ericfaller.com Pithy Quote Goes Here

New URL

If you've visited this site recently, you've probably noticed that it has a new URL: http://ericfaller.com. It took a few years, but the old owner of the domain finally let it expire, and I was able to capture it before it got taken over by domain squatters.

I've finally moved everything over from efaller.com to ericfaller.com. It was more difficult than I expected for a couple of reasons:

• All of the pages on the old domain needed to point to the same pages on the new domain with a HTTP 301 "Moved Permanently" redirect. Google lets PageRank goodness flow through a 301 redirect, so you don't need to give up all of your PageRank points when you switch to a new domain. This means that you don't need to worry too much about updating all of the external links which point to your domain - they will still count for SEO purposes. It took a while to get the Apache mod_rewrite rules set up, but I think everything's redirecting appropriately now. It already appears to be working: a Google search for "eric faller" now has ericfaller.com as the #1 hit even though this site has only existed for a week. efaller.com still shows up in the results for some less-frequently crawled pages, but those should be updated soon.
• All of the internal links on the site needed to be fixed up. I have a lot of blog posts which link to other posts, so just copying the contents of the posts would leave them pointing to the old domain.  WordPress helped a little bit here - it was somewhat easy to update all of the internal links which were tracked by the WordPress CMS database. Unfortunately, that didn't cover everything because I had a surprising number of links not stored in the CMS. These links used hardcoded URLs instead. Whenever I edited some HTML by hand because it would be "easier and quicker", I often created a hardcoded URL, not thinking of the consequences. Each of these URLs required fixing by hand, though I did come up with an easy way to find all of the URLs: run 'wget -mirror' on the site to create a fully-crawled local copy, and then grep for the old domain.

The result of all this effort is that everything should just work and nobody should need to update any bookmarks which point to the old site. Even the RSS feed should theoretically still work fine, as long as your client knows how to follow 301 & 302 redirects.  However, if your RSS client keeps track of unread posts based on their URLs, you might suddenly get a bunch of new 'unread' old posts - rest assured that it should only happen once.

New WordPress

With all the hubbub this weekend about a new WordPress worm going around the internet, I decided to update my installation to the latest version. I had been keeping it up to date with security patches, but the version I had was so old that it had to be done manually, which was a real pain. The latest version (2.8) supposedly supports automatic updates so it should be much easier to stay up-to-date now. We'll see how it goes.

There have been a lot of changes since the release of the old version I was using, so it's possible a few links or other things have broken on the site. But I think it'll be worth it because there are also a lot of new features, most of which are under the cover. Some of the reader-visible features are:

• Threaded comments!  Now in the comments it's actually possible to reply to other people's comments and have them show up in a group.
• Commenter pictures. WordPress uses Gravatar avatars based on your email address. If you sign up for a Gravatar account, then your picture will show up on this blog and many other WordPress-based blogs. Of course you don't have to sign up for anything, and in that case then you will get a little auto-generated "Identicon" like this:

• Better themes and widget support. I haven't decided whether to port over my old hand-made theme from the previous installation, since it would take considerable re-writing to support all the new features like threaded comments. I'll probably take an existing 2.8 theme and tweak it to my liking. In the meantime, I'm using one of the default themes. Everything's still under construction so it'll probably all change soon.
• HTTPS on the admin and comment screens. This is long overdue.

Here's a picture of how the new threaded comment system looks:

2 Years

So as a follow up to the 1 Year stats post, here are a bunch of stats to celebrate 2 years of efaller.com. These are the stats from the last year of web visitors to the site (which does not include RSS readers).

Daily Pageviews

There were an average of 225 pageviews per day, a 12.5% growth YOY but still not enough to make money with AdSense .

Browser/OS Combinations

This year IE/Windows increased its share from 54% to 57%, Firefox/Windows increased from 30% to 31%, and Firefox/Mac increased from 4.1% to 4.8%. The biggest loser was Safari/Mac which fell from 7.3% to 3.4%. Linux (all browsers) stayed pretty constant at 0.87%.

Search Engine Keyword Hits

In this year's search engine results I was finally able to overcome the end of false religion is near with searches for my name. The results also reveal growing interest in the zeitgeist with iPhones, GTI iPods, and broken Rock Band drum pedals.

Bugs, cereal bugs and bugs in cereal also made a big showing, and if combined would beat out searches for me.

Another interesting hit is 8bf3a13b - people are still searching for this, and I'm surprised that the answer hasn't been widely posted on the web yet.

Referrers

In the referring sites competition Google dominated all comers, but Simon made a strong second place showing:

Bandwidth theft

Recently most of my bandwidth has been getting sucked up by bandwidth thieves deep-linking various pictures from this site.

I'm not sure why, but Google seems to like my images and places them high in its image search results. It might be because I actually write descriptive alt-text for them, when most people don't bother. For example, images from this site are in the first or second page of results for queries like starbursts, fork, elevator, and quarters. Multiple-word queries like eames chair bring in many others.

This 'success' has caused many people to rip off my images and link to them from their dim-witted MySpace or LiveJournal pages. For example:

• MySpace page ripping off a picture of my car
• MySpace page stealing my quarters picture

Warning: as with most MySpace pages, your IQ may decrease if you click those links.

The majority of hits come from MySpace, but there's a large number that come from LiveJournal or random forums on the internet.

Back in the wild old days of Web 1.0, you could easily solve this problem by checking the referrer header and blocking the request or substituting the image for another one if it didn't come from your own site. Unfortunately, these days that won't work so well because it will break RSS reader apps, as well as RSS aggregators like Google Reader or Bloglines. Unfortunately there's too many of those to whitelist, and RSS readers like Outlook don't even really send a referrer header that you can filter on. I can't make a blacklist either, because there are way too many random forums on the internet to block, though blocking MySpace would take care of about half.

I'm trying to come up with a list of options. Here's what I have so far:

1. Stop writing descriptive alt-text for images - this may work, but it would block legitimate searches.
2. Block Google from crawling my images/ directory with a robots.txt file - same disadvantages as above.
3. Pull a Niall Kennedy on them and swap out the most commonly ripped-off images with Goatse. This has the schadenfreude-appeal of getting revenge on the thieves, but I'm not that much of a jerk (and judging by the designs of their MySpace pages, their lives must be bad enough already). It's also a lot of work on my end.
4. Do nothing and just pay the bandwidth bills. This is easiest, so that's probably what I will do for now. My monthly bandwidth usage isn't near the usage cap, so I'm not paying extra yet, but it's definitely increasing pretty good rate. I'll have to re-evaluate the situation in another year or so.

1 Year

One year ago I created this web site with the goals of creating something that might be interesting enough to read and to take over the #1 Google search result for my name. I'm not unbiased enough to comment on the first goal, but I can gauge the success of the second:

• #1 in Google search results - Check
• #1 in Yahoo search results - Check
• #1 in Live.com search results - Check

In fact, as an added bonus due to some blog posts and a magazine article I wrote for work, now 9 out of the top 10 and 43 out of the top 50 Google search results for my name are related to me. Sweet. I don't think I have to worry that somebody searching for me will find the wrong person any more.

It's also interesting to check out the Analytics stats for the past year (which, somewhat significantly, do not include RSS readers):

Daily pageviews:

Thoughts:

• 200 pageviews per day? Not enough for AdSense (not that I would anyway)

Hits by Browser/OS combination:

Thoughts:

• Since 90% of the hits to my site are referred by random Google Image Search (images.google.com) queries, this mix of hits might actually partially represent a statistically random sample, combined with the people who know me.
• One wonders, who are those 53% of people who still use IE?
• Mac OS X at 11.5% is a pretty strong showing.
• So much for Linux on the desktop. (0.85%?)

Search engine keyword hits:

Thoughts:

• It's nice to see that Jehovah's Witness propaganda is still 2x more popular than me (and, alas, the end of false religion still has not come).

Spam comments

My WordPress spam filter has caught 384 spam comments as of today.

Am I weird because I saw that and immediately thought "Ooh, 384 is a nice round number: 256 + 128!"? (110000000 binary)

#1!

After 6 months, I have finally reclaimed the #1 Google result from the Scoble video on MSDN! Woo!

Google Analytics

I've been trying out Google Analytics, and so far it's pretty cool.  It's geared toward webmasters who are trying to increase their AdWords/AdSense revenue, so there is a lot of stuff that doesn't apply to a small personal web site, but there are still some things I find useful.  Currently it's a free service, and it's not even marked 'Beta' (I guess Google expects that the increased AdSense revenue will cause it to pay for itself).

You just have to stick a small tag of javascript in your page template, and you get all kinds of cool stats about your pages.  It tracks the basic things like visits & pageviews, but also does more advanced things like plotting the search engine keywords people use to find your site, or their locations on a map of the earth. Here are a couple of screenshots after it had been running on this site for a couple of days:

Search keywords

Visitor location map

One downside (at least for a blog) is that it can't track visitors who read your site using RSS readers, since the RSS content doesn't contain the Analytics tracker tag and RSS readers usually don't run embedded javascript anyway.  So I mostly find it useful for seeing which Google keywords people are using to find my site.

Google stats

As I mentioned in a previous post, one of my goals for this web site was to be the #1 Google result for a search for my name. As of yesterday (June 26th 2006), this site had been around for little under a month and I had captured the #3 spot, even beating out the other Eric Faller who owns http://www.ericfaller.com/. The #1 and #2 spots were still being held by the GameDev club at the University of Colorado. Ironically, I created those pages while back in college and now I can't get rid of them (grr).

Yesterday Microsoft posted a Scoble video of my coworker Savraj and me explaining what we work on all day. Within one day, that page shot to the #1 spot on Google for a search for my name (#2 for Savraj). Less than 1 day for the #1 spot! I was very surprised. Unfortunately that page already seems to have been linked by a lot of other bloggers, so it will probably be very difficult for me to beat it any time soon.

The video isn't that bad, but unfortunately I had a very bad haircut when it was shot, and I and do a poor job of speaking clearly to the camera. I also manage to screw up one demo 4 times in a row, after I had just said something like "Oh yeah, I do this all the time" . If you are interested in checking out my office and seeing what I do all day, check out the video. (Yes I realize that if I link to it too, that will only make it worse)

Google results as of June 27th 2006

Welcome

Hello, and welcome to this blog. Introductory posts are always a bit awkward, so as an attempt to take the easy way out I decided to structure this one as a FAQ.

Who are you?

I’m a computer programmer living in the Seattle area.

Why did you create this blog?

For a couple of reasons:

1. I was dissatisfied with the current Google results if you search for my name.
2. I figured I would be able to post some stuff that people might find interesting.

As for reason #1, here’s a link so you can track my progress: Google results for ‘Eric Faller’. As of the date this was written (May 2006), the results include a mishmash of random things:

• The horribly out-of-date homepage for a club I used to run while in college.

• An old friend’s web site for a computer game we used to work on.

• Various other web pages dealing with old school projects.

• The web site of a French dude with the same name as mine (rapidly gaining on the #1 spot).

Fortunately none of the results contain anything too embarrassing, so I’m currently more or less OK. But, I’m fully aware that the first thing that modern people do when meeting (or dating) somebody new is Google them. So, obviously it can’t hurt to have some sort of positive influence over the results. Plus, I have found that reading the archived posts of somebody’s blog is a good way to quickly learn a lot about the person and avoid potentially dangerous conversation topics (“ooh, well when I made that comment about people from the East Coast, I meant everybody except people from New York, you see...”).

As for reason #2, it will be up to you to decide if my posts are actually interesting. I’ve read a good number of blogs so I hope I know what to do. I’ll try to avoid posting boring stuff (“Today I ate cheerios for breakfast, went to work, came home and went to bed”), cryptic stuff (“Here’s a picture of the back of Joe’s head,” (no explanation of who Joe is)), pompous stuff (“Obviously the opening brace goes on its own line – anybody who thinks otherwise is an idiot”), and lazy stuff (“Does anybody know what the website for the IRS is? Post a comment if you know”). My goal is to post more-or-less regularly on a variety of topics, while keeping the content interesting (so far I have learned that pictures = good, and spell checking = good). We’ll see how it goes. If you see a post that sucks, write a comment that says “This post sucks” and I’ll get on it (obviously, more constructive feedback helps as well).

So basically this is all about you and your ego, isn’t it?

Yep, pretty much. Isn’t that the whole idea behind blogging?

It looks like this blog is running on WordPress?

I looked at a variety of blog hosts/software packages and ultimately chose this one for a couple of reasons:

• It’s free, and there are no ads (always good).

• The provider can easily be switched - don’t have to worry about it getting bought out by some megacorp.

• It’s totally customizable: I can set the style to whatever I want, get rid of any annoying “Powered by Blah Inc” thingies, and if I wanted to it’s easy to write a little PHP widget for the sidebar that shows the weather in Turkey (for example).

You know, Real Programmers write their own blog software by hand. In frickin’ assembly.

Yeah, I know. I started out by mocking up something in ASP.NET, but as I was attempting to write an RSS library by hand, I thought to myself, “NIH syndrome!” and gave up. It probably would have taken a few weeks or months (of my spare time) to implement half the features that every other software package already has, and I realized that all that time could be better spent doing something fun. So that’s the story: basically, I’m lazy.

What's that picture at the top?

That's a picture of my desk. I couldn't think of anything better. Plus, it's a pretty hot-looking desk.

I had some other questions too, but I forgot what they were since you talk so much.

Sorry about that. If you have any questions or suggestions for posts, feel free to leave comments!

- Eric