Onyxbits

Have you ever had that sudden sensation of "why am I doing this?" sneaking up on you? You know, that kind of feeling where some common practice, you were so accustomed to in your daily routine that you never questioned it, all of a sudden seems to be totally absurd and pointless to do? Like, for example, washing your hands after using the toilet, closing the faucet and realizing that you opened it with supposedly dirty hands and now are touching it with supposedly clean hands, potentially picking up again what you deposited there in the first place?

Six weeks without internet access can really cause you to do funny things. I, for myself decided to pass the time by finally rewriting an old project of mine that was, to put it mildly, an embarrassment to show to anyone. I am still not quite finished with it yet, but since I haven't been able to blog for a while and there are always people searching for code examples, solving common problems, I guess, I could as well work some snippets into blog posts.

I just saw a video of a talk, Matt Cutts, head of Google's anti web spam team, gave at WordCamp San Francisco 2009. I can only recommend watching listening to it (sadly, audio only), since it's as entertaining as informative and covers a lot of topics potentially relevant to bloggers.
Among other things, Matt also addresses Google Page Rank and gives away one of it's applications.

My website is a fun project for me. I just love working on it and watching it grow day by day.
Speaking of watching it grow, I am also someone, who actually reads web server logs just to see, whats going on. One thing, I am particularly interested in are the HTTP referrers. After all, which website owner would not want to know, where his visitors are coming from? Curiously, some of mine seem to be coming from porn websites, "make money fast" blogs and other shady places.

I recently had the epiphany, that Drupal's Blog module is not that great for blogging after all, at least not if you are using your website mainly as a single user blog, like I do.

Headline: "Catholic church invests in tobacco, arms and birth control pills".

Sounds too unbelievable to be true? Well, not entirely. According to this article on spiegel.de, the German Pax bank, one of the four catholic church banks in North Rhine-Westphalia did exactly that.

According to the article, the following investments were made:

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