Puzzlepieces – tag ‘faganfinder’

Via Alf, I learn that apparently delicious has long supported lookup by domain and path, not just absolute URL.

I took a look through all the bookmarks of my old website, Fagan Finder, and it turned up a few interesting things. The most popular page, with some commentary:

1. URLinfo (688). This makes sense because it is (well, was) a useful tool for web developers, bloggers, etc., the typical audience of delicious, however it is definitely not one of the most popular pages by the site’s own statistics.
2. All About RSS (568), with bookmarks spread over 34 different URLs. Aside from the bookmarks to specific sections of the page, this shows the results of moving the URL by changing the file extension, although I did use a 301 redirect. This page is no longer one of the popular pages in terms of traffic.
3. Google Ultimate Interface (377). Aside from the oddity of this not-that-useful page being so popular, what’s interesting is that a long time ago I created a second version that failed to work in Mozilla, so I had it redirect to the old version for those users which I thought (at the time) would be rare… yet there are almost 6 times as many bookmarks for the Mozilla/Firefox version.
4. Image Search Engines (322) - finally we come to a page that is actually popular among the general public; it’s also the only page on my old site that I updated “recently”
5. Translation Wizard (201) - sadly this hardly works any more but I loved the idea and spent an insane amount of time to build this

Another thing I noticed is that a tool I’d once built but never referred to anywhere, and could only be found by going to a tag page on this blog and clicking “more” in the sidebar somewhere somehow has 10 bookmarks.

Google Webmaster Tools - Webmaster Tools - this will now show you all links that Google knows of to your own pages.

Some things I noticed

• there is a lot of spam, especially search result pages and wikipedia clones
• Google’s indexing multiple versions of wiki pages on pbwiki.com

So I was looking at the stats for Fagan Finder; it’s always nice to see new data, and I’ve never been very good at keeping track of it all myself. According to Google, 64% of the links are to the Translation Wizard. In second place is my article on RSS at 13%, and URLinfo at 8%. 98% of links to the Translation Wizard are websites using the translate this page feature. I had to play with the data in Excel to arrive at this.

Clearly there’s a power law going on here. And this is yet another confirmation that the Translation Wizard was a huge winner, and since it is largely broken now, seriously needs an update. I just do not have the time. Ideas, anyone?

Image Search Engines || Fagan Finder - virtually all of Fagan Finder has stagnated since 2005 (if not 2002/2003), and I definitely do not have the time to give it the upgrade it deserves. Anyhow, so I decided to update the image search page… taking out all the dead links, etc., and putting in some newer stuff. You’d be surprised how long that takes, even though I didn’t bother adding descriptions for the new additions like I used to.

The image search page has been among the most popular pages on Fagan Finder since it was created in May 2003, and I often get requests for people who want to advertise on the page. So now I have updated it (first time since June 2003), added an ad spot (right now it shows Google Adsense 50% of the time and Adbrite 50% of the time, but I’m still playing with that. For the latter, I have it set that I must approve all ads.

Somehow, despite removing dead and crummy websites, it has gone from 42 search tools and 42 external links to 65 search tools and 42 external links. The page is seriously getting crowded. Anyhow, let me know if you find any bugs or if I’m missing anything.