I Hate Google.org

I’ve been reading Corey Doctorow’s novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. If you like science fiction (even if you don’t), this book is well worth the time. Much Whuffie to Corey for bringing us his near-future vision of the Bitchun Society.

I’ve been seeing some obnoxious Adsense ads here lately. Apparently, some company can guarantee a “Page 1 Ranking” for $49.95. No charge until you are on Page 1. Of course, I can guess that what is meant is that they will charge you $49.95 to set up an Adwords campaign where you bid until you have a page 1 ad.

However, this is not the same thing as a page 1 ranking. The word “ranking” indicates organic listings, not advertisement placement. I find this ad misleading, disgusting and obnoxious.

Luckily, no visitors to IHateGoogle.org ever click on the Adsense ads, so the point is actually moot.

I’ve noticed that my modified .htaccess file has been overwritten by WordPress at least twice.  This has broken the archival routine of the bBlog version of IHateGoogle.org.

I did install a couple of plugins to WordPress.  I wonder if when they were installed, the .htaccess was overwritten?

I was trolling today and came up with another Google hater. You have to check out GoogleSearchSucks.com.

I have a few comments about this blog:

1. I like the drawings. Is that Larry and Sergey or Beavis and Butt-Head behind Jerry Yang?
2. He’s still got Ron Paul ads on the site. Now that’s persistence!
3. The disclaimer is awesome!
4. GoogleSearchSucks.com hates Google because the SERPs are full of spam and advertisements, not because they don’t have the ranking they deserve. That actually seems novel.

GoogleSearchSucks.com seems to be searching for its online identity. You can check it out and post your comments as to what direction you think the site should take.

I’ve been posting my grades from McNeese State University here on IHateGoogle.org, so my friends can follow my academic career. For those of you who don’t know, I’m currently working towards a Bachelor of Science in Finance.

Here are the latest grades:

I have two semesters left.  Here’s a link to my university web page.

Last semester, I was inducted into Beta Gamma Sigma, the international honor society for accredited business schools. Hopefully, if I can maintain my A-average, I will graduate magna cum laude. My cumulative grade point average is 3.61. My average since starting at McNeese in 2006 is 4.00.

For an archival list of IP address updates for IPLists.com previous to this date (May 22, 2008), click here.

I’m seeing a very serious bandwidth crunch on IPLists.com. Today (so far) I’ve used over 30 gigs. So, in order to clamp down a bit, I’m restricting access to the site to those requests which contain a User-Agent header. It seems that the majority of requests for the lists come from bots with no User-Agent header. I don’t mind if people access the lists, but at least be polite about it. Tell me who you are, for Pete’s sake!

KloakIt users should not suffer any adverse effects, but just in case–especially if you are using a very old version (post v3.5)–I recommend you update to the latest version.

So, when I decided to convert to WordPress from bBlog, I had to decide what to do with all of my old bBlog entries. I came across various home-grown conversion tools that claimed to convert various versions of bBlog installations to various versions of WordPress installations, but I was really leery about using any of them. For one thing, one of the sites I visited generated one of those nice Google warnings about the site being untrustworthy.

I suppose I could have written some code myself to perform the conversion. It probably wouldn’t have been all that difficult. I’m familiar with MySQL databases and have done some hacking both in WordPress and bBlog.

In the end, though, I decided to maintain the look and feel of my old bBlog entries. Why not just keep the bBlog blog and install WordPress on top of it? Installation was no problem…the only file WordPress need to overwrite was index.php. I just renamed bBlog’s to index_bblog.php. Then, with just a little bit of mod_rewrite trickery, I have both blogs available on the same URL!

Here’s my mod_rewrite code, in case somebody wants to do something similar:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /

RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} postid=(.*)$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !(index_bblog\.php.*)$ [NC]
RewriteRule .* /index_bblog.php?postid=%1 [R=301,L]

RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} sectionid=(.*)$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !(index_bblog\.php.*)$ [NC]
RewriteRule .* /index_bblog.php?sectionid=%1 [R=301,L]

This makes it so anytime bBlog-style entries are requested, because for instance they are still indexed, or linked to from within the entries themselves, the server recognizes them and redirects them to the index_bblog.php file, using the QUERY_STRING info to specify which blog entry is requested. Very handy!

I have decided to switch from bBlog to Wordpress. You can find the old bBlog version of IHateGoogle.org here.

Please bear with me while I painfully wrench my chosen template into something half-way acceptable.

My Site IPLists.com was down for awhile during the last couple of days.  I have since moved to a new server and hopefully the new nameserver settings have fully propagated.

After the switch, and during my upload of files to the server, a .htaccess file became corrupted which temporarily caused server errors when trying to access anything in http://www.iplists.com/nw .  This has been fixed.