October, 2007 · TangleBones

A good idea for people with strange names

I men­tioned a while back that I was using Google Apps for Your Domain to handle my email, and I dis­cov­ered a lovely side ben­e­fit. By point­ing my MX record for tan­gle­bones to Google, my main account is a catch-​all for any emails sent to @tan​gle​bones.com. So if you were to send some­thing to admin or web­mas­ter or sysad (or jack­ass) @tan­gle­bones, I get the mes­sage in my email.

So when I fill out a com­ment card in a restau­rant or sign up for a ser­vice, I can be sure that as long as they get the host right, I’ll get my email.

And when your email address is “jemaleddin” that’s a big help.

Not exactly what you were looking for

A lot of my traf­fic on this site is from search engines. And while I like to think that my site is a beacon of knowl­edge in the waste­land of the Inter­net, I get the feel­ing that not every­one is find­ing what they were look­ing for.

Google’s Web­mas­ter Tools lets you see what search terms led people to your site, as well as what your aver­age search rank­ing is for those terms. Here’s what I have for the last week:

Some of those people got what they were look­ing for. But who­ever searched for “suck me” prob­a­bly didn’t want an arti­cle about comic books. And while I did write about Batman, I don’t host any tor­rents to down­load that issue.

So, I’d like to apol­o­gize to free-​loaders and porn-​seekers: I’m sorry Google sent you here, but you’re going to have to look elsewhere.

One of the toughest fighters in the world?

On this past week’s episode of Human Weapon, the guys did some train­ing in MMA. Jason actu­ally man­aged to win his fight (against some nobody in the IFL) and Bill held his own against Ricco Rodriguez. The part that stuck in my mind was when they intro­duced one of their train­ers, saying some­thing like, “Many have described him as one of the tough­est fight­ers in the world: Forest Griffin.”

And if I hadn’t seen Forest get­ting his hand raised after chok­ing out one of the great­est fight­ers in the world with a cut in his fore­head that lets you see into his skull, I would have laughed. Nice job sched­ul­ing that episode, His­tory Chan­nel. Well played.

Introducing PlainTags for WordPress

I finally got my upgrade to Word­Press straight­ened out (do your­self a favor and upgrade the Google XML sitemaps and Sim­i­lar Posts plu­g­ins), but I was a little dis­ap­pointed with the new Tag Sup­port. It’s a big improve­ment over the old built-​in tag sup­port, but I wish they’d have worked toward fea­ture parity with Ulti­mate­Tag­War­rior. To bring back some of the old fea­tures like tag man­age­ment and auto­mated tag gen­er­a­tion, try out Christine’s Word­Press Things.

One thing that is still miss­ing is the abil­ity to output a plain list of tags. Word­Press assumes that if you want tags, you want those tags to be links. I, how­ever, just want plain old text some­times. So I hacked around in the Word­Press code and made my very first (sorry excuse for a) plugin: PlainTags.

I’m hoping not to have to main­tain this plugin for very long, as this really ought to be part of the Word­Press core code. In fact, there may be a sim­pler way to do what I want, but if there is, I couldn’t find it. Either way, enjoy this plugin, and let me know if it gives you any problems.