Category Archives: Discourse.net

In the past two days or so, more than a thousand people who have Googled for search strings including the words “Kerry” and “Fonda” got sent to an empty trackback page for NYT Falls for Hoax Kerry-Fonda Photo instead of to the article itself. I have no idea why. (If search string weirdness appeals to you, check out the Discourse.net Zeitgeist.)

I've been wanting one of these, and there it is: New York Times Link Generator—a way of making permanent links to NYT articles. Wish every paper had one. Especially the Washington Post.

Actually, this NYT latest headlines page is sorta nice too.

I'm not going to keep writing about this, but having noted Discourse.net's promotion to Marsupial in the TLB Ecosystem, I feel honor-bound to also note the near-instant demotion to “Adorable Little Rodent”. It seems that rather than spurring legions of readers to add links to this blog, the effect of my post was to motivate almost 10% of the existing linkers to delete their links. Link numbers do fluctuate, but this drop was much larger than usual.

Rats.

It seems that Discourse.net is no longer a mere “Adorable Little Rodent” in the Truth Laid Bear Ecosystem but (temporarily at least) a (lesser) Maurauding Marsupial. I think that sounds a lot nicer.

TLB's amusing ranking system is based on the number of inbound links from participants. The lowest category are mere Insignificant Microbes, then Multicellular Microorganisms, Wiggly Worms, Crunchy Crustaceans, Lowly Insects, Slimy Molluscs, Flippery Fish, Crawly Amphibians, Slithering Reptiles. I think that by the time I found the site, discourse.net qualified to be one of the Flappy Birds.

It took four mounths for inbound links from TLB members to double from 33 to 66. Does that mean if all goes well it will only be another four months to break 100 and join the “Large Mammals”? (Note that this works, more or less, if one assumes linear growth or sees this as time-to-double, not that there's the least reason to believe either is in the cards; one must plateau at some point.) I certainly would be radically shocked if I ever got beyond the TLB “large mammal” stage, categories that include the highly linked “Playful Primates,” the very highly linked “Mortal Humans” and the mega-linked “Higher Beings,” although it's nice to see Brad DeLong is an actual “human”.

Now if I could just figure out how to get the TLB system to include me in its traffic rankings, discourse.net might just scrape into the top 250 or so….

This time I didn't change the style sheet. I just updated my copy of IE. And now, at least under win xp, the right column is off center and renders partly under the center. It looks fine in Mozilla. Data points from the Mac crowd or other browsers most welcome (or even IE under other OS's).

There may be a slight delay in fixing this one—both because I can't figure out what's causing it, and becasue my DSL connection is out at home. We're knocking down the back part of the house to rebuild it, bigger and better (we hope), and that includes the place where the DSL hits the house. We've cut the electricity to that section, so the modem — the last thing left over there — won't be able to do its stuff.

Until the nice people from Bell South come to move the service — which could be tomorrow with any luck, there will be less going on here. Indeed at some point I may lose dial-up too…

I've added a link in the “stats” section to the output from Jim Flanagan's MovableType Zeitgeist Plugin. It scans the server logs for today and yesterday, and displays referrers from search engines—what people have been searching for that brought them here, and which page they landed on when they arrived. The more common the search, the bigger the type. It's fun.

Update: I've set the script to update every two hours, at 20 minutes past the hour. Currently, the top search terms for this blog are…. self deprecation, personality quizzes, discourse, self-deprecation (with a hyphen), daily howler and 'how to pick up women'. I suspect I disappointed some of those searchers. But I do wish I'd written something more appropriate for “is a b in law school good?” Maybe next time.