Flour Power

The “Doodle 4 Google” competition to choose the Google logo for St. Patrick’s Day has come to an end. The winner is Evan O’Sullivan Glynn from St. Munchin’s College, with his doodle entitled “My Irish Roots”:

On St.Patrick’s day Irish people around the world celebrate their connection to Ireland “The Emerald Isle”. “My Irish Roots” represents this connection with how shamrocks trace back to their roots in the same way that Irish people throughout the world trace back to Ireland, their Ireland, my Ireland.

The winning logo will be displayed on the Google homepage in the UK, US, Canada, Australia and Ireland on St. Patrick’s Day (17th of March).

The other 3 national finalists were Louise Gilmore from S.N Muire na nGael, Marcela Ponikova from St. Clare’s NS and Orla Gartland from Dominican College.

I was checking the Google Webmaster Tools statistics for this blog today and noticed that the Google web crawler picked up a few broken links. That was weird, since I’m using WordPress and I haven’t messed around in a way that could cause this kind of behavior, so everything should be neat and tidy.

Further analysis showed that there where two pages that the crawler couldn’t get to. 404 errors were being thrown instead.

One of them is a category page that’s being linked from the homepage. It’s being linked using a query string with the category id in it, which is something that’s no longer being used. The categories link now have the category name in it. Apparently this error was detected on the 17th of January (about 1 month and a half ago), and it’s weird that the homepage hasn’t been crawled since. I’ll have to look into that later.

The other problematic page (and the reason for this post) had 6 links to it, and when I checked the post that had those links I realised that this was a case of a post that, to put it simply, had vanished! How? I have no idea. But I do remember writing it, posting it, and linking to it. So it had to be somewhere. It wasn’t in the list of all posts. It wasn’t in Windows Live Writer. I was just about to check the database backups when I decided to try my luck with Google. I knew they keep a cache of the indexed pages, so I could get lucky and find it there. All it took was a search for a term I knew was in the title of the post:

I instantly recognised what I was looking for from the tidbit on the first result. Clicking the “Cached” link I was taken to the page as it was on the 25th of January, 5 days after the post was written, and there I found the post exactly like I remembered it. A few minutes for copying and pasting to a new post, with the same name and URL, and it’s now live again. When the crawlers come back, the crawling errors should go away.

I still don’t know how the post vanished, though…

Last Tuesday Gmail had a 3 hours outage and it seemed like the world was going to end, considering all the Twitter and Facebook cries of panic. It’s clear that a lot of people rely on Gmail as a work tool, and the possibility of such “glitches” happening is something to worry about. But there are a few things you can do when it seems you can’t access your Gmail account properly:

• Maybe the problem is just with your connection, and not with Gmail itself. You can find out about the status on Gmail and several other Google apps in their Google Apps Status Dashboard;
• If the web interface is not loading properly, you can try accessing the more secure SSL interface or the basic HTML mode;
• You can also access your email using POP or IMAP on any email client of your choice. During the outage this was the only way of accessing Gmail, but you had to have it enabled, which can only be done through the web interface (Gmail settings/ Forwarding and POP, IMAP). It’s probably a good idea to just enable it even if you don’t plan on using anything besides the web interface. Just in case… 

So the next time Gmail seems to be down, don’t panic. First try the items above. And if none of them works, then you can panic

Google now has thousands of servers (probably hundreds of thousands) all around the world, but it started out quite small. This is Google’s first server, from 1999:

(image courtesy of Jurvetson)

Since its early days, Google’s homepage has seen a lot of different logos. They are used in select days, to “celebrate different people, events or special dates”. And so, this year’s St. Patrick’s day will be celebrated with the logo that wins the ‘Doodle 4 Google’ competition.

The ‘Doodle 4 Google’ competition asks young people across Ireland to design their own doodle, and the winning doodle will be displayed on the Google homepage in the UK, US, Canada and, of course, Ireland on St. Patrick’s Day 2009.

More than 100 finalists were chosen by a panel of judges and now it’s time for the Irish public to vote on their favorites. In the end, the so-called ‘original Doodler‘ – Dennis Hwang – will select the winner.

These were my choices:

Voting ends at midnight on Monday, 16th February 2009.

And while you’re at it, check out this collection of Google logos used in the past.