I’ve changed a couple
of things about this weblog.

First, in the referrer
listings I keep with each post, I am now filtering out search engine referrers.
They were not only filling up the lists, but there were an interesting problem
with it. I had one post a while back where someone searched for “google
toolbar”, and went through enough pages in google to get to my site. Now, the
posted article had nothing to do with the google toolbar, but happened to have
both words in it. When this first visitor came in, I logged his referrer, and
displayed on that page “Google search results: google toolbar” or something like
that. Well, of course this was indexed, which sent more traffic to that post
from people searching for that phrase, which logged those
referrers…and pretty soon it had wormed its way to the top 2 or 3 hits in
google for that particular search. Not really a good thing, since my post had
nothing to do with what those people were probably looking
for.

I may add search
referrers back later (I’m still logging them, just not displaying them) but in a
different way…I’d show the search terms, and aggregate together all the
queries for those terms into a single line.  So no matter how many hits we
got for “britney spears”, it would only show up once.  This code isn’t
there yet, so for now, they’re suppressed. Sorry!

Second, both RSS feeds
on this site now support ETags, which should reduce bandwidth a lot. So, if you
notice anything strange in your aggregator, or you miss a post (how would you
know? hmm) let me know. This site is the test bed, before the code goes to
newsgator.com. :-)