Before sneaker.org went dark over a year ago, a google search for my name would bring sneaker.org as the first hit on google. After the site went dark, the ranking for the site on google’s search fell dramatically (which is to be expected). After I restored the site, I’ve been observing the logs and the rankings on google (not scientifically, but just using random sampling). Recently I noticed the google bot making requests for pages and images which do not exist on the site any more. Presumably this will make it remove the dead links to those pages over time (and hopefully expunge them from the cache as well) and also raise the rankings of the live pages. Intriguing…

On Friday, October 15th, I will be attending the Alumni Awards Ceremony at Carnegie Mellon University where I will receive the Young Alumni Award for 2004. The award is described on the CMU Alumni Awards website as:

“Young Alumni” are defined as those alumni who have graduated, with their bachelor’s degree between 1994 and 2004. The award will be granted to an individual who has either attained exceptional accomplishment in the nominee’s chosen occupation or for distinguished service that brings honor to the recipient and the university during the first 10 years following the receipt of their bachelor’s degree. The contribution of service need not bring public acclaim, but may consist of important creative effort in organization and development having social or educational value. The Young Alumni Award need not be presented each year.

The website is mostly in shape from a content perspective. Further cosmetic updates such as the color paleter adjustment and subtle fixes to the CSS to accomodate IE/Firefox issues are still in the works.