Spontaneous Monotony

I just remembered the one plugin I hadn’t restored after the problems I had the other week: dofollow. Basically, the nofollow attribute does nothing to fight comment spam, and all it accomplishes is a poor attempt to fix Google’s broken PageRank algorithm for them, which is not something I intend to do since I am not being paid by Google. The ‘nofollow’ (which, by default is added by Wordpress without the site owner’s permission) attribute on links in comments and pings now times out after 3 days – since unless I’m simulatenously struck by lightning and hit by a meteor, a spam comment is never going to be publicly viewable for longer than that.

So, our transport system is in disarray yet we are now going to be paying for a new underground in Warsaw, some areas are so short of water that they now have ‘pressured’ status and charge home users by their use, yet we are now going to be paying for new sewers in Budapest. I challenge anyone to write an accurate description of Tony Blair without using the words poodle, liar and weasel. It would seem fair to suggest that Britain would only give up its rebate if France gives up its own rebate known as the CAP. The response is better left to Mark in Mexico to describe

Chirac, knowing that enraged French farmers, 131,000 of whom receive some 20,000 euros annually in subsidies, would have his head on a pike if he were to agree, disagrees. In fact, Chirac says France will not consider any reduction whatsoever in its farm subsidies in spite of the fact that Britain has offered to forego 1.1 billion euros, or more than a third of its rebate. The EU, in keeping with its forward looking while marching backwards strategy, spends 40% of its total budget on farm subsidies which benefit 5% of its population. Imagine that; 40% of the budget to 5% of the population.

Up until recently, Alexa was little more than Amazon’s (fairly unsuccessful) attempt at a search engine. However, they recently launched ‘Alexa Web Search’ (separate from the search engine, – which gives users access to the vast amount of data cached from Alexa’s web crawl. So far, no great difference between that and the cached versions of pages offered by Google, MSN etc. other than the fact that access is being offered directly via an API, rather than through a search box. The difference being that, instead of offering this access for free, Alexa charges by the hour. This stretches the ‘noncommercial’ license a bit too far – and since it’s obviously impractical for Alexa to review and comply with the intracacies of the license of every site they spider, I’ve decided to simply block Alexa’s bot from this site altogether (using the robots.txt standard). It probably won’t affect anyone seeing as I’ve had precisely five hits from Alexa so far this month (compared to 2415 for googlebot, 1256 for inktomi slurp [yahoo], and so on) but if you’re reading this then it won’t affect you anyway since you already know where the site is.

He might be 34, but Roy Keane is still an absolutely fantastic player. Sure, there’s all this stuff about him ‘unsettling’ the dressing room, but I would rather have a committed, honest player like him than someone who is two faced. I can’t think of any of the ‘controversial’ things that he has said that aren’t actually true, and to have a player of his calibre at Celtic is a real coup.

EDIT: At the news conference Peter Lawell said he’s ‘fitting within the current wage structure’ – ie he’s getting £22,000 a week or less (Desmond is putting nothing towards it, that was explicitly said). That really shows his level of commitment to the club, since it represents something like a 65 – 75% pay cut. Incidentally, his first game will be Clyde at Broadwood, maybe slightly less luxurious than he’s used to

See Also

• BBC Sport – Keane completes switch to Celtic
• Eric Setiawan – Thank You, Roy

Thanks to a tweak plugin (which I regrettably can’t link to because the author’s website seems to be down right now) SK2 no longer causes teeth-gnashing in Wordpress 2.0, and after getting acquainted with phpmyadmin’s table creation system (yes, I had deleted the SK2 database tables) it is back up and running. It is just a lot more accurate (and importantly, configurable) than Akismet (although I still have the plugin to make SK2 use Akismet as one of its ‘filters’), so let’s move on.