"This space intentionally left blank" - Google, fix you results from spam and malware!

So this morning I opened up google.com and noticed quite a change: everything except the Google logo and the input box were not visible. And they added a small sentence "This space intentionally left blank." Just look at the following screenshot:



When moving your mouse everything else quickly fades in, resulting in the standard look of google:



So actually a pretty neat idea of google - emphasizing their image of a very fast and clean search engine. And when you need more information you can just wiggle your mouse a little bit and all relevant information gets displayed. (By the way: Google Chrome doesn't display the bare-bones sites and always displays all buttons and links)

As a curios person I then wanted to search for previous discussions of this change. But beware - searching for the term "This space intentionally left blank google" will give you the following result page:

The first five hits all lead to malware-infested sites (as I so nicely illustrated using MS Paint ;-) ) . These sites are pretty convincing IMHO and could easily lead a not-so-technically-inclined user to install malware / adware / virus / trojan, etc. So Google, please fix your result pages for the search term "this space intentionally left blank google"!!!

Exams, marriage, honeymoon and exams again - what a month!

Wow! The last 2 months were extremely exciting. And I didn't have time to blog - why?

So I had two pretty big exams on the 7th and 11th of August. Two days later I got married and we went to bed at around 5:00am. 90 minutes later we had to get up and went to Frankfurt so we wouldn't miss our flight to Indonesia where we spent our honeymoon. Exciting times indeed :-)

And now we've returned to Germany and I have to prepare for some large exams again :-( I'll probably write more later - but right now, as I hope to have explained to you, I'm pretty busy...

Adding a blogger sitemap to search engines is unnecessary

Summary
This is a blog for those of you just starting with Blogger (like me). If you look around for doing some SEO for your blog you will find advice on the net to submit a sitemap of your blog to google webmaster tools. This is not necessary.

What are sitemaps good for?
They help search engines to understand the structure of your site. Your site is thus indexed better and (so some claim) might get a better position in search engine result pages. Just google for terms like "sitemap" "webmaster tools" "blogger" and you will easily find more information.

So why don't?
Well, basically Blogger.com does the work for you. When you start a blog on blogger.com a file called robots.txt is created automatically. Robots.txt-files are recognized and indexed by all major search engines (read up on robots.txt on wikipedia) It is available at http://yourblog.blogspot.com/robots.txt. Mine can be found here: my robots.txt. This is the interesting bit:

Sitemap: http://jahnmichael.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?orderby=updated

This piece of code is recognized by major search engines (cf. here and here). It automatically tells search engines the location of your sitemap - so there is no need to submit them manually. If you submit a sitemap manually and blogger.com changes the location, your manually submitted entry might point to the wrong location.

Fusion2 Blogger Template

Overview
This is the template I am using on my blog. Here is the Fusion2 Download (Right-click the link and save target) It is not perfect yet but I won't have time to improve it in the coming weeks. I'm releasing it hoping that somebody may find it useful. If you want some bugs fixed please comment on this blog :-)

Usage notes
Some Blogger features are either not tested or disabled in the source file. You can try enabling them but you will be on your own :-) I've also disabled the blogger navbar on top of every blogger post. You can easily enable it by setting #navbar-iframe {height:0px} to #navbar-iframe {height:30px}.

No IE6 support
I've also decided not to support Internet Explorer 6. A warning will be displayed when a site is accessed with IE6 - just like on other major sites. I've decided that my time is not worth supporting an eight year old browser (even though it is still standard browser for users within large corporations - you are SOL :-) ).

License
The template is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License This means you may use it and make any changes you like. However, credit links must remain on footer for legal use.

Giving credit
The icons are made by Ivan Boyko of VisualPharm. The template itself is a heavily extended fusion of two existing themes (hence the name). It is based on the Green Dark Template and on the Word Press Complimentary Theme. It also uses parts of Minima by Douglas Bowman of StopDesign.

Downloads

This post will be edited in the future and will contain links to software or other downloads created by me.

Testing 1-2-3

So, this is my first post. There won't be much content in this post except some non-sense sentences. Sentences like this one. Or this one. Basically this post was created to:

1. Test my CSS on blogger.
2. And do that by using lists, quotes, paragraphs all in one post.

some
sample
code

As Gore Vidal once said in an almost completely unrelated quote:

Style is knowing who you are, what you want to say and not giving a damn.

You keep reading. If you are bored and want something content-free, may I suggest:

• youtube or
• faux news station

On second thought - don't visit the second link even if you are bored. It's just not worth it.Well, you haven't stopped reading by now. Wow. Let's hope you'll read my other posts with the same endurance and passion :-) Welcome to my blog!