Joe Hayes {dot} Org

Where have I been? Well, extremely busy with local projects and folks breathing down my neck to get things done. Eh, good problem to have I guess. Been so busy actually I just now got a chance to read through some of my favorite blogs, namely Matt Cutts (head of the spam team at Google) – and I came accross a post late last month about Google Trends.

You know, for years (literally) I’ve always wanted to be able to exclude certain words when looking at things like “links from an external page” while using Awstats. This especially comes in handy when you have alot of subdomains, as those links are counted as “links” the same way (actually worse, or more often) than links from other (completely different) domains. In my case, I manage free forum and blog hosting services which offer free subdomains… so that’s literally thousands of listings cluttering up what I really want to see (websites passing the most traffic via incoming links) and often eliminated just one word isn’t enough.

Recently I have been working on a large project, BlogSavy, a free blog hosting service. Other than the typical stuff like updating the software to the lastest version of WPMU and getting all the plugins and templates playing nicely with each other, recently there was a forum installed for support. As such, posting updates on both the host’s homepage and in the forum cumbersome, as well as a time waster.

Came across this list of the first registered domain names on the internet. Thought it was rather interesting who jumped on the bandwagon first. It’s great to see they weren’t poker domains, heh. At any rate, here’s the list.

1. 15-Mar-1985 SYMBOLICS.COM
2. 24-Apr-1985 BBN.COM
3. 24-May-1985 THINK.COM
4. 11-Jul-1985 MCC.COM

So you’ve started a blog? Congratulations, unfortunately though - if you build it, they will not come. Who’s they? Visitors, traffic, people coming to your website to read what’s on your mind. There are many things involved in the building of a successful blog, none more important than writing stuff people actually want to read.