View source for Toolswiki Blog 2007-10

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==14 October 2007==
'''Stop looking at the statistics...'''

I just looked at the statistics concerning this site. Other than myself, there was one visitor yesterday, and two the day before. It's too depressing. I should avoid looking at the statistics and just keep concentrating on developing content. All the same...

'''English Google and French Google'''

It occured to me recently that this site is probably only listed on French Google, not on the English Google. When we were in the States last summer, I discovered that the home page of the [http://conviviality.ouvaton.org Convivial Tools Encyclopedia] site was unlisted there, whereas it had been listed in France.

When I try to connect to http://google.com I get automatically redirected to http:google.fr. Is there some way I can prevent the redirect?

'''[[ReFactoring]] the [http://conviviality.ouvaton.org Convivial Tools Encyclopedia]'''

Today I [[ReFactoring|refactored]] the [http://conviviality.ouvaton.org Convivial Tools Encyclopedia] website. It needed simplifying. I'm also going to rewrite the Home Page to profit from the lessons I've learned about Google. The new Home Page of the [http://conviviality.ouvaton.org Convivial Tools Encyclopedia] will be a long summary of what is on the site, with links to every article. That way at least the Home Page should pop up regularly when people are searching Google, and thus get visited from time to time.

==13 October 2007==
'''RainDog finally understands the basic principle of a blog'''

All of this worry about getting pages into the Google listings has finally lead me to understand the basic principle of a blog: A BLOG PAGE ALWAYS HAS THE SAME INTERNET ADDRESS.

Once the blog page gets into the Google listings, people who click on the link will always go to the same page, and will thus see the new content added to the top of the page. Whereas if you create a new page, there is little chance that it will get listed on Google, which means no one will ever see it.

I am therefore creating a main blog page which will always have the same internet address, at: [[User:RainDog/Blog|RainDog's Blog]]. The remaining listings for October will be posted there.

==12 October 2007==
'''Our [[Main Page]] is finally on Google'''

The [[Main Page]] of the toolswiki site is finally on Google. This is probably only because I myself have been connecting to it so much. Or is it because I added at the bottom of the [[Main Page]] all those summaries from RainDog's Blog?

At any rate, mission accomplished. A few other pages had been showing up, but now at least the Main Page is on Google. '''For how long?''' See [[Google Log]].

The other big news is that the page of Wikipedia user [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Redeyed_Treefrog Redeyed Treefrog] also shows up on Google!

'''And so is the "History of Wikis" article!'''

This evening I launched again the Google search chain that should find the [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_wikis History of Wikis] article and no other: "WikiWikiWeb snowballed." Bingo. This article is already listed on Google, and I only posted it yesterday!

'''But my "WhyClublet" article got booted off Wikipedia'''

But my [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WhyClublet WhyClublet] article got deleted by a Wikipedia administrator called [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Marasmusine Marasmusine], for failing to meet [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:WEB notability guidelines for web content]. I had also created a page called [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Drake Richard Drake], which I redirected to WhyClublet (the redirect was left in place). I pointed out that WhyClublet founder Richard Drake was one of the original WikiReductionists, who were historically the first group anywhere to deliberately delete articles from a wiki (from WikiWikiWeb in this case). The article about the first person to delete articles from a wiki was deleted from a wiki (from Wikipedia in this case).

==11 October 2007==
'''The [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_wikis History of wikis] is hot off the press!'''

Today I posted my big [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_wikis History of wikis] article on Wikipedia. I then spent a lot of time editing the wrinkles out.

This evening I [http://www.google.fr/search?hl=fr&q=%22history+of+wikis%22&btnG=Recherche+Google&meta= Googled "History of wikis"] just to see, knowing from experience that it will take a while before the new article is crawled. The first result, all the way up at the top of the list, was the [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiki Wikipedia article on wikis]. The search had found a tag in the "history" section of this article, saying "Main article: History of wikis." Hey, I just added that "Main article" tag today! So the Wikipedia article on "wikis" was crawled today ''after'' I added the tag. Coincidence? Or are certain Wikipedia articles crawled every day?

Then I looked for a search chain that would be only in ''my article'', and no other. I tried the chain "WikiWikiWeb snowballed" and that worked. The result was:

::Your search - "WikiWikiWeb snowballed" - did not match any documents. 

The countdown begins to see how many days before the article appears on Google...

'''Google speaks "Elmer Fudd"'''

In writing the above paragraphs, I wanted to capture the sentence "Your search ... did not match any documents" in English, whereas my Google speaks French. So I went to the [http://www.google.fr/preferences?hl=en Google settings page] to change the language, and discovered that the list of available languages includes "Elmer Fudd." I set it to that, and got things like:

::Tip: Twy wemoving quotes fwom youw seawch to get mowe wesults.

The void search result shown above became:

::Youw seawch - "WikiWikiWeb snowballed" - did not match any documents. Oh, dat scwewy wabbit!

They're a load of laughs, they are, those Google guys.

(I then wanted to be able refer to this story easily, so I put it on its own page: [[Scwewy Wabbit]].)

==10 October 2007==
'''My MediaWiki is too slow'''

Perhaps one reason there are so few visitors to this site is that it is too slow. It strains my own patience when I click on a link and have to wait forever before the next page comes into view.

What can I do about this? Replace MediaWiki by something faster? My sites using WakkaWiki and SPIP feel significantly more rapid. Move to a service provider with more powerful computers? Tweak my MediaWiki installation to give it more pep?

I tried Googling this problem, and got good results with these search words: "Mediawiki faster." This gave a [http://www.mwusers.com/forums/showthread.php?t=4338 forum page] with the following advice:

*Enable caching if it isn't already
*Install APC, eAccelerator or a similar product to pre-compile the php to bytecode
*Google "mediawiki performance" and find things like [http://dammit.lt/2007/01/26/mediawiki-performance-tuning this].

This "this" links to an article called [http://dammit.lt/2007/01/26/mediawiki-performance-tuning Five minutes of MediaWiki performance tuning], which advises installing [http://fr3.php.net/manual/en/ref.apc.php APC], as follows:

*pecl install APC 
*add extension=apc.so to php.ini 
*add $wgMainCacheType = CACHE_ACCEL; into LocalSettings.php 

The word "APC" links to the page of the [http://fr3.php.net/manual/en/index.php PHP manual] called [http://fr3.php.net/manual/en/ref.apc.php III Alternative PHP Cache].

But where do execute these commands? The second command goes in php.ini (where's that?) and the third command goes in the MediaWiki Local Settings file (that I can find), but what about the first one? And is APC installed on my Ouvaton server? I tried to look on the Ouvaton site to find out more, but with no success. To be continued...

==09 October 2007==
'''[[GING]] is not Google'''<br>
A couple of days ago I came up with the idea of "[[GING]] is not Google." Modelled on Richard Stallman's original free software project "GNU is (not) Unix," [[GING]] is a project to use P2P software to pool thousands of PCs together to provide 
enough computing power to create an alternative to the [[GoogleMafia]]. But in order for anyone to know about [[GING]], the pages describing it will have to be listed on Google...

'''[[Google Log]]'''<br>
I added a line to the Main Page of this website which proudly indicates:
*On 9 October the Main Page of this website '''is not''' listed on Google.
I also created the page [[Google Log]] which will show the long-term record of when the Main Page is or is not listed on Google. If ever...

'''Wikipedia "Sunir Shah" article finally listed on Google'''<br>
I am glad to discover that my Wikipedia article on Sunir Shah has finally been crawled by the Googlebot. The article shows up in '''eighth place''' in the results of a search for "Sunir Shah." There is hope yet.

==07 October 2007==
'''More on toolswiki'''<br>
I just took a careful look at the statistics about this site. Over the past few weeks there have in fact been at the most twenty visitors. And how many of these were the spammers? Also, the frequency of visits already seems to be dropping off. So I'm basically back to talking to myself again. I guess that's just as well - I still have a lot of work to do on this site before it will really be useful to anybody.

'''More on Wikispam'''<br>
But how did the spammers create new pages, without first making a link in an existing page?

'''More ReFactoring'''<br>
I just laboriously [[ReFactoring|refactored]] the [http://toolswiki.ouvaton.org/index.php?title=Main_Page Main Page] of this website, adding a lot of recent blog posts at the bottom of the page, in order to try to preserve the presence of the Main Page on Google. But when I had finished I Googled "toolswiki" again, and sadly observed that the Main Page has already dropped off the list. [[GoogleMafia]]!

==06 October 2007==
'''[[WikiSpam]], the price of success'''<br>
The toolswiki has been spammed. It started a week ago, when this site started to show up just a little bit on Google. I only discovered it today. The spammers were discrete, to avoid killing the hen that lays the golden eggs, as it were. (Seen any golden eggs around here lately?) And fortunately the site had been configured to require creating an account before editing.

I quickly modified the LocalSettings.php file to allow account creation only by WikiSysop. I then logged on as WikiSysop and blocked one by one all 8 unwanted users, each of whom seemed to have lain only one golden egg. I consulted "All Pages," and with a bit of work created the following record:

*'''user name  --- date ----- page name'''
*8 r8y d9d -- --- 5 Oct ------ 雅思枪手13764107295雅思代考雅思
*8 r8y d9 ------- 5 Oct ------ @13764107295代考雅思代考雅思枪手QQ：27939721
*Luck668 -------- 4 Oct ------ Gold wow-power-leveling
*8P2q3K68 ----- 1 Oct ---- 代考雅思代考托福代考雅思枪手QQ：27939721
*3P2e3K68 ----- 30 Sept --- =代考雅思代考托福代考QQ：27939721
*3j2e3m64 ------ 30 Sept ---- QQ：27939721代考雅思代考托福代考
*8P2q3K68 ---- 30 Sept ---- 雅思枪手QQ：27939721代考雅思代考托福代考

They all come from GuessWhere, except Luck688. There was also a user Noinfo126 who seems to have created no pages. The page from Luck668 contains nuggets like this:

*He honestly performed his promise to the [http://www.toppowerlevel.net wow power leveling] man of many cures.

As WikiSysop I could have deleted these files, but I decided to leave them for the moment (even though that way the scumbags will get the payoff - and maybe I will too). Take a look at [[Special:Allpages]].

Now I have to figure out how to allow new user accounts without getting spammed....

'''GING is not Google'''<br>
Ruminating about Google and how I suffer from the way it works, I came up with the idea of a solution: [[GING|GING is not Google]].

==05 October 2007==
'''[[GoogleMafia]]'''<br>
After yesterday's high, a big low. I discovered that my [http://conviviality.ouvaton.org Convivial Tools Encyclopedia] website has already completely disappeared from the Google ratings. This saddening discovery prompted [[RainDog's Second Rant]].

==04 October 2007==
Wow! I found another link to this site. I Googled "Sunir Shah" to see if my [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunir_Shah Wikipedia article] about him has started to show up yet. I was prepared to dig deep to find it, so I was down to about the eighth or ninth page, when I found a listing of - RainDog's Blog! Yipee! But what about the Wikipedia article?

'''Wikipedia article unknown to Google robot'''

I searched to the bottom of Google for my Wikipedia article on [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunir_Shah Sunir Shah], but never found it. I finally put together a foolproof combination: "Sunir Shah" with "Early Life." That only brought up two or three pages of Google listings, but the article wasn't there.

So it hasn't even been crawled by the [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Googlebot Google robot] yet! Holy cow - I put that article on Wikipedia more than two weeks ago. The insignificant information in Raindog's Blog shows up towards the top of the list, while the ''encyclopedia article'' about Mr. Shah remains totally invisible. Apparently Google waits to find an external link before it crawls a new Wikipedia article. (Maybe I should put a link to the article in my blog page.)

When I was desperately searching, I tried the combination "Sunir Shah" plus "Wikipedia." Several pages down I found the  [http://www.wikirage.com wikirage website], which had put the "Sunir Shah" article on an automatic list of "what's hot on Wikipedia" (so hot that Google missed it entirely). The article was on the list of those that had received the most edits over a short time period.... So I'm a perfectionist....

'''Wikipedia "Recent changes"'''

I suppose every Wikipedia contributor has tried this at least once: last week when I finished saving an edit, I went straight to "[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Recentchanges Recent changes]" to see it listed there. In the second it took me to open "Recent changes," some thirty other edits had been made, showing up on the list on top of mine.

'''More on Toolswiki'''

I Googled "Toolswiki" again, and realised that there are several varieties. "ToolsWiki" in [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camel_case CamelCase] belongs to a [http://www-theory.lbl.gov physics site], although the wiki itself seems broken. The page called [http://www-theory.lbl.gov/toolswiki/index.php?title=Monte_Carlo_Generators Monte Carlo Generators] on that site is the grab-bag porn wiki page. This seems to be [[WikiSpam]]. My site is "toolswiki" all in small letters. The link from it to [[Lion Kimbro]]'s [[de.li.cious]] is already broken, but there is still a link to the main page of [http://communitywiki.org CommunityWiki]. Not because "toolswiki" is listed anywhere on the CommunityWiki page (it isn't), but because Raindog's Blog '''points to''' CommunityWiki. JUST HOW DOES THIS GOOGLE BUSINESS WORK ANYWAY?

==03 October 2007==
Things are snowballing - it is hard to keep up.

'''[[ReFactoring]]'''

I [[ReFactoring|refactored]] the [http://ctwiki.ouvaton.org ctwiki site] today, the one that is about "Convivial Projects." Just as the present "User Guide" site now has a special section entirely devoted only to Wikis, the "Convivial Projects" site now has a special section devoted only to Open Design.

I'm busy studying Wiki History, but I should stop for a moment to tell the story about my minor rise in the Google charts - and what goes along with it.

'''"Toolswiki" inches up the Google charts - but not alone!'''

The other night I thought I would do a Google search on "toolswiki," to see if someone else uses the term. To my surprise, on the second or third page of Google results, I found the present site, whereas I thought the [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Googlebot Google robot] had never crawled it. Of course, nobody is ever deliberately going to search for something like "toolswiki," so there were only three or four pages. But only one link actually connected to this site.

One of the listings caught my eye, because I recognised the name of well-known wiki-wizard [[Lion Kimbro]] (notably of the [[WikiNodes]] project). I opened the link, and found what appeared to be Lion Kimbro's de.li.cious record, showing that he had looked at this toolswiki site. Why? Probably because a day or two before I had put a link in this site pointing to his WikiNodes site, and being an expert hacker he uses software which allows him to look at sites that '''point''' to his.

The next morning I tried the experiment again. "Toolswiki" still brought up four pages on Google, but my site was no longer among them! On the other hand, I found sites that associated the term "toolswiki" with various forms of pornography. I opened one of the listed sites, and found a [http://www-theory.lbl.gov/toolswiki/index.php?title=Monte_Carlo_Generators long Mediawiki page] full of links, mostly to clearly pornographic sites. Apparently "toolswiki" was listed somewhere in the middle of all that. I think the explanation is that some kind of robot software followed the same path I did, looking at links on de.li.cious, and then copied everything it found onto that grab-bag wiki page. The payoff seems to be that the grab-bag wiki allows the porn sites to "ride" on the Google references of legitimate sites, including mine, to boost their own Google ratings. HOW TWISTED CAN YOU GET?

==02 October 2007==
'''Slow sites'''<br>
This site was extremely slow last night, taking forever to open pages or save changes. I surmised that the Ouvaton server is unable to process the MediaWiki software fast enough, and decided I would have to either migrate to a more professional server, like Lycos, or move all of the wiki pages to my simpler WikkaWiki site. But the next morning things worked much faster. Still, Ouvaton might well be overloaded at peak times like 10 o'clock at night.

But this site was not the worst. When I tried to open pages on one of the the Open Design websites, it took so long that I had to give up and do something else instead!

==01 October 2007==
This website henceforth includes two sub-sections, as follows:
* The Convivial Tools User Guide
* The Wiki Pages: pages about wikis, their history and main concepts

[[Category:Wikis Blog]]