DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

parsley
hard-boiled egg
pickle
French fries
slice of tomato
chicken
tuna

…or first names from the personalized souvenirs at Cuxhaven harbor

Bernd
Jorg
Krawumm
Ernst
Krch
Rong
Flupp
Joachim
Wumms

1. The carpets: The 500 West Hotel was built in 1924. I think this is when the carpets were put in. I suspect they may have been listed with the National Register of Historical Artifacts, as that would explain why they haven’t yet been hauled into the desert and summarily burned.
   
2. The bathrooms: The hotel website makes impressive claims about them:

   Every bathroom is lockable, self contained and private. Our professional housekeeping staff restocks and cleans every bathroom around the clock, 24 hours a day. If you think the bathroom at your home is clean, wait until you enjoy one of ours!

   Don’t believe the hype. At one point I hung a dirty towel in one bathroom as a test; it was still there the next morning. Convenient, in one sense, but sort of gross in another.

   Some of the bathrooms are worse than others, not because they’re more soiled, but ironically because they’re more clean — due to the wall-mounted Ecolab dispenser that squirts disinfectant into the room… and its occupants.

3. The irons: burned and sticky. I went for the wrinkled look.
   
4. The broken elevator: Actually, the fact that this one was out of order could be considered a safety feature, considering how badly the other elevator shakes.
5. The nearby train crossing.
   
6. The expired safety permit for the one elevator that still works.
   
7. The flaky wifi connection.
8. The mattress condom.
   
9. The apparent hotel policy of 1 blanket per guest. Requests for extras will be met by front-desk staff with a cheerful smile, a scratch of a pen on a scrap of paper, and … actually, that was the end of the exchange.

   Which brings us to:

10. The indifferent desk clerks: They smile, they nod. They don’t produce clean irons or spare blankets.

    On the other hand, they did promptly call the San Diego police when one of the guests threatened to break down the door of her neighbor.

So, you get what you pay for. At $50/night, the 500 West is one-sixth the cost of some of the other hotels in the area. It’s the most affordable, or even the only affordable hotel downtown. But ultimately the question of whether it’s worth it cannot be easily answered… at least not until my pathology report comes back.

In a conversation about music recommendation services — LivePlasma, Pandora and the Music Genome Project, Last.fm, and the like — Robert Kaye of MusicBrainz.org relayed an idea that I found immensely appealing and maybe a little frightening too. It goes like this:

Invite a few close friends over. Have each bring a few songs that carry some personal significance. Have each friend introduce their songs, telling why each one is important and what to listen for. And then listen.

Impose no restrictions on what qualifies a song as significant. Paraphrasing Mr. Kaye, whether it’s because someone played the song for three days while crying his or her eyes out when a relationship ended, or because s/he just thinks the drum part is really cool… it’s all equally valid.

Robert acknowledged that one of the challenges is getting people to listen. If the group talks through the music, you’ve missed the point.

I find this idea deeply compelling, perhaps because it recalls a related activity that (as Robert observed) nobody does much of after college — namely, sitting down to actively consume music. This is absolutely true in my case. Although I have music playing most of the time, I’m invariably doing something else while it plays, even if that something is analysing the mix. This is a significantly different sort of listening; moreover, it is one which is less enjoyable than the sort of abandonment of consciousness that used to accompany music listening. I guess I’m a bit nostalgaic for the days when I made time for it.

This blog has historically had a relatively high PageRank value, a benefit I attributed to the fact that the software that drives it was created to meet what everybody understood to be best SEO practices in 2000-2001 — for example, each article has a short and eternal URL (mouse over any article title to see its permalink), a unique and descriptive page title, and so on. I’m not sure whether SEO was an industry in 2001, but certainly it was a skill of webmasters and web engineers to build indexable websites, and SEO guidelines were formost in my mind as I architected this website.

My site’s PageRank changed in early 2006. I was reading about SEO, ironically, and I learned that sites answering to multiple URLs risk getting penalized in Google’s index due to Google’s new (early-2006) duplicate content filtering algorithm. Although I’ve only ever published my own blog URL without the ‘www’ hostname, the server hosting this site responded to both forms of the URL: both debris.com and www.debris.com. Every page on the website was available at both addresses.

I followed Matt Cutts’ advice in early 2006 to use a 301 redirect to automagically forward everyone who was trying to get to www.debris.com (or any page there) to the equivalent page at debris.com. Shortly after that, my PageRank disappeared — the Firefox PageRank plug-in reported it as “n/a;” multiple-datacenter survey tools mostly reported it as blank, with a couple datacenters inexplicably still showing 4-5.

At first I thought this was a temporary condition resulting from the 301 redirection. I waited a month or two to see if a subsequent PageRank push would reveal the effect I’d intended, that the previous PageRank of 5 for www.debris.com and 4 for debris.com would consolidate to a solid 5 or maybe even a 6 for the canonical domain. Alas, this never happened.

In May, 2006 I created an XML sitemap to seed Google’s crawlers with the newest content from this site, thinking that perhaps this would cement in the crawlers’ collective mind that, despite inbound links from 3rd party sites to formerly duplicate-content URLs, everything was happy and canonical and uniquely addressed on the server, using the technique advocated by Google’s own webspam master, Matt Cutts. The sitemap reduced traffic from the crawlers — reflecting my on-again, off-again publishing style — but unfortunately didn’t correct the site’s missing PageRank.

By early 2007, I had waited more than six months. I wondered if my site had been inadvertently penalized, for its PageRank never came back.

So, I did the thing I should have done last March, as soon as my PageRank disappeared — I filed a reinclusion request. Honestly I didn’t really need to be “reincluded,” as my site was still in the Google index, and did turn up in searches for which my site is authoritative. But it was the only trigger I had left to pull.

A week or two later I took an additional step, inspired by a blog post by Rogers Cadenhead. He described that his blog software showed his entries at multiple addresses — the home page, the category pages, the tag pages, and on each item’s permalink page. This is how debris.com works as well. Rogers describes this as a “huge mistake.” I personally disagree; this seems to me to be a service to the user. And I have to point out that Matt Cutts’ blog shows full posts at multiple URLs, all of which turn up in Google’s index.

But as Rogers points out, the best case outcome of this seems to be that Google shows an italicized message at the bottom of results pages indicating that duplicate results have been omitted. I followed his lead and sequestered all but the permalink URL from Google’s crawlers, via “nofollow” attributes on category-page HREFs and robots.txt entries for those pages. Also I dropped the category pages from the XML sitemap.

I’m not sure these category-page changes made any difference, but the reinclusion request certainly did; this site is now showing an all-time high PageRank of 6.

And it only took 30 days. Or 13 months, depending on how you count it.