A Night At Mineroad

I decided to brave the evils of a dial up Internet connection and spend the night at my family farm tonight (it’s amazing what lengths you will go to in order to get home made cookies). I’d put up some pics to show you the place that inspired this domain but I left my digital cam at home and it’s being flaky anyway. It always amazes me how much productivity will increase when you are placed in the middle of nowhere for short periods. Tonight I sat down to finish a logo for a client and actually managed to not get distracted from the task at all. If you know me then you know that this is a rare feat. I generally tend to take mini breaks a good bit when I’m working. If you can’t tell there really wasn’t any point to this post. I just felt like putting some words to screen for some reason. Oh well I guess that just happens sometimes.

SPAM Annoyance

Well I couldn’t sleep tonight so I decided to check in on this dusty corner of my server to see how it was holding up. To my dismay I found somewhere in the arena of 600 or so Spam comments spread across the site. To say the least I am slightly annoyed at this. So until I update WordPress to it’s newest version and get some new, improved Spam filter plug-ins commenting has been turned off on the entire site. I hope to have this taken care of by the weekend.

New Google Sitemaps Toys

I was poking my head around Digg.com today and ran across a story saying they had added some new functionality to Google Sitemaps. Now considering I’m a Sitemaps advocate with all of my clients I had to go take a look and see what all the fuss was about. Upon verifying your site by FTPing a empty HTML file to your root directory you are able to access some statistics for your site. These include query stats, crawl stats, page analysis and index stats. Inside of these base options you can see how well your pages rank, what your top queries were and where Google ran into problems indexing your site. Right now the information is vague but anything helps when it comes to Google in my opinion. I hope to see expanded functionality and more detailed information in the future.

Oh on a side note you don’t actually need to have a sitemap up to use this feature. Just add your site and verify it within your account and you are good to go.