One thing Twitter and a lot of other social sites have that Google+ lacks is a nice, short url to give to people. I can say:

“Nice to meet you, I’m at twitter.com/iamjason.”

And there I am. That’s a lot easier than saying:

“Why hello there, would you like to follow me at https://plus.google.com/u/0/101453275162405736930/posts?”

After the 6th digit or so people wander off. Just imagine trying to spell it out during a candlelit dinner on your first date with someone. Ruins the mood.

I could use a redirect service, like gplus.to, for a vanity url, but then they get to see who’s going to my profile and it’s sort of up to them if it keeps working.

So now I just tell everyone to go to jasonmorrison.net/+. It’s easy to set up, if you have your own domain. Here’s how to do it if your web server is running Apache, which is pretty common:

Step 1: FTP to your server, go to the root directory for your site, and open or create an .htaccess file.

Step 2: Put this in your .htaccess file:

Redirect permanent /+ https://plus.google.com/u/0/(your profile id)/posts

This will create a 301 (permanent) redirect to your profile, which also tells search engines that you mean business.

Step 3: Order a new box of business cards, with your spiffy new Google+ profile link.

Hope this helps!

From More Around Mystic, CT

I have a problem: some people are following me on Twitter, some friends and family are only on Facebook, and others are using Google+. Personally, I like using Google+ most – I like the UI and using my Circles to share certain things with just family, and G+ ties into Picasa really well. I’m also probably a little biased.

I just don’t have time to manually post everything I want to share with all of these people in all three places. So I decided to write all my inane ramblings into Google+, and from there automatically update Twitter and Facebook.

Before I start, I feel like I have to add a disclaimer: Please don’t spam Twitter and FB by shoveling all sorts of autogenerated content into your feed, with no intention fo actually interacting with people. No one wants that, you will lose all your friends, and even your dog will stop loving you. Be judicious.

Here’s how you can automatically post from Google+ to Twitter:

Step 1: Get an RSS feed of your public Google+ posts.

Many sites offer RSS feeds, usually you just have to look for the little orange icon, or a link that says “subscribe”. Google+, at this point, does not – but it does offer an API, so it’s not too hard to write a Python or PHP script to convert. Actually, many developers have stepped in to offer RSS feed services – I found a good list of them here.

A word of caution: these services may be unreliable, they may come and go, developers may run out of money or go crazy and post weird stuff on everyone’s feeds. If you don’t want to take the risk, you should probably write your own code using the Google+ API or wait for Google+ to support RSS.

Step 2: Take your RSS feed and add it to FeedBurner.

FeedBurner is a feed management system run by Google. It lets you do all sorts of fun things with your RSS feeds, including posting to Twitter (Step 3). First, go to http://feedburner.google.com/, there should be a text area titles “Burn a feed right this instant. Type your blog or feed address here:”. Do that. FeedBurner will walk you through a couple of simple steps.

Step 3: Set up FeedBurner to post to Twitter.

Click the “Publicize” tab and look for the “Socialize” option in the menu. There you’ll see an option to add your Twitter account. Click the button, authorize FeedBurner in Twitter, and you are ready to go.

By the way, FeedBurner also offers some interesting analytics options so you can see how many people click through from Twitter, Facebook, or wherever else they might see your feed.

How to update Facebook too:

Actually, I already had Twitter updating Facebook – that’s easy to do, simply go to http://twitter.com/settings/profile and connect your Facebook account. This has a drawback, though, in that it squeezes my G+ posts through the 140-character wringer of Twitter before passing it on to Facebook.

Facebook does have a few apps that are able to publish an RSS feed directly to your wall. RSS Graffiti looks like a likely candidate, with lots of positive reviews, but I haven’t actually tried it. The list of permissions the app demands scared me away.

Hopefully this is useful and I’m not annoying my friends with too many reposts. If you feel the need to stop following me on Twitter since you’ve already seen my hilarious anecdotes on G+ (or vice versa), I’ll understand. I should also add that I’ll read any comments and probably reply in all three systems – I don’t want to force everyone to use G+ to talk to me.

One big drawback to this setup is that I can’t share privately across the three social networks. If I post pictures of my kid playing at the park to just my Friends and Family circles, I don’t have a way to post that to my network in Facebook. Drop me a note if you’ve figured that one out.

I’ve been hearing about 9/11 all weekend on NPR and I thought I’d share a tiny bit about my experience. I usually post about geekier topics so I hope you’ll excuse a bit of a tangent – though this might be one of the geekier experiences of the tragedy that you’ll read today.

From NYC 2011 Shots

In 2001 I was out of college and working for Cleveland.com. It was a pretty good job coming out of school with a major in journalism and a minor in computer science, though it didn’t involve as much journalism or programming as I had hoped. I got to help out with some man-on-the-street interviews, write headlines, etc. but most of my time was spent doing things like layout section pages, manually scrubbing errors from XML files, and deleting profanity from the forums.

I was off that day, I worked weekends. I was still living at my parents’ house, and when the news started pouring in I was glued to CNN just like everyone else. I called the office to see if they wanted me to come in, but my boss told me to stay home, since there was talk of evacuating downtown Cleveland (Cleveland, can you imagine it?) – so stay home. I have nothing interesting to add about that day – go listen to the survivors’ stories on NPR – I watched TV and checked news on the web obsessively just like everyone.

My story gets a little more interesting the next day. I came in and was given a few tasks:

1. Keep an eye on wire reports of victims lists for locals.

This might sound a bit weird if you haven’t worked in regional or local journalism, but people become much more interested when something happens to a complete stranger who grew up in their hometown than when the same thing happens to a complete stranger who grew up in Kalamazoo. I was used to this. Still, continuously scouring the victims list was a grim way to punctuate my days for the next couple weeks. I never got used to it. As I checked the list of victims for the 20th time, though, I started to wish everyone had to read this list over and over just as I did – that way they would see names like Mohammed, Ahmed, and Abdoul, sprinkled through the long lines of Adams and Smiths. The US is a nation of immigrants, and the WTC was a hub of international business. It seemed like trivial, uncontroversial facts like this started to slip away from the national memory on that day.

2. Help cover the wire for photos.

This was another duty I wish the whole country had to share, but for different reasons. The wire was not filled with “death to America” chants, it was filled with an international outpouring of grief and support we are unlikely to see again. It’s hard to imagine it now, but there was a brief moment where almost everyone really was with us, from Europe to Asia to the Middle East (though not quite everyone). It was hard to imagine it in those days as well – I would see thousands of photos of Palestinians holding candlelight vigils over the wire only to come home and hear about nothing but American flags burning in streets, real and imagined. There were clearly two stories to tell in those days and one of them, the hate-provoking story of the minority of reactions, got all of the coverage.

3. For the love of god, try to keep things under control in the forums.

There’s a bit of a debate over requiring real names online right now, but at the time Cleveland.com forums didn’t even require a login to post. Other than a few helpful answers to gardening and wedding questions they were usually filled with pages of schoolyard name-calling lubricated in boastful logorrhea. The attacks put things into overdrive. Racism, conspiracy theories, accusations against everyone’s patriotism – eventually we gave up trying to really moderate and started deleting any threads that had devolved into nastiness, which was almost all threads on some boards. I didn’t have to wait for “Loose Change” to try to “wake me up”, all of the scapegoats and crackpot theories were already there.

It would be nice to think I was above all of this but I knew how the forum posters felt. One moment I will never forget was just a walk from my car to the office – I parked in a very cheap lot down in the Flats, so I had to walk up hill to the Warehouse District every morning. One of my least favorite duties was occasionally manning the front desk – but that morning I started really looking forward to it. We had been getting threats against one of our staff from some nut, and I had heard he even showed up to the office once. As I walked up that hill, I found myself wishing he would show up again, so I could do something physical to someone who deserved it. Before I realized how crazy the feeling was, I’m not sure I ever wanted anything that badly before.

By the time I got to office I had calmed myself down, like an adult. Ready to clean the forums and scour the list of dead for another day, though I wouldn’t be there much longer. Cleveland.com had weathered the dotcom bust fairly well until the advertising spend decline following 9-11, and I was laid off.

In two ways, 9-11 was the event that turned me away from a career in journalism toward programming. For one thing, I couldn’t find a job in the field. The tech job market was bad for a long time, but it was possible to eventually feed yourself as a programmer or web developer. At the same time, that post-9-11 news coverage, and especially the coverage in the lead up the Iraq war, made me lose interest in the field. War is not something to enter into lightly – regardless of whether you were in favor of invading Iraq or not, shouldn’t someone have been asking really hard questions? For the past decade, I have had a hard time finding anyone asking hard questions, unless they were doing a comedy show.

I’m posting this late, on the West Coast, so the anniversary is basically over. My story is small and peripheral to the really tragic stories of that day, but I learned something from it. So now, back to your regularly scheduled geekery.

I saw this ad in Reader:

From Screenshots and random things

I read a lot of tech blogs, so it’s not that it isn’t targeted. But the thought of 200,000 lines of payment processing code, when PayPal is taking care of all the credit card stuff already, makes me queasy.

For anyone reading my blog who isn’t a programmer, imagine an ad like this:

“Hungry for a hotdog? Get access to over 200,000 pounds of hotdog buns. And learn how to use it.”

If I was in the market for payment processing, an ad that offered a few really useful, secure APIs would be a lot more enticing.

I’ll be traveling to St. Louis this week for the National Association of Government Webmasters 2010 Conference. I’m giving a presentation there on Fighting Site Abuse with Webmaster Tools. It should be fun – I have a lot of info to share and some (hopefully) interesting demos to show everyone along the way.

I’m also very excited to talk to as many webmasters of government sites as possible over the course of the conference. We try to serve everyone who builds and maintains websites but I worry that we hear more from SEO-knowledgeable commercial sites than government, non-profit, and small business sites. I can’t wait to get more perspectives on how Google can help them, what their major challenges are, and even what their goals are in building sites. If you’re going to be there, feel free to chat with me.

If you can’t make it to St. Louis this week, and aren’t a webmaster for a government site, no worries – much of my material comes from Google Help Center articles and Webmaster Central blog posts that you can read right now:

• Our best practices against hacking
• A quick security checklist for webmasters
• And our Help Center article on malware and hacked sites.

On a personal note, it will be great to get back to the midwest again.

I have an important question for all the experienced photographers who happen to read my blog. I just spent a couple of weeks working with my colleagues in the Google Dublin office. Everyone there is great, and it’s really impressive how they cover so many different languages and help webmasters in so many different markets.

Despite Ireland’s rainy reputation I had plenty of opportunities to take photos, and you can see a picture from the top floor of one of the Google Dublin buildings at the beginning of this post. I also managed to drop my camera, a Nikon D60, lens-first to the pavement. This was right before a trip to Ireland’s beautiful west coast, including Connemara. My 18-55mm Nikon kit lens wasn’t completely smashed, but zooming is painful, autofocus doesn’t always work, and something is out-of-plane because I get annoying directional blur in the sides and bottom corners of most shots.

So I need to replace the 18-55mm. I don’t have a lot of budget for cameras and equipment, hence the D60. I have a few ideas about what I might get, but between the experienced photographers I know and rest of the web I hope to get some suggestions, pointers, and other wisdom.

Here’s what I’m thinking about:

Sigma 18-250mm f/3.5-6.3 DC OS HSM. I keep wanting more telephoto than my kit lens, and I’d like to have one versatile lens that I can leave on the camera for entire trips. It’s got decent reviews, and more importantly, it looks like I can pick it up for under $500, compared to $750+ for the Nikon 18-200mm f/3.5-5.6G AF-S ED VR II. One drawback with any super zoom lens is weight, and this one clocks in at 628 g. I might also consider the older Sigma 18-200mm is it’s significantly cheaper.

The Nikon 18-105mm f/3.5-5.6 AF-S DX VR ED Nikkor Lens is tempting too, but Ken Rockwell isn’t a fan and I’ve had luck with his recommendations in the past. It looks like I can pick it up for $360 and probably get a lightly used one for even cheaper – this is the kit lens for some cameras so a lot of people sell it when they upgrade. Not as much zoom as the Sigma but also not as much weight – only 420 g.

I’m also really interested in picking up a prime lens at some point. I take a lot of photos of my kid, and she’s moving faster every day. Any recommendations on 55mm vs 35mm? Should I pick up a used 18-105mm and use the savings to pick up a prime lens too, or is buying used a big risk with these kinds of lenses?

Please tell me what you think (or that I’m crazy and should pick up something completely different instead) in the comments below.

UC Davis physics student Austin Sendek has proposed that the prefix “hella-” be used as a standard prefix for 10^27th power. If that sentence doesn’t make much sense to you, you’re in luck – there’s an explanation in Part 1 below. If you could parse the sentence but think it’s a rather lame joke, don’t make up your mind quite yet – I’ll lay out the surprising history of some units that might make you reconsider in Part 2.

Part 1: Giga-what, giga-who?

Most of the time you and I can get by with some pretty small numbers. I might buy a 5-pound bag of flour or ask you to lend me 20 dollars, and there’s nothing wrong with that. But if you work in science, engineering, economics, or other similar fields you inevitably need to count or measure things that are really, really big, and you don’t want your readers to spend all their time counting digits rather than appreciating your brilliant prose.

This is why we have the International System of Units (SI) and its prefixes. When Doc Brown is pouring pilfered plutonium into a DeLorean to send it to the future, rather than wrapping Marty’s head around 1,210,000,000 watts he can simply exclaim, “1.21 gigawatts!” When Commander Data is downloading MP3s, he can say he’s got 100 petabytes to fill, rather than boring Geordi with 100,000,000,000,000,000.

But what happens when you get past peta- (10^15), exa- (10^18), zetta- (10^21) and yotta (10^24)? Right now you’re stuck. At this point we’re in the range of some ridiculously big numbers, but the universe is ridiculously big. The mass of the Earth is about 5,980,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 grams, or 5,980 yottagrams – but who’s got time for thousands of yottagrams?

Sendek has a solution – add a new prefix, hella-. Now we can say that the Earth’s mass is about 6 hellagrams. Isn’t that better? If you like, you can join the petition at Facebook.

If you’re not from California you might not recognize the term “hella.” No worries, I’m originally from Cleveland, where the only person who ever said “hella” was Mr. T in A-Team reruns, so it took me a while to catch on too.

“Hella” may have started as a contraction of “a hell of a”, as in “we had a hell of a good time,” but has evolved to serve as both an intensifier and a quantifier. For example:

1. That particular flavor of ice cream is hella delicious.
2. Let’s go to that other heladeria, they have hella flavors.

You can read more scholarly research by Bucholtz, Bermudez, Fung, Edwards, and Vargas in the Journal of English Linguistics.

Part 2: Hella isn’t as crazy as you might think

“Hella” is regional slang, and Sendek’s petition is a bit tongue-in-cheek, so why don’t we just dismiss this as a stupid joke? Well, it turns out that not all current SI units – though very impressive and scientific-sounding – have very scientific origins.

Let’s take giga-, for example. From Wikipedia, we learn:

According to the American writer Kevin Self, a German committee member of the International Electrotechnical Commission proposed giga as a prefix for 10^9 in the 1920s, drawing on a verse by the humorous poet Christian Morgenstern that appeared in the third (1908) edition of Galgenlieder (Gallows Songs). This suggests that a hard German [?] was originally intended as the pronunciation. Self was unable to ascertain at what point the alternative pronunciation came into occasional use, but claimed that as of 1995 it had died out.

As a non-German I was completely ignorant of Galgenlieder, so I poked around a bit to learn more about the source of our very scientific prefix. It turns out this is a book of literary nonsense poetry, and includes this verse (translated to English):

The Winglewangle phlutters
through widowadowood,
the crimson Fingoor splutters
and scary screaks the Scrood.

So yeah. Given this precedent, it’s safe to say we can pull SI prefixes from whatever source we want. We can continue up the chain. Tera- comes from the Greek for “monster”, meaning every time some programmer talks about terabytes they might as well be saying “it’s like monster-bytes big, yo!” Prefixes come from German, Greek, Italian, even Danish. Given the many contributions to science and engineering by the United States, isn’t it time for a prefix of peculiarly American English origin?

Bonus Part 3: Get a load of this

I’m not quite done yet. Some of our least official-sounding vernacular units actually have extensive literary and historical backing. I’m talking, of course, about the assload. How many times have you heard phrases like, “I have an assload of homework,” or “I have to get this assload of parrots to the recycling center?”

Well it turns out that this unit of measure has a long, established history. In fact, it’s biblical. From Eerdmans Dictionary of the Bible (2000), Page 1375:

The homer serves as the standard expression of dry capacity in the OT [Old Testament]. The word “homer” is cognate to “ass” and serves as an approximation to the normal load carried by this animal.

The reason you don’t remember it from Sunday school is that it’s usually imprecisely translated as “measure” in the King James Version. It shows up in Exodus 16:35 and Ezekial 45:11 and probably other places, but those KJV guys took a lot of artistic license in translating units to “a measure.”

Sewing up the argument hella tight

In a sense, this all boils down to prescriptivism vs. descriptivism. Measures used to all be descriptivist like the assload, but now we need prescriptive precision. “Hella” is a prescriptivist’s nightmare, but most modern linguists are descriptivists, so why not? And don’t even get me started on the units that journalists tend to use on TV, where you’re more likely to encounter “football fields” as a measure of area than square meters.

So we have historical precedent for the “hella-” prefix and we’ve incidentally proven that “assload” deserves its spot in the lexicon of quantification. So sign the petition, and if you happen to know any members of the SI committee, please pass this along so we can get this matter settled quickly.

Salon had an interesting post about some trouble Nestle ran into on their Facebook fan page. You can read more there, but here’s the gist: environmental groups are accusing Nestle of driving rainforest destruction through their purchase of palm oil. They buy palm oil from Indonesia, where enough forest is being cleared to threaten orangutans with extinction. Nestle has a fan page on Facebook, and orangutan lovers started posting complaints on it.

Shortly thereafter, the moderator posted:

To repeat: we welcome your comments, but please don’t post using an altered version of any of our logos as your profile pic — they will be deleted.

If you know anything about the internet, then you know that this message was the worst possible thing Nestle could have posted. It’s the Streisand Effect – if you try to hide something on the internet, it suddenly becomes a lot more interesting, and you only draw more attention to it. This is so basic to the sociology of the web that if I were hiring someone to do social media work or PR, that would be the first question in the interview.

The Salon article catalogues some interesting exchanges between the Nestle admin and Facebook users, culminating in this announcement:

Nestle: This (deleting logos) was one in a series of mistakes for which I would like to apologise. And for being rude. We’ve stopped deleting posts, and I have stopped being rude.

A trip to the fan page now shows nothing but altered logos and calls for boycott. The Salon piece concludes that the real shame of this whole exchange is that the admin acted like a human being, actually talked to people, and is probably in big trouble for it – and if not, Nestle will be less likely to do anything like this in the future, retreating to boring press releases and spokespeople.

I think the real lesson to be learned here is that when you show up to a conversation, you actually need to have something to say.

Nestle is trying to take advantage of the fact that there’s a lot of people out there who really like their milk chocolate, or really enjoy KitKat bars. They’re using social networking sites to encourage people to talk about chocolate and KitKat bars, remember how much they like them, and hopefully buy more. This all makes sense and is a lot more engaging and cost effective than TV ads and the like. But once you start people talking, you cannot control what they are going to say. That’s not how conversations work, even conversations attenuated into new formats like Facebook wall posts.

So no people are accusing you of hating cute orangutans, what do you do? You need to be able to say something:

• We didn’t know, this is what we’re doing to fix this.
• This isn’t true, here’s why.
• There’s no other suppliers, but here’s what we’re working on to substitute or work around the problem.

Hell, if you think you can get away with it without losing more customers, even saying “Who cares about monkeys, we gots to have our delicious sugary snacks!” is better than saying nothing or trying to edit the conversation in progress. Having some kind of ethics really matters here.

But if you can’t say any of these things… well, just shut everything down. Stop trying to build equity in your brand and concentrate on making the cheapest candy because your company obviously doesn’t understand the point of building a brand or cultivating passionate customers.

Normally I reserve this space for techie topics, feel free to skip this post if you’re not interested in personal blogging. Or skip to the end for two points about Twitter, Facebook and Google.

Three weeks ago I found out I had a time bomb in my gut. The timer on this metaphorical bomb wasn’t set to an exact hour, and there were no ominous red digits ticking down, but my viscera were rigged on a hair trigger. My gall bladder was filled with stones, and it was just a matter of time before they would be ejected, painfully squeezing down my bile duct. With luck they would jam their way through and into my duodenum, but some could back up into pancreas, causing pancreatitis, or create a blockage and infection, cholangitis.

This was actually a good thing. After an all-night stomach ache over the weekend I went to work on Monday and met my wife and her brother (an NP and MD, respectively) for lunch. They noticed that I was turning yellow, eyes-first. Something like this:

Turning yellow isn’t all bad – I could defeat the Green Lantern in a super hero battle and as my friend Jessica pointed out on Facebook, I no longer needed to use the sepia filter in Photoshop to make myself look old-timey. Jaundice has a number of possible causes, and gall stones are definitely one of the more agreeable ones. An ultrasound turned up the stones in my gall bladder, a series of blood tests helped rule out other causes, and an MRI found the stones already stuck in the biliary duct.

A quick word about the MRI, since I had never had one before – getting an MRI is like being stuck inside a particularly tedious Atari game. The sounds are straight up Yar’s Revenge, though instead of flying a spaceship you are stuck in a tube. Something like this:

I had an ERCP and a laparoscopic gall bladder removal scheduled for the following week. As surgeries go these are very agreeable. Unlike my father 30-some years ago, I would not need to have my abdomen cut open for a cholecystectomy, but instead they would make three small cuts, insert instruments, and pull out my gall bladder. Something like this:

So, back to that time bomb. I had an ERCP scheduled for Tuesday and the actual removal for Friday. My job was to eat small, extremely low-fat meals so as not to trigger the release of bile and otherwise wait it out hoping to make it to the first procedure before the timer ran out. My life was becoming the most boring season of 24 ever conceived.

How had I gone so long without symptoms? It turns out, I hadn’t. For a few months I had been getting stomach pressure and pain, but it always cleared up within 20 minutes of taking normal, over-the-counter simethicone so I didn’t think it was a big deal. I already eat a diet pretty close to what they put me on while waiting, very low fat, usually small meals, lots of veggies and grains. On an average diet, I guess I would have been in pain constantly. I had been getting spells of fatigue as well but tiredness is a hard thing to pin down – tired after lunch at work? Must be low blood sugar. Tired in the morning? Must not have slept well.

On Sunday my time ran out. I started to feel the same kind of pressure I had the week before and called the on-call GI doc. He said to give it a little while to see if it would die down. It didn’t, so he got me pre-admitted and my wife drove me to the hospital.

There’s one thing I will never understand about hospitals, and that’s why they are so universally difficult to navigate. Stanford is a prime example, starting with finding your way to the right parking lot and entrance. Between the two of us we could not find the way to admitting. We ended up going to the ER (that was well marked, at least) to ask directions to admitting. I’ve spent a fair amount of time thinking about the usability of websites, but what about the usability of street signs and floor plans?

By this point I was in the worst pain of my life, and about to confront another thing I will never understand – the entire legal profession. As I sat in a wheelchair, shaking from pain, the (otherwise very nice and helpful) woman at the desk started handing me forms to sign. At that point, I would have signed anything! The Declaration of Independence, my own death warrant, hell, if she would have handed me a 1951 Bowman rookie card I would have signed “Mickey Mantle.” How could that possibly be considered necessary or valid?

Once in the hospital, everything went smoothly and I really am doing well in recovery. Sitting in the bed between procedures my anxiety about my gall bladder was put in its place – both of the roommates I had were in much worse shape than I ever was. So though I felt like I was walking around with a time bomb, and I wouldn’t wish gall stone pain on anyone, and surgery is never fun to look forward to, I spent a few days mostly feeling thankful I didn’t have something much worse.

Which brings me to my final two points, which are probably more interesting to the regular readers of this blog than my personal episode of ER:

First, this whole episode has really reminded me how connected we all are. I sent out status updates here and there via Twitter, Facebook, etc. and got back a lot of great replies from friends and family. It’s the same thing we discovered when our daughter was born- with social networking it’s remarkably easy to let a lot of people know a little about what’s going on in your life.

Second, some things about working at Google still astound me, even after two years. When you see Google on TV you hear about the food, the dinosaur, the marble track, but you miss out on the most important difference working at Google compared to other companies – people actually want to be there.

It sounds simple but it has strange effects. I have never been out sick for this long in my life, but have had absolutely no pressure to return to work from my managers or co-workers. No ticking clock of sick-day PTO hours, no calls, no expectations of keeping up with email, just good wishes and advice to make sure I’m really recovered before I head back. And yet here I sit, really wanting to go in tomorrow so I can work on X and Y and see what’s been going on with Z.

In a sense I feel a little bad for the folks who go to Google straight from college, if only because they don’t have anything to compare it to. In other jobs you might be wary to even mention the nature of any health problems you’ve had, coming in sick to not risk adverse consequences. Here, I’m writing about surgery for the world to read. I got to watch the recent health care reform vote out of policy interest rather than, as so many others must have, watching in the desperate hope of getting coverage. I’m pretty damn lucky.

Seen my personal blog lately? Probably not, if you were searching via Google. Major sections of my site have been disappearing from the search index over the past three weeks. My homepage, my blog and many of the most recent articles on it no longer showed up in result pages. I’m no Matt Cutts, but I get a fair number of people coming to my site when searching for info about Google search, avoiding scams, and how to name their baby. All that traffic has been slipping away.

You can probably imagine how you would feel if this was happening to you. Does Google hate me? Was my site hacked? What do I do, and how much will it cost to get this fixed?

I will answer all of those questions, starting with the first:

My site is falling out of the index, does Google hate me?

Probably not. My situation is actually pretty illustrative – I’m pretty sure Google doesn’t hate me and isn’t unfairly slapping my site down because, well, I work at Google.

That’s right, Google was kicking pages from one of its own employees out of search results. I’m sure I’m not the first. Google doesn’t treat my site any differently than anyone else’s. BTW, standard disclaimers apply to this post.

So I knew there was probably a logical reason for the dropped pages, which brings me to the next question:

Is Google dropping my pages from search results because my site got hacked?

This is a very, very good question to ask – hacking is unfortunately common. This very site has been hacked before. I don’t want to go into a lot of detail on how to tell if your site was hacked in this post, but the Webmaster Central Blog has some good pointers.

Really, this is part of a broader question – what has changed with my site? In my case it wasn’t hacking – it turns out out that Google was getting tons of crawl errors over the past couple weeks. As Googlebot tried to recrawl my site looking for new content, it kept getting network unreachable errors. After days and days of this, Googlebot figured I had closed up shop. We don’t want to send searchers to pages that have disappeared.

Why all the errors? Here’s where I had to do some digging – I have a multi-site account with a web host. It turns out my site had exceeded my bandwidth quota. The worst thing is it’s not the max quota I paid for, but just the amount I had portioned off for my blog. I didn’t think I’d ever get enough visitors to worry about it. D’oh.

What do I do, and how much will it cost to get this fixed?

If your site starts disappearing from Google search results, how can you figure out what’s going on without access to all the uber-powerful, super-secret Google tools that I used?

It turns out I only needed one Google tool to diagnose the problem, and I’ll let you in on the secret. In fact, I’ll leak the url (SEO bloggers get ready to tweet!):

http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/

Yep, good old Webmaster Tools. Between the reports there and my own host’s dashboard, I was able to figure out and fix the problem in less than 20 minutes. Googlebot will take longer than that to reindex everything but I noticed progress almost immediately:

I looked under Site Diagnostics -> Crawl Errors to see all the pages that Google couldn’t reach. After I fixed the bandwidth cap on my side, I noticed that under Sitemaps, my sitemap status had a little red “X” as well. I logged into to my blog and regenerated the sitemap, checked that it was there, and clicked “Resubmit” in Webmaster Tools.

Voila! Total cost: $0.

Bonus Question: This sounds embarrassing, why are you sharing it with everyone?

Having my own site start disappearing from my employer’s search engine isn’t exactly something to brag about. It’s doubly embarrassing to admit how long it took for me to notice what was going on, though I bet a lot of other site owners are in the same boat, to busy doing their day jobs to constantly check search rankings.

I wanted to share my story because #1, it might help someone figure out what to do if they have a similar issue, and #2, it illustrates a bit about how Google tries to do business.

Everything is set up to give users the best results we can, and to cope with all the spam and abuse on the web. Sites that are irrelevant, unresponsive, or violate the webmaster guidelines might not end up in front of searchers, even if it’s my site. Heck, even if it’s Google Japan.