Break

Report Finds Little Progress On Iraq Goals - washingtonpost.com

Iraq has failed to meet all but three of 18 congressionally mandated benchmarks for political and military progress, according to a draft of a Government Accountability Office report. The document questions whether some aspects of a more positive assessment by the White House last month adequately reflected the range of views the GAO found within the administration.

To me, the most intersesting bit in the report is this little gem:

While it makes no policy recommendations, the draft suggests that future administration assessments “would be more useful” if they backed up their judgments with more details and “provided data on broader measures of violence from all relevant U.S. agencies.”

Powered by ScribeFire.

Anyone who doesn’t know the call sign WDRE didn’t live in the Philadelphia area in the 90s. WDRE was a Philly alternative rock station which introduced alot of amazing artists to the area.

Regrettably, the media consolidation of the late 90s made WDRE a liability and they changed their format. However, due in part to a dedicated staff including Jim McGuinn, DRE refused to die.

Anyone who knows me can attest to my distaste for radio. I may have to rethink my position. Recently I discovered that my favorite radio station has found a new home on WXPN, a radio station run by the Universty of Pennslyvania.

Y-Rock on XPN to me represent all the things I used to like about radio, DJs who care, an interesting playlist. It’s a refreshing escape from the homogeny that currently exists on the FM dial. I encourage anyone who likes the alternative to listen and support this station.

For a trip down memory lane, listen to the WDRE takeover of YROCK which aired in Feb. 2007.

Written by Ben D'Angelo, Search Quality Team

First, a brief recap: In late 2005, we started emailing webmasters to let them know that their site is violating our Webmaster Guidelines and that we have temporarily removed some of their pages from our index. A few months ago we put these emails on hold due to a number of spoofed messages being sent from outside Google, primarily to German webmasters. Then, in mid-July, we launched Message Center in our webmaster console, which allows us to send messages to verified site owners.

While Message Center is great for verified site owners, it doesn't allow us to notify webmasters who aren't registered in Google's Webmaster Tools. For this reason, we plan to resume sending emails in addition to the Message Center notifications. Please note that, as before, our emails will not include attachments. Currently, the Message Center won't keep messages waiting if you haven't previously registered, but we hope to add that feature in the next few months. We'll keep you posted as things change.

Written by Trevor Foucher, Webmaster Tools Team

I'm happy to announce that Webmaster Tools is expanding support for webmasters outside of the English-speaking world, by supporting Internationalizing Domain Names in Applications (IDNA). IDNA provides a way for site owners to have domains that go beyond the domain name system's limitations of English letters and numbers. Prior to IDNA, Internet host names could only be in the 26 letters of the English alphabet, the numbers 0-9, and the hyphen character. With IDNA support, you'll now be able to add your sites that use other character sets, and organize them easily on your Webmaster Tools Dashboard.

Let's say you wanted to add http://北京大学.cn/ (Peking University) to your Webmaster Tools account before we launched IDNA support. If you typed that in to the "Add Site" box, you'd get back an error message that looks like this:



Some webmasters discovered a workaround. Internally, IDNA converts nicely encoded http://北京大学.cn/ to a format called Punycode, which looks like http://xn--1lq90ic7fzpc.cn/. This allowed them to diagnose and view information about their site, but it looked pretty ugly. Also, if they had more than one IDNA site, you can imagine it would be pretty hard to tell them apart.



Since we now support IDNA throughout Webmaster Tools, all you need to do is type in the name of your site, and we will add it correctly. Here is what it looks like if you attempt to add http://北京大学.cn/ to your account:



If you are one of the webmasters who discovered the workaround previously (i.e., you have had sites listed in your account that look like http://xn--1lq90ic7fzpc.cn/), those sites will now automatically display correctly.

We'd love to hear your questions and feedback on this new feature; you can write a comment below or post in the Google Webmaster Tools section of our Webmaster Help Group. We'd also appreciate suggestions for other ways we can improve our international support.

Written by Jonathan Simon

Posted by John Blackburn, Webmaster Tools and Matt Dougherty, Search Quality

Reporting is better, too. You'll now be told of multiple problems per line if they exist, unlike earlier versions which only reported the first problem encountered. And we've made other general improvements to analysis and validation.

Imagine that you're responsible for the domain www.example.com and you want search engines to index everything on your site, except for your /images folder. You also want to make sure your sitemap gets noticed, so you save the following as your robots.txt file:

You visit Webmaster Central to test your site against the robots.txtanalysis tool using these two test URLs:

Earlier versions of the tool would have reported this:



The improved version tells you more about that robots.txt file:





We also want to make sure you've heard about the new unavailable_after META
tag announced by Dan Crow on the Official Google Blog a few weeks ago. This allows for a more dynamic relationship between your site and Googlebot. Just think, with www.example.com, any time you have a temporarily available news story or limited offer sale or promotion page, you can specify the exact date and time you want specific
pages to stop being crawled and indexed.

Let's assume you are running a promotion that expires at the end of 2007. In the headers of page www.example.com/2007promotion.html, you would use the following:

<META NAME="GOOGLEBOT"
CONTENT="unavailable_after: 31-Dec-2007 23:59:59 EST">

The second exciting news: the new X-Robots-Tag directive, which adds Robots Exclusion Protocol (REP) META tag support for non-HTML pages! Finally, you can have the same control over your videos, spreadsheets, and other indexed file types. Using the example above, let's say your promotion page is in PDF format. For www.example.com/2007promotion.pdf, you would use the following:

X-Robots-Tag: unavailable_after: 31 Dec
2007 23:59:59 EST

Remember, REP META tags can be useful for implementing noarchive, nosnippet, and now unavailable_after tags for page-level instruction, as opposed to robots.txt, which is controlled at the domain root. We get requests from bloggers and webmasters for these features, so enjoy. If you have other suggestions, keep them coming. Any questions? Please ask them in the Webmaster Help Group.

Great tip from Better Homes and Garden, found by way of Lifehacker.
Hanging pictures on a blank wall can be rough, especially with all of the hit-and-miss involved in aligning your frames and hammering in your nails. Better Homes and Gardens has a tip for getting your wall hangings right the first time so you don’t end up with three holes side by side while you attempt the perfect hang.

1. Trace pictures onto brown kraft paper and cut out. Label each of the papers with a description of the picture or a corresponding number.
2. Using blue painter’s tape (which won’t pull up wall paint), tape the papers to the wall. Experiment with arrangements until you have one you like.
3. Install picture-hanging hardware directly through the paper. Pull paper away and hang pictures one by one.

The third step is the real kicker; by installing through the paper, you should have a much better idea of exactly where to put your nail than you do when hanging without the paper.

According to the associated press, people in 41 countries are living longer than we are.

A baby born in the United States in 2004 will live an average of 77.9 years. That life expectancy ranks 42nd, down from 11th two decades earlier, according to international numbers provided by the Census Bureau and domestic numbers from the National Center for Health Statistics.

Several factors have contributed to the US falling behind other industrialized nations.

A major one is that 45 million Americans lack health insurance, while Canada and many European countries have universal health care, they say.

Powered by ScribeFire.

Written by Panayiotis Mavrommatis, Anti-Malware Team

In the past year, the number of sites affected by malware/badware grew from a handful a week to thousands per week. We noted your suggestions to improve communication for webmasters of affected sites -- suggestions mentioned in our earlier blog post "About badware warnings" as well as the stopbadware discussion group. Now, Webmaster Tools provides malware reviews.

If you find that your site is affected by malware, either through malware-labeled search results or in the summary for your site in Webmaster Tools, we've streamlined the process to review your site and return it malware-label-free in our search results:

1. View a sample of the dangerous URLs on your site in Webmaster Tools.
2. Make any necessary changes to your site according to StopBadware.org's Security tips.
3. New: Request a malware review from Google and we'll evaluate your site.
4. New: Check the status of your review.
• If we feel the site is still harmful, we'll provide an updated list of remaining dangerous URLs
• If we've determined the site to be clean, you can expect removal of malware messages in the near future (usually within 24 hours).

We encourage all webmasters to become familiar with Stopbadware's malware prevention tips. If you have additional questions, please review our documentation or post to the discussion group. We hope you find this new feature in Webmaster Tools useful in discovering and fixing any malware-related problems, and thanks for your diligence for awareness and prevention of malware.

If you’ve ever called a customer support number and were stuck navigating through endless messages then the Gethuman website is just for you.

The Gethuman database contains a list of company phone numbers and - more importantly, the instructions for bypassing the phone system to speak with a human.

Powered by ScribeFire.

Technorati Tags: Productivity, tips, telephone