So, I created this blog yesterday. Already if you search for “arun blog le” in Google it comes up with this site. Google must have very tightly integrated Blogger with their indexing. I have added a keywords meta tag to try and get a search for Arun Stephens to yield the blog as a result. At the moment my main web site (with less content than this one) comes up trumps, which is fine (preferable, even) but it would be good if this could come up too. I haven’t actually written my full name on any of the pages (until now) so there’s no reason that it would have come up in the search results anyway.

Yesterday I was reading, mostly in Wikipedia, about photo sharing sites. I had tried Flickr once before and didn’t really like it. I think it was because it was too difficult to get the photos in the right order (the order I took them, rather than the order in which I uploaded them). Maybe it has changed by now, or maybe I was just stupid. In any case, it should have been easier. I learnt about Zooomr yesterday. I checked it out, but it turns out they are currently upgrading to Zooomr Mark III, and the site’s been down for a couple of days. They’ve run into some problems during the upgrade but I am eager to check it out. I think that it’s probably not going to be the best time to create a new account with all the old account people checking out the new features but I will persevere – when it’s ready.

I also did a search for myself in Technorati today. I’m already there. It’s very strange. It’s a lot different to 11 years ago, when I created my first home page on GeoCities. (I just had a check back through old emails to see whether I had the old address to put here for prosperity but I don’t. I probably do have the first site somewhere on DVD, CD or floppy. That will be weird to look at.) Anyway, back in 1996 I had to manually submit my site to all the search engines (Excite and Lycos were the big ones back then) and wait a few weeks for the site to be included in the index. Now it’s almost instantaneous.

So now to test the speed of Technorati. Blogger automatically pings weblogs.com. I’m not entirely sure what weblogs.com does with it but I guess other sites can get a list of recently updated blogs from them, and that “other sites” could conceivably include Technorati.

Thats all for now.

Hello again

So, I created this blog this morning at school. I have been playing around with it this afternoon and have come to the conclusion that Blogger‘s not bad at all.

The reason I originally decided against using Blogger or something similar was that I wanted a way to restrict access to certain articles to certain people. The same thing with photos. For photos it was more important actually, because I didn’t (and still don’t) want photos of me available for the world to see. But it’s not worth the trouble.

I’m trying to find a decent place to put my photos. I have just signed up for Photobucket but it doesn’t let you restrict access to photos. Does anyone know of a good one that would let me create groups of people and let particular groups access photos? Or that lets you create albums and only let certain users look at the album? Photobucket doesn’t do that yet, but says it will be eventually.