weeks ago.
I'd like to unveil a new group weblog that I'm involved in: The ODP Weblog. Amazingly enough, it's a weblog about the ODP, aimed at the general public. All editors (in theory) have access to it, although there are only a handful of us actually involved in updating it. It's very much like Google Weblog, except about the ODP, and is actually published by editors (though it isn't officially related to Netscape, our parent company).
While it would be unwise to expect regular updates, there may be a few interesting things cropping up there. It's created using Ciaran's homegrown blogging system, but it supports trackbacking, so you can indirectly comment on articles (public commenting was not added because usually anything to do with the ODP attracts trolls).
Of course, if there are articles you think should be posted there, feel free to get in touch with me via my feedback link on the weblog index page.
You've seen the Blogger Code, the Geek Code, and all of the other codes, but how about the ODP code? Yep, we have one now, and here's mine:
<ODP ver="1.0" code=" E++ F++++ D+++ X* N++ G Q++ Lo A+ H+ W- O+ B T+++ I---">
I'll let you decide what it means until someone writes a decoder. And yes, I imagine it is XML-compatible.
Oh yeah, and I've updated my Blogger Code too, since I've been blogging for more than a year now.
Rich Skrenta, the somewhat elusive co-founder of the ODP (elusive because he rarely, if ever posts on the internal forum), is holding a public talk on the ODP's early history as part of the Internet Developer Group. It could be quite interesting.
Unfortunately, the meeting is at Netscape headquarters in Mountain View, California, and it's tomorrow, so there's no way I'm going to be able to get there, unless somehow I get the money for a transatlantic air ticket and an American visa in the next 12 hours or so.
I've just received another ODP promotion! You may remember I was promoted to 'Editall' last April (which was completely unexpected). Well, today I now have 'catmv' priviledges!
This means I can move categories around, and rename existing categories, without asking for someone else to do them. I guess that the powers that be noticed that I was making a lot of requests, so they gave me this permission to keep me quiet ;).
Oooh... I'm so happy!!!
Since it's been about 6 months since the last Mozzie Awards, where I won an award, the next round has started. And I'm already nominated for the 'Best Editall Award' :).
Yay! The ODP is back up again! And I'm off to bed, see you tomorrow...
The greens are falling... gradually. As for the awards, I'm actually leading Best Editall and Most Persistent Forum poster by 2 votes, way behind in Most Ubiquitus Editor (fortunately) and standing somewhere in the middle in Best Regional editor.
Ah well, there's still 2 weeks to go. Maybe I'll actually lose :)
By the way, that image at the top is a photo of my laptop, which, fingers crossed, will arrive tomorrow. And on the right is the USB->Ethernet adaptor I got yesterday - you can read more about it by clicking on the image. It's quite small actually, which is good considering it is for a laptop...
Darn my new editall priviledges. There's so much more to do - sorting out greenbusts, clearing errors, posting URL notes... it's been taking up most of my free time. But it's certainly fun, and I've been getting lots of positive feedback from other editors.
I've got some big news for you...
I've been made an editall!
I'm not joking when I say that it has come completely out of the blue - I absolutely never expected it to happen so soon and nearly had a heart attack when I found my dashboard had been enhanced with the new features. Boy I'm going to have fun this afternoon :).
Good morning! Sorry for the lack of updates yesterday, I was rather busy, and here's why.
Staff at the ODP have created a new permission - greenbuster (the page is public). Although there is already a greenbuster project running, this new permission integrates with the directory more fully - previously sites were sent across in batches to a non-public part of the directory where they were reviewed and then sent back. Now, in effect, it is just like editing in that category, except that you can only modify unreviewed sites, and any additions you make have to be checked by someone who can edit there.
Is it a good thing? Yes and no. It's good for the more experienced editors (like me) who can now choose areas of activity and can do chainsaw operations to get rid of spam and junk, but for the less experienced editors, it's not such a Good Thing?. At present, with the old system, it is monitored by the editalls, the catmvs and the metas, who all have a lot of experience and are able to give hints and tips. Now, any editor who can work in that category can approve edits, even if they aren't very good. Similarly, deleting sites require no approval whatsoever, which is good for clearing the backlog, but may lead to some good sites being deleted accidently.
Why am I saying this? Because I'm now a greenbuster! But it gets better. I emailed the staff editor rdkeating25, hoping that I might get England.... and got United Kingdom! He even offered a small compliment of my editing! So yesterday was spent sifting through unreviewed sites, removing inappropriate ones and adding a few appropriate listings and altering erroneous listings that Robozilla flagged up on Thursday. The permission is still in beta testing (and there are a number of bugs) but I guess these will be ironed out over time. It's a great idea though.
Today, I'm doing something, but I can't tell you what since I'm surprising someone, and while I doubt they're reading this, it's best to make sure. See you later!
Woo! I've finally finished my second lot of blankbusters - vladd is in the process of moving them back into the public view as I speak. I kind of lost the desire to deal with them earlier on, though having spent the day red-busting and finding sites for Filey, it seemed like an equally mundane thing to do. Actually, the 'Filey-finiding' mission happened by accident - I was going through the categories with TulipChain, weeding out any URLs missing their trailing slashes, when I came across a site that had a directory of links for Filey, which I promptly mined. That happens quite a lot actually.
Oh well, I'll be hitting the stack soon, just as soon as my blanks are gone. See you tomorrow.
Argh! It's the return of Robozilla! Yup, I've now got 50 errors to sift through and sort out. It's a little mind-numbing, but armed with AnalogX WhoIs Ultra, Web Archive and Google's cache I should be able to get somewhere. And it's for the good of the directory - of all of the directories, the ODP has one of the lowest link rot levels. And it's all thanks to Robozilla :).
Yikes... I've made over 250 edits at the ODP today. Part of it was down to a minor reorganisation of Yorkshire Dales - until today it had its own editor, though he was removed - although I do know the reasons why, it is confidential so I can't say. To put into context how many edits that is, I've made nearly 5500 in total at the ODP, so over 4.5% of all the edits I've ever made there were made today. Ouch.
Although Yorkshire Dales should be a-okay for the time being, I still have 65 blankbusts to do, plus a few greens in England/B&E to tackle. Having said that, I'm having an earlyish night since I'm going to be on a 3-day French course starting tomorrow. And I'm not looking forward to it...
Yay, I'm speedy. I've just found out that this has been listed under Personal Weblogs: N for almost two weeks now. Well, at least it's nice to know that that category is being looked after reasonably well.
I really should visit the SETI@Home site more often - there's a whole wealth of information on there. What amazes me is that collectively users have sacrificed nearly a million years of CPU time to the project, and the collective computing power produced - over 27 Teraflops (trillion floating point operations), which is far higher than any supercomputer. All I can say is that I'm glad to be part of the club, even if I only rank 1576865th. Still, with SETI now working much faster on here, I should rise in the ranks pretty soon. I'm already over a quarter of the way through unit 7, and I reckon I could be on unit 8 by Monday or Tuesday.
By the way, the Vorbis petition now has 834 signatures.
Good morning! I've made another request to be a category editor - this time for York College. Hopefully being a student there may help my cause :). Talking of the ODP, it seemed relatively quick this morning, with not one timeout. That either means that the problem has been fixed, or all of the yanks haven't woken up yet so the server is under less stress. Either way, I just wish it was like this all the time.
I've spent the morning worrying about exam results - the results of my retakes in January are out today so I'll collect them when I get it. To be honest, I'm not incredibly confident about doing well, but I'm still hopeful. And in any case, the best result stands, so if I've done worse this time around, then I won't be at a total loss. I'm mostly worried about my maths results, which is annoying since I need high maths results for university.
I spent last night writing a new CLI Codec for dBpowerAMP - in a few days you'll be able to encode MPEGPlus files too. I've sent the file to Spoon, and he has replied to say that he received it, but it isn't available to download as yet. But I'm sure it will be soon.
Today is CptSiskoX's birthday - 23 years young. Happy birthday, Anthony!
Ah...blue sky, the sun is shining. Not a cloud in the sky. And it's 7ºC outside. Brrrrrrrr - I'm staying indoors.
The ODP is still being "impotent", as one editor put it, and "needs its injection of Viagra". I think staff are blaming the hampsters which drive our servers - maybe they forgot to feed them, or they have gone on strike again. I hate it when that happens.
I'm now the England B&E editor, so I've got a little bit of work to do here and there now. X-Setup 6.2 Beta 1 also got released - it looks good, bar the occasional bug, and should be going into public beta very soon. Chris also likes it :)
Here's something I've found recently - Bishop calls for end to 'state ties' - this is want I've wanted someone to say. If only the idea would catch on...
The ODP has gone insane today - first it has slowed to practically a halt, and now I'm getting all manner of ghosts in a category that I am working on. Arrgh!
In fact, the ODP staff have even posted "Don't adjust your monitor - we are experiencing some technical difficulties - please be patient while we fix the problem - Thanks" on our editor dashboards. But don't worry, it's not affecting the public side, thankfully.
Spoon has released an update to Sveta Portable Audio, though Yepp support hasn't been included just yet - he did post a copy of his to-do list which contains quite a bit of my correspondance with him on it, so obviously I'm being helpful... or annoying.
I've spent a bit of time this morning working on Affiliations - I might as well claim who I'm working with so other editors don't accuse me of bias. In fact, with the exception of the Sash! entry none of them are on my categories. I will add more once they're listed in the directory - if I list them then they have less chance of being listed elsewhere in a more important category. Specifically, I'll be adding George's and CptSiskoX's sites.
Lockergnome, incidentally, exists in 10 categories, and is the highest ranking site in Windows 98 FAQs, Help and Tutorials - putting it ahead of the MS Knowledge Base. Nice.
Today's the day my HE1 Higher Education Funding form goes in, and fortunately Computing is cancelled again so I have a longer lunch break. But having said that, I have a lot of Maths homework for tomorrow and preparation for a mock French oral to do, so it's hardly a day off. Then at the weekend I've got a minor Computing project to complete (in place of lessons) and to start my French coursework, which will include analysing Lionel Jopsin's canditure speech for the French Presidential Elections in April. Wish me luck.
And another person who needs luck is Ciaran Hamilton - he's got his Driving Theory Test today. Let's hope he passes...
Millennium Projects seems to be growing by the day - Julian suggested a number of extra links, and I've added a few extra myself, taking the total number of sites in the category up to 39. Ouch. I did finally find the web site for York's Millennium Bridge, not bad in terms of content, but the design is a little depressing. The photos are good though.
Today is the day of my french mock exam - 2½ hours long. Another ouch. Especially as my lunch hour is cut short by half an hour as a result. And I have a DME for Geography to hand in tomorrow. It's going to be a long night...
Just me signing off for the night - you can see my work on Millennium Projects if you like. Managed 21 links, with the help of some of the other UK eds.
Yay! I'm now editor of Yorkshire and the Humber! Trouble is, there were over 50 sites to review when I started, with two Robozilla errors. Looks like I have a lot of work to do this weekend.
We had a meeting about the Paris trip today - I'll be sharing a room with two people from Lower Sixth that are in my Computing class, so it should be good. Only 6 days to go!
Tomorrow I'll be getting my hair cut - I'm starting to look rather 70's-like, so it needs trimming. I'll probably go for the usual short back and sides (#2 in case you're interested). Unfortunately this weekend will be a mainly homework-ish weekend - I've ended up with a load of homework and while most people have got the whole week to do it I only have until Wednesday, due to this French trip. But hopefully I won't have too much to do over my (shortened) half term holiday. It's just a pity that I miss Pancake Day...
I lost patience and went to clear out all of the unrevieweds in North Yorkshire, including those in categories where editors are listed. So now there are 1512 sites and nothing waiting :). Talking of the ODP - February is green-bashing month in the Bands and Artists branch of the ODP, with the aim of cutting the number of unreviewed sites to something more manageable. The target is over 200 per day, and I'd say it was probably acheiveable. Though admittedly my categories are clean, so unless I apply elsewhere I'm not going to be much help.
Since most of my French lessons were cancelled this week due to subject reviews, I have a little extra time off this morning, though unfortunately I have to forfeit coming home for lunch since I have to attend a meeting about the trip to Paris. Only 6 days now!!!
I made some very good timing this morning - I managed to catch SETI clicking over to its next work unit. My fourth took 206 hours to complete, making a total of 723 hours for four units. Not impressive, but then again I probably do exert more strain on this computer than I should - although it meets Windows XP's minimum requirements most magazines seem to suggest it is underpowered.
Anyway, I'd better do some Maths homework. Toodles!
It seems that the 'A' bug has disappeared from the ODP. A good thing too - it now means North Yorkshire has 3 unreviewed (out of over 1500 sites - I passed that mark a few days ago :)). But that wasn't before the 'D' bug appeared too...
I'm really starting to like Trillian - being able to talk to ICQ and MSN users similtaneously without hogging incredible amounts of memory is great! Its memory usage isn't much greater than Microsoft's MSN client, and you also get other services thrown in. Why didn't I think of this before?!?!?
Oh well, I'm off to watch the new series of DIY SOS on BBC1. See you tomorrow!
Oh no! It's the attack of the 'a' bug! Along with the 'n' bug and its various companions, it brings havoc to anyone editing at the ODP by slowing down the loading of pages whenever a site starting with 'A' is reached. Another bug that happened yesterday was that the editor forum had -559858 new messages. Go figure.
Looks like there's another darn worm about. If you receive an email from a friend about photos from a party, play cautiously, particularly if it mentions Yahoo!. See this page from Sophos for more information. If you used an NT-based OS (NT 4.0, 2000 or XP) then you may end up with a trojan, posing as a file called msstask.exe.
Not much else to report today, though since I'm going to be here, there and everywhere tomorrow I'll be mostly doing homework today.
