I’m still mostly offline, but luckily UMTS offers a sort of solution. It works alright, but it is fairly expensive and I’m counting my bytes again. Still better than helplessly and hopelessly waiting for local telecom to fix ADSL, which judging by previous experience may happen who knows when.

I’ve been looking for an Atom feed generator and I can’t find anything more than a few exploratory hacks. Is there something out there that would at least resemble PyRSS2Gen ?

What I’d like is something that returns a proper Atom 1.0 feed and doesn’t choke on non-ascii using languages. I’m sure I’m missing something. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

I’ll be mostly offline at least until the middle of next week. Elektro Ljubljana was fixing something on Saturday and we only got our electricity back. ADSL is out and since Monday and Tuesday are holidays, I can only hope that Wednesday will bring good news.

It’s a bit tricky to do Internet related development without, well, Internet.

In last couple of weeks I’ve begin to notice that ever larger part of my visitors are coming to my site through search engines, most of them from Google. I seem to be the most unsatisfied WordPress user or at least the loudest of the lot. I find Google’s ranking algorithms highly perplexing and therefore extremely interesting. So far the only thing I learned about them is that I haven’t got a clue.

I’ve added Google ads to this blog a couple of days ago. A move, which unsurprisingly didn’t lead to instant riches and a life of a professional writer and won’t do so anytime soon. But I am learning and when I’ll have enough data for an actually meaningful statistical analysis, I might even write a word or two about it.

Of course lack of data doesn’t stop me from thinking about it and the question that’s been on my mind these last few days is, does showing Google ads influence your page rank in their search engine?

Let me be clear upfront. I don’t think it does and also have absolutely no reason to think otherwise.

But opportunity is there. Obviously it doesn’t make sense for Google to promote websites solely because they show their ads. Bad search results would lead to exodus of their users to other search engines fairly quickly.

However, let us imagine a scenario where we have two websites with the same calculated rank for a given query. One has Google ads and the other doesn’t. There’s obvious benefit of favoring the one with ads, but the risk of doing so is probably quite small. After all, they have the same rank.

I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that Google favors “their” websites in situations like this and truthfully, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with it.