Roberta X, not happy with the new Blogger interface, pulled off a successful rollback — temporarily, anyway. She remains not happy:

I quite dislike the new UI. I’m no good at real HTML and formatting in the new near-WYSIWYG editor baffles me.

When Blogger pulls the rug out from under for good, I am not going to mess with it if it becomes too annoying.

Can we talk her into migrating to WordPress? I’ll call this a No:

I have a WordPress backup — which I kept updated until Google/Blogger, as is their right, decided to pull the plug on that — and I’m not happy with WP’s UI, either.

I’ve made my peace with WP, mostly by avoiding the clunk-o-matic Visual Editor whenever possible; I’m no HTML genius — it says “Bad Example” right over there in the sidebar — but I’ve been doing it long enough to have developed something vaguely resembling technique.

And speaking of Blogger, they sent me a nastygram yesterday to the effect that my old account, used only to maintain a profile, needed to be migrated into the Google hivemind post haste or else. I made two attempts at this. The first errored out; the second, in which I made a point of not checking the “I have read the Terms and Conditions” box, breezed through the system in milliseconds. Lesson learned.

You’ve already seen what Google looked like in the 1960s, and you’ve presumably seen what it looks like today.

Now to split the difference: Google in the 1980s, with its old BBS interface intact.

(Snagged from Aaron Schmiedel on FB. Incidentally, you should have seen Facebook in the 1990s.)

Normally I shy away from those humongous infographics you see here and there, but this one raised a couple of points I’m sort of willing to discuss:

Created by: College At Home

As it happens, my normal commute runs 18 minutes each way, though recent construction on I-44 near the Broadway Extension adds two minutes to the return trip, bringing me up to, yes, 38 minutes a day.

Of the “anger” responses, I prefer the simple digitus impudicus, as it seems pointless to yell, and if you’ve heard one horn, you’ve heard them all.

As a rule, I keep the seatback at about 110°; there’s a movable lumbar support which feels remarkably like a piece of, um, lumber.

I do, however, question that bit about “when a car steps on its brakes.” If a car is doing its own braking, either it’s a megabuck sedan with some high-priced alleged “safety” option, or it’s one of Google’s automated autos.

And by the way: last cholesterol reading (late last month) was 163. Nyah.

When are we going to stop handing over all of our personal information to Zuckerberg and the Googleplex? How about “never”? Does “never” work for you?

Some are saying sooner or later consumers will have to revolt and demand payment for the use of that kind of data, but for now, we’re all idiots and do it for free for them. Personally, I have no hope of any of the average users having the intelligence to realize they’re being manipulated, particularly when they still think liking some post or another will automatically drop a dollar from Bill Gates or whomever into some mythical cancer sufferer or the like.

A lot of them, I suspect, think they’re getting something for free, despite the fact that “free” stuff does not actually exist. (Which explains much of our political discourse, come to think of it.)

More cookies than the Girl Scouts ever dreamed of, and they’re all for you:

For a while I wondered why Google wanted me to sign in. Now I wonder why I ever would. If you have Gmail and a personal YouTube account that simply must store what you watch and recommend new things and broadcast your choices hither and yon, and you use Google calendar and Google Plus and Google Clear and Google Bold (now with chipotle) and Google Whitening Google with Deep-cleansing Foaming Action, then I suppose it’s necessary to stay signed in.

And of course, they will pay you back for your loyalty by letting slip the Dogs of Infernal Memory:

The Web giant announced Tuesday that it plans to follow the activities of users across nearly all of its ubiquitous sites, including YouTube, Gmail and its leading search engine. Consumers won’t be able to opt out of the changes, which take effect March 1.

Le sigh. Remember “Don’t be evil”? Nowadays we’d settle for “Don’t be Facebook.”

However efficient Google’s Mystery Math may be at detecting dangerous or deceptive Web pages, it still can’t actually read, which explains why Bill Quick’s Daily Pundit associate Alfred Centauri got this authentic link-farm gibberish while looking for laptop reviews:

Man, possess Sony produce a single hell of an item using the Sony VAIO F2 Series VPCF232FX/B. This infant is one highly effective mom, and can perhaps you have storming via work and enjoy at the velocity of gentle!

And this, he said, was the #2 search result. Certainly reminds me of Number Two.

Update: Corrected name of contributor (see comments).

I mentioned yesterday that Google’s available tool for checking malware didn’t find anything here. However, there are tools, and then there are tools, if you know what I mean, and Google has a better one: it allows you to browse a page as though you were the Googlebot, and see what it sees. What it sees, frankly, is not pretty.

So I called for backup — specifically, these guys. While I was deleting several hundred files, most of them innocuous but you can’t be sure, they were attending to the stuff I couldn’t reach very well. (You do not want to see me working phpMyAdmin; it’s like Dane Cook lecturing on quantum mechanics.) They have pronounced the place thoroughly scoured, and will monitor for changes. When Google comes back, which eventually they will, they will be presented with something that doesn’t insult the integrity of their database, or whatever the current explanation is.

We now return you to your semi-regular bloggage.

You may have already noticed the Yahoo! search box, a piece of pure 1990s code that’s now sitting on the sidebar. Hardly anyone uses a search function from here, except me, for quick and dirty cross-referencing of past posts. WordPress has its own search function, but there are upwards of 8,000 pages here that aren’t in any way connected to WordPress, which will never be seen. So I’ve been relying on Google to serve up my local stuff.

Then this weekend, Google informed me that they were de-indexing the entire site for a minimum of one year, as punishment for not blocking injections of malware quickly enough, or something. (One such event is described here.) Their own malware tool doesn’t find anything here, but the Master Control Program will not be denied.

I filed for reconsideration, which may or may not work. In the meantime, traffic here will drop by a third, which doesn’t bother me a great deal, and search traffic will drop by two thirds, which does, since it means I’ll probably have to suspend the search-query roundup on Monday mornings for lack of material.

Google Reader subscribers should not be affected. People who have ridiculous work filters and get here by typing the name of the domain into the Google search page will no longer be getting here.

Update: On the basis that I can’t assume I found everything myself, I have called in a white-hat guy to look over the site and make recommendations.

I was so delighted, a week and a half into the existence of this site, to find myself actually listed in the colossal AltaVista database: they found me in a mere ten days? How did they do that?

Fifteen years and odd later, AltaVista is dead — Yahoo! bought it and put it out of its misery — and I put up this post, which had been sitting in the can for a day and a half, at 4:26 yesterday afternoon.

At 4:40 a Googler showed up in the log, looking for two of the three tags I’d set (“Peter Todd” and “bonk”). Which means that the mighty Googlebot had already spidered its way to that post in no more than fourteen minutes.

Now I thought this level of attention was reserved for, um, important sites. Shows you how much I know.

Not everybody is thrilled with the Google+ real-names-only policy; the estimable nakedjen, who has blogged under that name for several years, tweeted her frustration: “Raise your hand, Internet, if that’s the ONLY way you’ve ever known me.”

While keeping one hand in the air, I found this advice from Marcel:

An important element to keeping a secret is not letting anyone know you have one. If you are going to use a pseudonym, it follows that the best pseudonym would be a common … name other than your own. Choose a given name and a compatible surname: Jacob Miller, Alejandro Martinez, Mohammad Khan, whatever is suitable to the environment, and move on. You’ve been Mighty Thundarrr since you went online back in ’98? Take the opportunity to change, and get a fresh email address while you’re at it.

People will complain this makes it hard for others to find them. That’s largely the point for me. Why then would I use Google+? I most likely would not, and will not unless there’s some compelling reason, and the loss of privacy is balanced by some gain. If I did, I’d use my own name, or else some common name. I would not use Goofy Gonif or Bigbird777 and then complain that Google+ was repressing my freedom of expression when the enforce their terms of service.

I started phasing out most of my pseudonyms in the late 1980s; separate personas turned out to be too high-maintenance a luxury. (I’ve kept one, which shows up on several message boards to this day, but there’s no fabricated persona involved.) Then again, nakedjen doesn’t have a fabricated persona either: she is what she is.

The Atlantic’s Alexis Madrigal sees the Google+ edict as an inversion of reality:

[I]n real life, we expect very few statements to be public, persistent, and attached to your real identity. Basically, only people talking on television or to the media can expect such treatment. And even then, the vast majority of their statements don’t become part of the searchable Internet.

Online, Google and Facebook require an inversion of this assumed norm. Every statement you make on Google Plus or Facebook is persistent and strongly attached to your real identity through your name.

And if nobody hears it now, maybe someone will hear it a couple of years down the road, when you perhaps don’t want it heard. I once got a request from a person whom I had quoted extensively in a post: he’d been overtaken by events in real life, and some of this stuff he didn’t want attached to his name. I agonized briefly over this, then rewrote the post to omit anything traceable. Social networks, of course, can’t be bothered to do this sort of thing.

The search box over in the sidebar might get some use from you guys, but it probably gets a lot more from me, as I try to see what else I might have said on a subject.

While doing that sort of research Monday, I found a couple of old posts which didn’t bring up the topic desired at all — but which, when served up by the Big G, contained extraneous information that happened to match the search. These were static pages; I sent up fresh copies, just in case. And then I went looking for a reason why.

Turns out that last week someone managed to drop a bogus redirect for search engines into .htaccess, and directed it to an encoded php command hiding in a little-used directory. I had WordPress pretty well locked down, but I’m thinking the problem was with FTP. It took me about two minutes to find the offending code and trash it. Passwords and such, of course, are being adjusted.

With great power, Lynn reminds us, comes great responsibility. Are you listening, Google?

You have deliberately tried to make yourself ubiquitous. You’re into everything. That’s fine. It makes it convenient for us but it also means that you have a great responsibility. You are now like water. When we turn on the faucet we expect water to come out of it without fail.

When the pipes aren’t frozen, anyway.

Note: Some sloppy verbiage in the first paragraph rewritten.

TTAC’s Ed Niedermeyer has a nice preview of the 2012 Mercedes-Benz SLK coupe, focusing on cabin ambience, which apparently is way above average for a two-door with sporting pretensions, what with the available glass roof and all.

Most any Benz is out of my price range, and the SLK is surely more so. The interior pictures furnished, however, were quite appealing, though something concerns me about this particular shot:

I have reference to the obvious Google screen at the midpoint of the dash. The potential for driver distraction seems obvious to me. Then again, at least it isn’t TVTropes.

Google’s been playing around with the Apache Web server, and they’ve announced a new module:

[W]e’re introducing a module for the Apache HTTP Server called mod_pagespeed to perform many speed optimizations automatically. We’re starting with more than 15 on-the-fly optimizations that address various aspects of web performance, including optimizing caching, minimizing client-server round trips and minimizing payload size. We’ve seen mod_pagespeed reduce page load times by up to 50% (an average across a rough sample of sites we tried) — in other words, essentially speeding up websites by about 2x, and sometimes even faster.

Well, we’ll just see about that. I actually installed it last night, and about half the time it sped up the load time considerably, and the rest of the time it refused to load at all. I’m still testing on some smaller sites, but I’ve pulled it from here for now.

Back in December 2008, I replaced the search box in the sidebar (Google, natch) with a box that invoked Scroogle, which was a sort of Google proxy: Scroogle submitted the search, but it intercepted Google’s attempts at data mining.

Until this week, anyway:

Scroogle users saw a Scroogle page that said, “Google returned no results for this search,” when in fact Google returned results but our scraper was unable to deal with them. Over the next few days we will attempt to contact Google and determine whether the old interface is gone as a matter of policy at Google, or if they simply have it hidden somewhere and will tell us where it is so that we can continue to use it.

And no, it’s not a question of just adapting to a new Google API:

It is not possible to continue Scroogle unless we have a simple interface that is stable. Google’s main consumer-oriented interface that they want everyone to use is too complex, too bloated, and changes too frequently, to make our scraping operation possible.

I suspect this is now Google policy, and have reinstated the old search box, mostly because I need it to cross-reference things now and then, and there are over 8,000 pages on this site that are not now and likely never will be in the WordPress database.

I did, briefly, experiment with a Bing box, but I don’t much like their defaults.

No, it’s not Google. It’s someone pretending to be Google, and they sent out something called “Security Confirmation Code GUK/877/798/2010,” which means — well, nothing, actually.

Claimed email address is “Google@[24.210.55.233],” which seems unlikely, inasmuch as that particular IP resolves to a RoadRunner account in Columbus. I’m thinking the alleged “Google Promotion Award Team” pulled that number at random, since the actual email, assuming there’s anything at all believable in the header, originated from the Middle East.

And oh, there’s a 36k Word document attached, which I don’t think I’ll read.

I will, however, point you to “Google Eye,” a song about a fish (not a phish) written by John D. Loudermilk and recorded by the Nashville Teens (not teens, not from Nashville).

Google has decided that FTP is no longer worth the bother to them:

FTP remains a significant drain on our ability to improve Blogger: only .5% of active blogs are published via FTP — yet the percentage of our engineering resources devoted to supporting FTP vastly exceeds that. On top of this, critical infrastructure that our FTP support relies on at Google will soon become unavailable, which would require that we completely rewrite the code that handles our FTP processing.

Apparently they’re not planning to outsource it to China, either:

[W]e will no longer support FTP publishing in Blogger after March 26, 2010. We realize that this will not necessarily be welcome news for some users.

That much, at least, is true.

Google’s PageRank is as inscrutable as a person’s FICO score, and if you make your living on the Web, you’re influenced by both whether you like it or not.

This “enhancement” to PageRank may not make you like it any better:

I just came across a very unpleasing revelation to end the year however it’s just part of every blogger or webmaster’s life to be hit by Google once in a while or maybe frequently for some.

The Google pagerank of this blog has been stripped a notch and is now down to 3 from the previous 4 which isn’t giving me a totally happy face to end the year. My other friends’ blogs have also been stripped with their page ranks however I’m not going to tell who because it’s up for them to find out.

Google’s nasty caffeinated algorithm had finally taken its toll and is mercilessly affecting sites on shared hosting as they have advocated page loading speed as an added factor to rank in 2010. I’m not surprised that is this going to happen however this exaggerated move isn’t helping the web but it’s killing the content delivery networks especially blogs the benefit of ranking for highly relevant page positions that provides more quality content than static pages.

The PageRank scale runs 0 to 10, so a drop from 4 to 3 might be considered significant.

Fort Hard Knox has been similarly hit:

Ft. Hard Knox’s page rank just dropped to 4/10 from 5/10 where it has been nearly two years. I think part of that has to do with the fact that we’ve been going through a little transition in the last few months, and have not been posting as much original content that other bloggers want to link to.

For my part, I’ve found that I’m pretty much incapable of guessing which posts will generate links or even comments; it’s probably a good thing that I take a relatively dim view of trying to game the system, because plainly I wouldn’t be good at it.

Which is not to say that massive link dumps like The Other McCain Full Metal Jacket Reach-Around don’t help; McCain’s sporting a highly-respectable 6 these days. Of course, he’d like another point or two — who wouldn’t? (Besides her, I mean. She has two sites, a 2 and a 3.)

As for optimizing one’s page-loading speed, I’ve done just about all that I can: unless I’ve linked to an audio/video file lately, everything originates here except the Twitwidget, the SiteMeter, and the little Green thing, which actually comes from the host anyway. (I generally avoid hotlinking other people’s graphics, preferring to store my own copy.) There’s a WordPress gizmo to tell me how much of the RAM on the shared database server is going to support this site: it runs around 25 MB of a possible 90 unless I have a bunch of runaway PHP processes going on, as I did New Year’s Eve for a couple of hours. (Weirdly, this seemed to be triggered by Google’s spider, which apparently stumbled into a trap of its own making and thrashed the server enough to cause it to have, in its own words, “gone away.”)

Still, I try not to take this stuff too seriously. I hit 6 once, dropped back to 5, and have settled there ever since. I have no idea what my credit score is, however.

Jenn takes note of a couple of Google’s Hot Searches:

eDiets and full body scanners are among the hot searches. Possibly fat people are worried about being scanned.

Not me. I’m not about to subject myself to one of those Shiny Tubes O’ Death, especially now that Underpants Gnomes seem to be the dominant influence on the airline industry.

See also Lileks: “I regard airplanes as morgues with gift shops. As much as my brain knows the facts on flying — i.e., it’s safer than doing some welding while standing up to your knees in gasoline — my heart knows that as soon as I get on a plane, it will erupt in flames for no good reason and I will be paste on the landscape.” Suicide bombers are the very definition of “no good reason.”

Inspired — who wouldn’t be? — by The Bloggess, I typed “i” and a single space into Google’s search box and waited for the auto-suggestions.

And they looked like this:

At no time, incidentally, did I feel lucky.