Mishmash of Stuff That Occurred to Me as I was Existing Last Night

"Try the extra crispy."
(joke copyright D. Letterman)

Is it just me, or is Phil Jackson looking more and more like Colonel Sanders? He came back to the NBA with a limp, so he now just looks like an old man out there. He's not the cool and in-control "Zen Master" anymore. He's just somebody's grandpa. Actually, he kinda looks like a stereotypical plantation owner. In any case, he should start wearing white 3-piece suits and holding a bucket of fried chicken. That would be awesome.

I've been trying to drive traffic to my blog via "Blog Search Engines." These little munchkins index blogs and allow you to search them by the words they contain. That's how it's supposed to work, anyway. I have been testing the two main blog search engines (Icerocket.com and Google Blog Search Beta) to see if my incredibly entertaining posts have shown up in their search results. When I post, I'm supposed to publish in such a format that these search engines notice. My findings have been deeply frustrating and yucko.

First, Icerocket. Now if I know Icerocket, Mark Cuban probably has them trolling the internet right now looking for bloggers who post the word "icerocket." I just posted it 3 times, so they'll probably e-mail me responding to this post. For that reason, I can't really rip them, even though I've got problems with their little search thingy. When I search for, say, "Andrew Bogut," in an attempt to find this thing I posted yesterday on my sports blog, it doesn't come up. I can search and search all day and never get it. Now, the post from the day before comes up, but not today's. This is curious, but I've got a theory as to why this is. I think the Icerocket people look over all posts from the blogspot.com domain looking for what they call "splogs" or spam blogs that just exist to advertise and have no actual human content. Mark Cuban has become so fed up by these splogs that he now has to pore over every post people make through Blogger to blogspot.com, just to make sure they're legit. This story is boring and I'm sorry for that, but what it means to me is that my posts now take 24 hours or more to show up on Icerocket, and by that time they're already obsolete and 4 pages down in the queue (it gives results by time posted, last posts first. In that way, it's very Biblical). This sucks. I guess I could solve this problem by "simulcasting" my blog posts to another domain, but I don't know if I'm going to do that yet. I don't even know if that will help. All I know is, there were a bunch of spare recaps of the Bucks/Nets game that showed up above mine, and that is not acceptable to me or the internet community, who clearly needs a good recap of last night's Bucks game with their afternoon sandwich.

Much more frustrating the problem presented to me by Google's, and therefore Blogger's, own search engine, Google Blog Search Beta (I'm not linking to it until they meet my demands). These are my "peeps," right? They wouldn't do me wrong! But they did. Here is a summary of what I found:
When I search for "Andrew Bogut" in the general blog listings by date, I cannot find my post. However, when I search for just "Bogut," it's there plain as day. The post says "Andrew Bogut" at least twice. That makes no sense, but that's not the really annoying part. What ticks me off is that you can do an advanced search for "Andrew Bogut" with the author "Mike Pape" and pull my post right up. What does this mean? They are filtering my posts out of the general blog listings for some search results but not for others. Not only does this hurt my exposure, it makes absolutely no sense. I realize that this is technically "beta," which means it's not ready for release yet, but with Icerocket delaying me a whole day I need Blogger to treat me well. I am a victim here, but I don't know who to blame. Therefore, I get to choose who to blame, and I pick the Trilateralists. Did you know their name means "people who go sideways in three directions"? I don't know what that means.

In other news, the NBA's Western Conference? Sucks. More on that and other stuff here.