June 03, 2004

We're Not Entirely Missing In Action

Random Updates From HQ

Things have been less active here, yes. Partly that's due to political news being sparser during the break between the primary and general elections, and partly because of all the behind-the-scenes things we've been doing to this site.

Also, the past few days have been devoted to starting to move PORTLAND COMMUNIQUE Press -- where we offer print editions of this site as well as books from or about Portland history -- from Cafepress to a new on-demand publishing service which offers more features and better royalties/commissions. We'll have an announcement about that shortly, when we announce the print publication of the first half of the second year of this site.

Off-topic, we have a question: Any other weblogs out there whose authors have noticed this week a referer in their logs that indicates their site was being run through some sort of test_news_source script out of Google? It would seem to suggest that they were testing COMMUNIQUE to see if it fit the criteria for Google News, but prior to seeing this referer we weren't aware that Google News ever considered weblogs for inclusion.

Posted at 01:03 PM | PermalinkComments (8) | TrackBacks (0)
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Comments (8)

  1. Bob R. on 03 Jun 2004

    Speculation: It could be that because you are linked from oregonlive.com (are you?) or another Google-news indexed news source, that they followed the link and are testing to see if you, also, are a news source.

    It may also be that, even though you are a blog, you carry enough news reporting that some combination of keywords is present on your site, warranting further testing.

    - Bob

  2. Josh Berezin on 03 Jun 2004

    That's me. I submitted your blog to Google News, because it is one of my major sources for Portland-area political news, and it's annoying to not get the Communique in my search results.

    And they're going to include it. I got this mail back today:

    --

    Hi Josh,

    Thank you again for your submission. We have reviewed this site and will be including it in Google News in the near future. You should be able to find its articles in Google News within six to eight weeks.

    Thank you for your interest in Google News.

    Regards,
    The Google Team

  3. The One True b!X on 03 Jun 2004

    Rad.

  4. Scott on 03 Jun 2004

    Thanks Josh. More attention for b!X can only help the fundraising.

  5. The One True b!X on 04 Jun 2004

    FYI, my stopgap and interim measure to prevent the recent spate of comment spam swarms successfully blocked 173 attempts today.

    Also, there's an off-chance I might have just solved the problem with Recent Comments (currently over on the archives page) intermittently not working properly, but it will take time to know for sure.

  6. The One True b!X on 04 Jun 2004

    Ah, that didn't take long. Recent Comments problem not fixed after all.

  7. Bill on 10 Jun 2004

    I would be interested in hearing your impressions of the on-demand publishing services and products. I haven't used Cafepress or any other service but they seem very interesting. If you could post about that sometime I think others would be interested as well.

  8. The One True b!X on 10 Jun 2004

    Sure. When I see my first example out of the new place I'm going to use, I will post an item about both services.