When I registered this domain, ReadingOnTheToilet.com, I did it purely because I thought it was funny and could make a good blog name. I don’t read on the toilet and have no real interest in toilets. So what I discovered yesterday was both troubling and mildly fascinating in a disgusting kind of way. Plenty of people are utterly obsessed with toilets and activities related to toilets! Let me explain… (Continued)
Rack & Roll
We’ve gone a little too far into politics lately, and away from reading on the toilet. It’s time to get back to toilet talk! What better way to start than with the best toilet paper holder in existence? The people over at Rack and Roll have created the perfect, stylish solution for reading on the toilet. They call it “the neat solution to a dirty habit“. Instead of having a bunch of books and magazines sprawled out on top of your toilet, or getting soiled on the floor, you put them on a stainless steal rack next to the roll! Awesome! Here’s a close up of the rack:
The Rack
Enjoy!
This should be the top story on the national news every night for a week. Why is this not a bigger story?
Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy
Xe most definitely needs to be flushed down the toilet. Read the testimony of John Doe 1 and John Doe 2 if you have any doubts. What the hell is the Obama administration doing keeping Blackwater/Xe lunatics on the payroll?!?!? Courtesy of US taxpayers, they’re getting another 20 million dollars to continue on their crusade in Iraq. From The Nation:
Mr. Prince intentionally deployed to Iraq certain men who shared his vision of Christian supremacy, knowing and wanting these men to take every available opportunity to murder Iraqis. Many of these men used call signs based on the Knights of the Templar, the warriors who fought the Crusades.
In The Nations follow up article we hear that at least some in government are pissed about this:
“These contracts with Blackwater need to stop,” says Representative Jan Schakowsky, an Illinois Democrat and a member of the House Select Committee on Intelligence. “There’s already enough evidence of gross misconduct and serious additional allegations against the company and its owner to negate any possibility that this company should have a presence in Iraq, Afghanistan or any conflict zone–or any contract with the US government.”
There are plenty of bloggers talking about the Obama administration continuing to support Xe, but where is the mainstream media in all this? I guess they’re too busy with the likes of Michael Jackson and Jon and Kate…
Finding the ideal WordPress theme for a particular project isn’t easy, and sometimes it’s simply impossible. If you’ve got a static site that you need to add a blog to, you won’t find a theme that matches exactly, and even finding one that “fits” can be a chore to say the least. I found myself in that situation this past week, and found the perfect solution: Empty Canvas, the perfect WordPress theme.
Adrian Diaconescu created this theme as an “empty canvas” to build on. If you’ve got a custom job to do, but you don’t feel like (or know how) to build a theme from scratch, Empty Canvas is perfect. You don’t have to spend hours trying to undo or modify a theme’s graphics and CSS. With Empty Canvas you really do have a blank template to quickly customize however you like.
Don’t know how to customize a theme? It’s really not difficult. Check out the WordPress Codex on Templates to learn how. Let’s take the sidebar as an example (which doesn’t show by default in the Empty Canvas theme). The Customizing Your Sidebar link on the WordPress Codex on Templates page will show you what to put in the sidebar.php file to pull the data you want there…or how to add custom static code. For instance, to get your “pages” and “categories” to show up in the sidebar, all you need to do is add this code:
<?php wp_list_pages('title_li=<h2>Pages</h2>'); ?>
<li id="categories"><?php _e('Categories:'); ?>
<ul><?php wp_list_cats(); ?></ul>
</li>
If you want to change the way the sidebar looks, or any other part of the theme, just modify the CSS file.
Adrian has also done some incredible work on styled themes. Check out Visual for example…an incredibly cool theme for only $25. Enjoy!
As hard as it is for me to believe, most people don’t know what a browser is. (It’s the software you use to interact with the web…Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Safari, etc.) So, even less are going to know what “duplicate content” or the “cononical link tag” is. However, this is a very important topic for anyone with a website who wants it to rank in the search results.
Many content management systems, like WordPress for blogs, e-commerce carts like Interspire and OSCommerce, Drupal, Joomla, etc. create multiple versions of the same page, with different URL’s. That’s duplicate content…when you have the same content available on two different “pages”. Search engines don’t know which page to rank, and the “link juice” you get from people who link to your site will be watered down…split between the duplicate pages. If you’re using a content management system, it’s likely that you need to do something about this for sites you want to rank well.
To give you an example, some e-commerce sites have sort options for products. You can click on a link to sort by price, in alphabetical order, etc. Each one of these sort options has a different URL. So when Googlebot comes along and visits the links, it sees multiple versions of a nearly identical page. This is bad. WordPress has similar issues, splitting link juice between categories, archives, tags, etc. (Yoast has created a WordPress plugin to deal with this. You can also use his Robots Meta plugin to stop Google from indexing certain pages.)
Getting back to the canonical tag… Google came out with a canonical link tag, which allows you to specify which version of your URL you want them to index, as a solution to some of these duplicate content issues. Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s Web Spam Team, also posted about this canonical link element. The problem is, IT DOESN’T SEEM TO WORK! Read Here.
So what can you do?
It’s not a simple topic, but it’s a problem that many webmasters have, and one that needs to be dealt with if you want your site to rank. If you have any questions, post them in the comments below.
After seeing William Shatner re-read parts of Sarah Palin’s farewell speech, I looked it up on YouTube. I happened upon the Fox News analysis of her speech, with is shocking, appaling, and hilarious at the same time. Check it out:
WHAT!?!?!?!?!?!?!? He gives her speech an A-? What planet are these people on??? If that doesn’t disqualify Fox News as anything but a bunch of crap, I don’t know what does. It’s obvious why Palin dislikes the media…because they show her as she really is! Here’s a more reasonable, and also funny analysis:
And finally…the clip that spurred my search:
If there’s one thing that definitely needs to be flushed down the toilet, it’s high frequency trading. If you’ve got any money in stocks, you’re likely losing some due to companies like Goldman Sachs using your bailout money to artificially inflate the value of stocks by using super computers to make millisecond trades. They’re watching your orders, and quickly sneaking in and inflating prices before you can buy. See this NYTimes article for more, along with this PDF from 12/08. If Sal L. Arnuk and Joseph Saluzzi knew about this at the end of 2008, why hasn’t the government put a stop to it!?!?!?!?
Fortunately Senator Charles Schumer has decided to do something about this, according to the Bloomberg article High-Frequency Trading Faces Challenge From Schumer. Better late than never… A couple of quotes:
“It’s an arms race driven by technology,” said Sang Lee, managing partner at financial-services consultant Aite Group LLC in Boston. “Someone like Chuck Schumer getting involved in the process will create a deeper conversation about where the whole market is headed”…
“This kind of unfair access seriously compromises the integrity of our markets and creates a two-tiered system, where a privileged group of insiders receives preferential treatment,” Schumer wrote. “If allowed to continue, these practices will undermine the confidence of ordinary investors, and drive them away from our capital markets.”
While high frequency trading is not yet illegal, IT SURE AS HELL IS UNETHICAL! Tatyana Shumsky is saying the same, but also questions the legality:
Forget for a moment how lucrative this can be: how is it legal? Front-running, the practice of getting ahead of other people’s orders, is illegal. Yet this is exactly what high frequency traders do – see your orders, get ahead of them, buy low and sell higher to you.
Here are a few more articles on the subject:
High Frequency Trading Programs Ripping Investors Off
High Frequency Trading Is A Scam
Controversial High-Frequency Trading Yields Billions in Profits
Flush it down!
Ok, this video is even crazier than the last:
Looks fun, but totally nuts!
For watching on the toilet:
This video starts off a little slow, but be sure to keep watching. It’s PURE CRAZY!
