QuackTrack : Send the Duck to Find It For You

Working on all kinds of geeky things over the holidays. Making plans to move this blog and, actually, this whole domain to a new webhost, splitting up the domain’s content into two domains after the New Year. So, if you start getting 404’s over here on anything, don’t fret, we’ll get it sorted out eventually. Hopefully there won’t be too many horrible glitches to sort through, but we’ll see how it goes.

I’m also currently doing a beta test for Blogshares in the top of the sidebar; there’s a little text ad at the bottom of that block. Players may soon be able to buy text ads on other players’ blogs paying for them with Blogshares chips everytime someone clicks on the ad. The game’s Help system is also undergoing a few changes, and Rob is working on sorting out the transaction collision problems that have plagued the game since Day One. Over the next week, I’ll be working on fixing stock share discrepancies which were caused by the transaction collisions in the database, starting with the Top 100 Blogs in the index and working my way through the index doing corrections. As of right now, BlogShares is indexing 2,123,411 blogs, and the team is working on ways of keeping the index clean of 404’s, abandoned blogs, and linkfarms.

You might also take a look at the new QuackTrack search engine for blogs, being developed by the crew from Santa Cruz Tech. It’s a useful interface to the backend index that BlogShares is developed around, allowing you to search through the index for interesting blogs. In addition, VI (aka Village Idiot) has developed a Firefox plugin for QuackTrack which puts the blog search engine inside the Firefox browser’s search box. (It’s the bottom link on that page.)