This is weird – was looking at some of the reports in the Webmaster Tools I use from Google – and there were a lot (several hundred) Web crawl 404 not founds. Google reports that its spider was failing to find pages that I’ve never published – and which contain values that are incrementing over a range as parameter inputs in the url – 692-708 in the snapshot below.
UPDATE 2011-10-10: While I think ORCS is a good company - I'm not sure of the value of their shared hosting plan anymore. I've since moved to *nix for development and hosting, and am now happily ensconced on a Linux VPS hosted at Rackspace.
Trying to find a good ASP.NET web hosting company that represents the balance I need between cost and features turned out to be harder than I thought.
Alex Gorbatchev has done a great job with version 2.0 of his excellent JavaScript SyntaxHighlighter. And I’ve just updated my code snippet plugin for Windows Live Writer – with SyntaxHighlighter 2.0 support, as well as a new desktop application – useful for pasting code snippets into other apps.. like stackoverflow.com (CTRL-A to select all – and then >> to indent four spaces before pasting into stackoverflow).
I decided to create an aggregate sitemap.xml for the root of my domain. There are sitemap handlers in the blog, otherblog and photo subdirectories already – but I wanted a single sitemap.xml in the root that I could submit to Google.
I figured it was about time I blogged about this book (following on from Hans Rosling’s superb TED lecture - below).
A few years ago a friend recommend a book by Erich Fromm called ‘The Heart of Man’. I had trouble finding the title at the time however, in the process discovered what I believe is considered to be one of Fromm’s most famous works - ‘The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness’ – published nine years after ‘The Heart of Man’ and incorporating many of his earlier published ideas concerning human behavior and culture.
The book is written in an uncomplicated highly educational and engaging narrative that just about anyone can read. Fromm’s analysis of the instinctivism of Konrad Lorenz, to the behaviorist B.F. Skinner was eye opening.
For me the most valuable lesson in the book was his description of the primary drivers in human nature; co-operation and conflict avoidance, the desire to achieve and the desire to share. As some of the reviewers on Amazon and elsewhere have also said – this is probably the most important book I’ve ever read.
Read it – and you’ll see why.
This is probably more ‘tweet’ worthy than blog worthy – but what the heck. You see that little printer to the left? That’s an HP 930c DeskJet inkjet printer – and I’ve been using it now for eight years. :-) You can buy one used on Amazon (and no doubt from eBay) for about 10.00 USD. I love the blurb for this printer. “ This remarkably fast little printer enables you to produce letters, memos, and reports, plus photo-quality prints. Handling up to 100 pages of input and 50 pages of output, the HP DeskJet 930C color printer is a practical companion for your desktop or laptop computer.” Talk about a lesson in positive branding. I’ve been recommending HP printers to friends and co-workers for at least as long. I suppose having good quality HP printers in the office over the years has helped as well. On the other side – after a traumatic experience with Epson printers years ago, I’ve never forgiven Epson (and always thought their software was a bit wonky). Totally illogical and non-analytic I know – but that’s what branding is about I guess.
“Culture – Culture is the most important thing I would say because that is what brings joy to life. That’s the value of living…”
Hans Rosling: New insights on poverty and life around the world
Well at least I can’t be accused of lazy journalism. I went back to Luang Prabang on the 5th of March – and took with me many of the pictures I’d taken there on my previous trip. I was able to find most of the people in the pictures and give them prints, including the kids at the school, most of the apprentice monks and other people that I’d photographed there.
Update: 30th March More evidence that my previous hosting co., was in technical meltdown. Look at the Google bot stats below… and see if you can spot when Google and my old hosting co., hit an all time low – and how fast the new hosting company is now serving up pages (click for a larger version).
Is it just me – or is there something slightly odd about advertising export quality on a food product sold locally (like there should be any difference between domestic and export quality in the first place)?
