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White House expands use of search-blocking code

The White House has silently tripled the number of Web pages that it forbids Google and other search engines from accessing. Is this a bad omen or much ado about nothing?

Within hours of Barack Obama being sworn in as president, bloggers and tech journalists began to closely examine the new White House Web site for hidden indicators as to how he would shape future tech policy.

While I focused my efforts on the White House privacy policy, others looked to the new administration's robots.txt file, which lays out boundaries that search engines like Google should follow when … Read more

TXT8020 spotted at the PCD booth

PCD didn't have much to show off at CES 2009, but it did give us a brief sneak peek at one of its upcoming texting phones, dubbed the TXT8020 for now. It looks suspiciously like the Verizon Wireless Blitz, but with a swivel screen instead. It is a dual-mode 800/1900 CDMA phone, and it has EV-DO, which the Blitz does not. The display is around 2.2-inches diagonal and supports 260,000 colors.

Features include stereo Bluetooth, a microSD card slot, 1GB flash memory and 1 GB of RAM, text and multimedia messaging, instant messaging, a 1.3-megapixel … Read more

Google jokesters ward off zombies

Google, whose servers constantly crawl the Web, doesn't have anything against spiders. But zombies, well, that's another matter.

Showing some timely techie humor, the search giant updated its robots.txt file for Halloween. For the uninitiated, search engines trying to index Web sites look for robots.txt files for instructions about whether they're permitted access to particular pages.

The Google robots.txt file on Friday begins with the following exclusion:

User-agent: zombies Disallow: /brains

Most of the time when people do this sort of thing it's called an Easter egg. Is there such a thing as … Read more

Analyze, create robots.txt files in Google

Google's Webmaster Central has become a very important resource for anyone who has a Web site, works on a Web site, or, like SEO practitioners, helps others with their Web sites.

Google continues to roll out more features and better functionality to existing features, and now they just did a little bit of both with the addition of their Generate robots.txt function.

Google had previously added a robots.txt analyzer, which at this point is still the more useful of the two tools. For those who aren't aware, the robots exclusion protocol helps with instructing search engines … Read more

Keypad translates texting gibberish

Take heart, hapless Boomers. As unbelievable as it may seem, there's actually some technology beneficial to your aging generation other than keyboards with letters big enough for eye examination charts.

U.K.-based Cre8txt has developed a keypad that supposedly translates the IM slang of your literacy-challenged prodigy into the King's English, according to Shiny Shiny. When communication inevitably breaks down, just have Junior plug the device into his USB port and peck away, a la SMS. What comes out on the other end will, at least in theory, be a language that parents can comprehend.

The downside: … Read more

'Pac-Man,' meet 'Zork'

"You have been attacked by a cyan ghost! You pass out and awake minutes later back where you began."

You might not remember it this way, but you--and probably everyone you know--has almost certainly had this experience, though in a different manifestation.

It's Pac-Man. Except instead of controlling your little yellow iconic character around a maze of dots and colored ghosts, this is Pac-Txt, a text version of the famous video game that recalls the old glory days of Infocom games like Zork and Leather Goddesses of Phobos.

I found the site after stopping in on one … Read more