Wikipedia cites one of my papers

In a moment of vanity, I just googled myself. I’m pleased to see my website still appears as the top result for “Ruud Visser” on google.com and google.nl, ahead of the curtain specialist at ruudvisser.net.

The 10th .com result is titled “Everything about Ruud Visser” and the description goes like this:

Do you want to know more about “Ruud Visser”? Find all the information you need about “Ruud Visser” on Exalead Wikipedia.

I’m all for learning more about people with my name, especially if they appear this high on a Google search. The Exalead page contains links to two articles on the French Wikipedia. The first one immediately caught my attention:

Atoms in Molecules
En chimie guil, la proximité immédiate de deux atomes non liés … Why Kinked is More Stable than Straight Jordi Poater, Ruud Visser, Miquel Sola, F. Matthias …
fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atoms_in_Molecules

Loyal readers will recognize “Why Kinked is More Stable than Straight” as the (partial) title of a scientific paper based on work that I did in Girona, Spain in 2005. The Wikipedia article cites that paper as one of the criticisms against the theory of Atoms in Molecules. One click away, the English Wikipedia article on AIM does the same thing.

The citations in the English article was put in by user V8rik on June 9th of last year, and user Grimlock copied it to the French version on July 22nd.

It’s been said that you aren’t somebody in today’s world until you have an article on Wikipedia. I’m not quite there yet, but this is a good start.

WordPress acting weird

There seem to be some problems with my WordPress blogging software. Whatever link I click, I always get back to the same post. Before I wrote this, it was the post with my foggy forest pictures. Right now, it’s this notice. The good thing is, it’s not just at my weblog. I tried a couple random blogs also hosted at WordPress.com, and they have similar issues.

[Update (November 6th, 2007): Thanks to a quick response by the WordPress.com support people, everything seems to be back to normal.]

From Blogger to WordPress

After using Blogger for the past two years, I moved my weblog over to WordPress. I’ve really come to like this service through my visits to the weblogs of my Ohio friends (a.k.a. the Goble Families). WordPress is a lot faster, comments are integrated better, and RSS feeds are easier. On the downside, I seem to have less control over the looks and layout, which makes it a bit harder to integrate with the rest of my homepage. I think I can find a way, though.

I imported all posts and entries from Blogger and I am slowly categorizing all of them. As I write this, there are 297 posts to go, so this will be an ongoing project.

If you got my weblog in an RSS reader, please update your feed to this URL:
http://ruudvisser.wordpress.com/feed/

You can also get a feed of the comments posted to my weblog:
http://ruudvisser.wordpress.com/comments/feed/

Finally, if you have a link to my weblog on your own weblog or homepage, I would appreciate it if you could make sure it points to RuudVisser.com. That address is most likely to stay in the years to come, so it is the one I would like everyone to use to find me.

Number of the Day

Let’s try a new feature on my weblog… the Number of the Day. Each day, I’ll pick a number that’s somehow significant for that day. I’m pretty sure I won’t be doing this on a strictly daily basis, but at any rate, it sounds kinda fun. I’ve always enjoyed numbers, so why not add some to this place?

First NotD coming right up…

RSS, Atom feeds

If you have an RSS reader or something similar and you want to keep up with my (infrequent) writings, one of these feeds should help:

RSS feed (What’s this?)
Atom feed (What’s this?)

[Update (December 12th, 2006): Following my move from Blogger to WordPress, the RSS feed has also moved. The Atom feed is no longer available.]

RuudVisser.com

For those who cannot remember NogMeerOnzin.nl: as of a few days ago, you can also find me at RuudVisser.com.

Switching to English (2)

Err… didn’t I just say two weeks ago that I was switching to English? Well, yes, I did. And promptly forgot about it. Shame on me. Let’s see if I can stick with it this time.

Wikilinks

Sinds een maand of twee ben ik actief op Wikipedia, een gratis online encyclopedie die iedereen kan bewerken. Als gebruiker kan je daar een script installeren dat je een preview geeft van een link als je de muis eroverheen beweegt. Ik ben bezig om op mijn site iets dergelijks te maken… zie de link naar Wikipedia twee zinnen terug voor een voorbeeld. Echt optimaal werkt het nog niet, omdat alle Wiki-pagina’s waarnaar gelinkt wordt, worden geladen bij het laden van deze pagina. Als dat in totaal één of twee links zijn is dat niet zo’n probleem, maar met één of twee per post gaat het toch echt te lang duren. Ik moet dus iets inbouwen dat gelinkte pagina’s pas worden geladen op het moment dat de cursor over de link beweegt. Dat moet kunnen (want zo werkt het binnen Wikipedia ook), alleen nog even uitzoeken hoe.

Switching to English

My website was deleted this weekend, probably because it being primarily in Dutch violated the user agreement. Part of the site is back up now, albeit at a slightly different location: ruudvisser.funpic.de instead of ruudvisser.funpic.org. Of course, NogMeerOnzin.nl still works and remains the preferable way to get here. To make sure the site stays, I’m switching to English as the primary language. In fact, I was thinking about doing this anyway, so my non-Dutch speaking friends and colleagues can also visit and actually understand what I write. I don’t plan on translating all the existing entries… only new ones will be in English.

Right now, only the weblog works, and even then, only the text. I’ll get the rest of the contents back up as soon as possible, though it may take a while before all of the photo albums are available again.

Google-populariteit

Ik word steeds populairder bij Google. Zoek op “ruud visser” (zonder aanhalingstekens) en bij de eerste twintig sites sta ik op plaatsen 1, 2, 5, 6, 9, 17 en 19. Als je de aanhalingstekens wel meeneemt (en dus zoekt op pagina’s waar mijn voornaam en achternaam direct na elkaar staan), bezet ik de volledige top-4 en nummer 12. De zoekterm “ruudvisser” zet mij op plekken 1, 2, 4, 7, 8, 12 en 14. Met alleen mijn voornaam kom ik op plaats 34, wat nog lang niet gek is gezien de bekendheid van naamgenoten als Van Nistelrooy en Lubbers. Tot slot kom ik op nummer 72 met zoekterm “visser”.

Mijn website doet het nog minder goed: hij is niet te vinden in de eerste honderd resultaten voor “nog meer onzin”, zowel zonder als met aanhalingstekens. Aan elkaar geschreven, “nogmeeronzin” dus, gaat beter: de top-3 is voor mij, evenals plaatsen 5, 7, 8, 9, 12, 14, 15, 16, 19 en 20, waarvan overigens al wel vier pagina’s niet meer bestaan. Google is niet echt snel met het verwijderen van dat soort spul.