Brian Mark - Guitaraholic

I got the first step of the checkout process Ajaxified today on the live site. Because of all the issues I could cause by installing Norton, disabling JavaScript, etc. that I'm actually just giving "Helpful hints" if some input is wrong. For example, an invalid postal code or an invalid email address. Now I get to start checking for valid postal addresses and trying the same thing. A bit trickier, and a lot more possible instances. For example, is it valid, not valid, valid with multiple matches or invalid with multiple matches? Now, how do I convey all those messages? Should prove interesting.

I've been watching closely for that BOC on Woot for the past 2 days. Now, the woot-off is done, and all I have to show for it is an airplane (that'll be fun with my boys) and a monkey. Yes, I got a monkey. No, you can't have it. But I still haven't been able to buy a BOC, and having a woot-off without a BOC didn't feel as fulfilling. Sure, it was still fun seeing all sorts of junk flying by on my screen, but c'mon, where's the BOC? What's up with that, woot? :(

Now that we're going to put our current back-end into a new site, it turned out to be the perfect time to buy another mini. We'll have two v2 minis running for ToolBarn and a v1 mini on the new site. That'll make load balancing much less of a headache. Also interesting is that they no longer include the print books with the machine, instead giving a CD with the instructions. Seems much smarter to me. Oh, and they now have a 30 day trial. Excellent. I look forward to experimenting with the price range search on the v2, so overall this should be a great upgrade. I'm pretty happy with the $2k we spent this week.

A .gov.cn with parasite hosting? And it is ranking for our name? Huh? Actually, this isn't even that complicated to be considered parasite... or is it? I really don't get why this is here , but it was in the SERPs for the ToolBarn name and seems to be an open proxy via CGI. Why do people leave these things lying around? Are they that clueless?

Bow to me, like Epiar . Their comments just made me laugh on this image . Thanks, Ken and company. :)

Hmmm... I'm familiar with Experian, but I had no idea they were looking at Hitwise. The full announcement can be read here . It sounds like most of the people that have been there are staying. It should be interesting to see if this improves the service at all (more backing to get more data) or if it'll stay where it's at. I can always dream, can't I?

Ok, so I don't usually pay that much attention to the look of the SERPs on Google. I've noticed the yellow, noticed the 50 results earlier today, but I got a funky new look tonight. Blue lines and no background color for the ads. I wish they'd pick a look already and get on with it. Oh, and clicking on the image will give a clearer view. This one just seemed creepy to me. I didn't like it at all, mostly because it's so chopped up. Oh, well... it's their site to mess up I guess. One other change that was noticed on this version: No links for the other Google services above the search box, and it doesn't show me as logged in (or able to log in). Final thing I just noticed... on the "Standard" results, I show 294M results for the two word phrase power tools. With this new look, I only get 20M results. What happened to the other 274M?