I've noticed something strange about Blogspot. Have you seen the same thing? It's a bug in the word wrapping algorithm. This is the logic by which the software decides when to wrap to a new line within a single paragraph. It seems that the Blogspot word wrap algorithm doesn't want to start a new line with a quotation mark. To avoid this it will wrap too early and leave the previous line way too short. This is especially noticeable if the previous word is a long one. Let me see if I can create a couple of examples.
[If you follow this blog via a feed reader you will need to click the link and see this post in its original location on Geekspiel.]
With quotes:
The formatting method for quotations is incontrovertably "suboptimal" on Blogspot.
Without quotes:
The formatting method for quotations is incontrovertably suboptimal on Blogspot.
I kid you not; I did not insert the line break in the first example. Does anybody understand why this happens?
Showing posts with label blogging. Show all posts
Showing posts with label blogging. Show all posts
Saturday, April 19, 2008
Tuesday, March 25, 2008
Toshiba A205-S5805 Specs
Looking for the specs on Toshiba's A205-S5805 laptop? You can find them here.
One of the many joys of operating a low volume blog in the backwaters of the Internet is setting up a hit counter and monitoring the traffic on your site. (I use StatCounter. Free and highly recommended.) It's interesting to see what pages are attracting attention and where the page hits are coming from. A couple of weeks ago I told you about buying a new budget Toshiba laptop for my eldest son to use at college. This particular model, evidently, is a configuration Toshiba put together just for Fry's Electronics and information on it is hard to find, even on Toshiba's web site. Not long after we bought the laptop Toshiba even removed what little info they had from their web site. As far as I can tell you can't find anything by following the links on their home page. However, like the grin of the Cheshire cat, they left behind a PDF of the spec sheet, which is the document I linked above.
What's this got to do with page hits? I've noticed several hits lately from desperate souls searching the Internet for information about this model. So, as a public service I have posted the above link, which I pulled from my browser history.
BTW, you can glean some interesting tidbits about Google's page rank algorithm from looking at the page hits. For one, if the keyword appears in the URL of the page it get ranked much higher than if it merely appears in the body of the page. This is why I titled this post as I did, so it will be found by the folks looking for the laptop specs. Another interesting tidbit is that a blog gets a temporary ratings boost (lasting less than 24 hours) when a new page is posted. I don't know if this works for blog hosts other than blogspot.com, which is owned by Google. Another surprise to me is that when I first created each of my blogs, after the initial temporary ratings boost it disappeared completely from the Google results until people began to visit it and link to it.
If you blog I highly recommend StatCounter. Maybe it only appeals to geeks. But I find it endlessly fascinating. My favorite feature is a Google map of the world with a pushpin showing the location of every recent hit. It never ceases to amaze me when one of my blogs gets hit from Moscow or Bangladesh or Antigua and Barbuda. Now, if any of those folks actually read anything before hitting the Back button is another matter entirely!
One of the many joys of operating a low volume blog in the backwaters of the Internet is setting up a hit counter and monitoring the traffic on your site. (I use StatCounter. Free and highly recommended.) It's interesting to see what pages are attracting attention and where the page hits are coming from. A couple of weeks ago I told you about buying a new budget Toshiba laptop for my eldest son to use at college. This particular model, evidently, is a configuration Toshiba put together just for Fry's Electronics and information on it is hard to find, even on Toshiba's web site. Not long after we bought the laptop Toshiba even removed what little info they had from their web site. As far as I can tell you can't find anything by following the links on their home page. However, like the grin of the Cheshire cat, they left behind a PDF of the spec sheet, which is the document I linked above.
What's this got to do with page hits? I've noticed several hits lately from desperate souls searching the Internet for information about this model. So, as a public service I have posted the above link, which I pulled from my browser history.
BTW, you can glean some interesting tidbits about Google's page rank algorithm from looking at the page hits. For one, if the keyword appears in the URL of the page it get ranked much higher than if it merely appears in the body of the page. This is why I titled this post as I did, so it will be found by the folks looking for the laptop specs. Another interesting tidbit is that a blog gets a temporary ratings boost (lasting less than 24 hours) when a new page is posted. I don't know if this works for blog hosts other than blogspot.com, which is owned by Google. Another surprise to me is that when I first created each of my blogs, after the initial temporary ratings boost it disappeared completely from the Google results until people began to visit it and link to it.
If you blog I highly recommend StatCounter. Maybe it only appeals to geeks. But I find it endlessly fascinating. My favorite feature is a Google map of the world with a pushpin showing the location of every recent hit. It never ceases to amaze me when one of my blogs gets hit from Moscow or Bangladesh or Antigua and Barbuda. Now, if any of those folks actually read anything before hitting the Back button is another matter entirely!
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