… interested in professional blogging, optimization, promotion, SEO, and stuff like that, I have just resurrected my old “blog on blogging”. It’s now called Arte de Blogar (it lost the initial “A”) and it has moved to a new location, www.artedeblogar.net.
If you’re interested, and what to know what’s coming next for that blog, or why it had been “zombified” for months, start here.
We now return to our regularly scheduled programming. 
The top technorati ranks table for Planet Atheism members has been improved again. In addition to showing the Technorati rank, number of incoming links (from Technorati as well), and Google Pagerank, the table now shows Alexa ranks as well.
You can now also click on any of the above column titles to sort the table by that particular value/rank. Incoming links and Pagerank are “the more, the merrier”, while Technorati rank and Alexa rank are “the lower, the better”, so sorting takes that into account.
A note of warning: I’ve mentioned before that you shouldn’t really take any of these ranks too seriously, and this is especially true for the Alexa ranks. Alexa is a nice idea (it’s the only one that measures traffic instead of incoming links), but it has the following problems:
Incidentally, the application I’ve coded (and have been improving) to generate this table from a list of blogs is almost ready for public release.
As I mentioned here before, a couple of days ago I coded a program to take an OPML file and generate a table in which the sites listed on that file appear ordered by Technorati ranks. It also shows the number of incoming links (again, from Technorati), and each site’s PageRank.
(By the way: no, this is not ready for release yet. But it will be. Soon.)
Initially, the data collecting part of my program started by clearing a table in a MySQL database, which would then be filled with the values it would get from Technorati and Google. However, this had two problems:
To solve the first problem, obviously, some form of keeping the data from the previous run while getting the new values was in order, so that, if Technorati told me to get stuffed, I would still have the data from the day before.
The second problem was a little more complicated, though, in a way, the solution to the first helped me crack it.
My method was this: when running the script, start by copying the original table to another (let’s call it temp1) and clearing the original table. Then get the new data to yet another table (temp2). Afterwards, regenerate the original table with data from temp1 and temp2, the following way:
This way, if once in a while Technorati gives it a much worse value than it should (I’ve never seen it rate a blog better than the reality), it still has a more correct value to use instead.
Sounds fine, doesn’t it? But there’s a problem with this method… which I solved later, but which I’ll discuss the next post. Until then… any guesses as to what it was?
As of now, I’m looking for a job in the area of Lisbon, Portugal. Sorry to any non-Portuguese readers / potential employers, but I am not ready to move abroad at this time of my life.
My ideal job, at the moment, would be a senior sysadmin / junior PHP programmer “hybrid”, but I’m open to alternatives.
As I’ve said here before: no outsourcing, no MS stuff, no helpdesk. I don’t see this as “arrogance” on my part, but simply as not wanting to waste both sides’ time.
For more details (in Portuguese), and the full CV, please visit www.pedrotimoteo.com/cv . Thank you.
Inspired by Carlos Andrade’s own tool, I’ve just coded a couple of scripts to take an OPML file and show an ordered table of Technorati ranks. Naturally, I used it for my own Planet site, Planet Atheism.
Here it is: Technorati Ranks for Planet Atheism members
The implementation was ridiculously simple (and there’s a lot of room for improvement), but, other than Carlos’ tool, I didn’t find any scripts or utilities to do this. And, yes, I searched. Therefore I may release the code soon, as the 2nd project on software.dehumanizer.com, since this can be a fun “toy”.
[EDIT: added each blog's Google PageRank to the table. Why not? ]
Since I’m in an upgrading mood , I’ve just upgraded my Slicehost slice from Ubuntu Edgy (6.10) to Feisty (7.04).
It was incredibly hard: I had to type in two whole commands! Namely,
apt-get install update-manager-core
do-release-upgrade
Gee, this Linux thing is much too complicated and troublesome for us mere mortals. 
WordPress 2.2 is out, and all my blogs are already running it.
Since most of my blogs are using a customized version of K2, I also had to disable the new WP widgets so that the current version of K2 works. Hopefully, future versions of K2 won’t need this.
EDIT: more about the new features of WP 2.2.
A little offtopic for this blog, but what the hell.
I’m not American, so I won’t be voting, of course, but nothing prevents me from taking the test anyway. So here are my results:
1. Theoretical Ideal Candidate (100%)
2. Dennis Kucinich (78%)
3. Barack Obama (75%)
4. Al Gore (71%)
5. Wesley Clark (69%)
6. Joseph Biden (68%)
7. Hillary Clinton (67%)
8. Christopher Dodd (65%)
9. John Edwards (62%)
10. Kent McManigal (61%)
11. Ron Paul (59%)
12. Bill Richardson (59%)
13. Mike Gravel (53%)
14. John McCain (46%)
15. Rudolph Giuliani (46%)
16. Chuck Hagel (35%)
17. Mitt Romney (35%)
18. Newt Gingrich (32%)
19. Elaine Brown (30%)
20. Tommy Thompson (26%)
21. Fred Thompson (24%)
22. Sam Brownback (22%)
23. Mike Huckabee (22%)
24. Tom Tancredo (19%)
25. Jim Gilmore (14%)
26. Duncan Hunter (12%)
Source: 2008 Presidential Candidate Selector.
For anyone considering a new phone, this page will probably be very useful. It compares all released Series 60 phones (most of which are from Nokia), and shows them in chronological order.
It’s also very current (updated 2 days ago).
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