My wife does a London theatre blog. I was looking up her past performing search terms, and then looking around to see what the competition was.

Looking through the results for her current all-time top search term, I found a listing for an entry in another blog.

And then I found it again.

Same page. Same URL, same title/meta information, etc. etc. etc. The only difference I find is that the last-modified-since header is 2 seconds different between them. Now, I’ve seen Google index things really quickly, but that’s a little hard to swallow.

So. Why does Google list it twice, as if it is two unique pages? Inquiring minds want to know.

(It’s a great writeup of a great show, by the way.)

November has gone in a flash. Thanksgiving found us with 10 people around a not-quite-big-enough table, most of whom had absolutely zero sense of tradition surrounding the meal because they’re Brits. But it was tasty.

The UncleFromGermany is visiting, and it has been a crazy week of living London-style: six shows in 7 nights, taking Saturday off only for the making of the large meal. In order: The Country Wife at the Haymarket (totally fun), Billy Elliot (uncle’s choice), Parade at the Donmar (fantastic), a sneak preview of Kenneth Branagh’s film version of The Magic Flute (could have been so much better, could have been so much worse), the RSC’s King Lear (with Sir Ian McKellan, outstanding), and another version of The Magic Flute as done by a South African company tonight. Some would say this is why we moved here.

In more geeky news, I’ve spent some time this month trying to do a facebook app as a work-related experiment, with little success thus far. As in, I can’t get their basic ‘Hello world’ to work. I’m sure I’m doing something dumb. I hope to be making more progress on that as the week goes on.

I’ll be in Las Vegas next week for PubCon. For those of you who know me through other channels, this is a big search engine marketing thing. Assuming I can get out of bed in the morning, which assumes I’ll be getting to bed at all, there are definitely a number of good-looking sessions. I haven’t been to a conference like this in quite a while, and certainly not in this field, so it will be quite an experience, I’m sure. Not to mention…Vegas, baby!

But, of course what has prompted the switch to WordPress and the idea of doing a regular blog again at all is all the search engine research and work I’m doing online these days, so it would make sense to yammer on about that now and then as well.

My next bit of wordpress fun – and work research – may be to write my own plugin. One of the online properties at work is now running their own blog, also on wordpress. They are also taking a n RSS feed of info from their ‘parent’ site, thereby promoting one through the other. Works great. Except that we’ve done a lot of work to give the search engines a clear path into SEO-friendly pages, and the RSS feeds are not actually delivering the right URLs…so they’re pimping out the wrong pages. And it will probably be easier for me to whip out a bit of code that will do a custom rewrite of the RSS output on the wordpress side than it will be to get the parent site to change the outbound RSS feed.

Maybe.