I am currently an employee of Google. I receive a salary from them and I also own Google stock and options.

Other than compensation from Google, I don’t accept any money or other gifts of value from any companies or individuals. I don’t accept speaking fees, consulting fees, honoraria, or trips. I don’t accept free, discounted, or loaned products. When I receive unsolicited gifts of value from companies or individuals in the scope of work, I give away those gifts.

When I speak at a conference or event, I generally do not pay a registration fee for that event. Some conferences also waive registration fees for that event for one or more of my colleagues or a traveling companion. Either my company or I pay my own travel and hotel expenses when I speak at an event.

I do not run advertisements or otherwise receive any monetary compensation from the operation of my website.

Added January 16, 2010: A few years ago my wife and I formed a non-profit foundation. Neither of us are paid a salary from the foundation. Example groups that the foundation has donated to include the Electronic Frontier Foundation, MAPLight, Change Congress, the Sunlight Foundation, Free Press, the Poynter Institute for Media Studies, charity: water, and Room to Read. The Employer Identification Number (EIN) of our foundation is 203865461.

I have also invested in Perfect Third, the company that makes the WakeMate.

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No more jokes – you will always get %SI3_rnd21 and moans! The huge pack costs less than 30 %SI3_rnd22!
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I think it’s spam about embiggening a specific body part. But the spammer clearly didn’t set up their spam template correctly. Anyone have guesses about which email spamming software package this is?

I plan to talk sometime soon about what I learned in the process of moving to a completely different domain for a month.

- I took one of my domains, dullest.com, and moved it to TigerTech from pair Networks.
- I installed the latest version of WordPress on dullest.com and copied the MySQL database from mattcutts.com to dullest.com.
- I changed my blog layout to the excellent Thesis theme by Chris Pearson. Previously I was using the Almost Spring theme.
- I added an .htaccess file that will do 302 redirects from www.mattcutts.com/path/file.html to www.dullest.com/path/file.html .

Note: changing your IP address, webhost, domain name, blog template, and blog version all at the same time is the exact opposite of what you should normally do. It’s better to change only one thing at a time so that if something goes horribly wrong, you can trace what caused it.

Also, if you were truly moving a site, a 302 redirect wouldn’t be the right redirect to use–a 301 (permanent) redirect would be better. But if I like these changes, I might migrate mattcutts.com to TigerTech and then migrate my blog from dullest.com back to mattcutts.com. So I’ll stick with a 302 for now.

Sometimes it’s fun to mix things up. It’s not as if I make any money from my blog, so I don’t mind if my search rankings drop for a while. In fact, it will be a pretty interesting experiment to see what happens with search engines and traffic.

I’m sure a bunch of stuff broke; let me know if you see anything especially horrible!

Some different browser marketshare numbers:

- Net Applications says that Chrome went from 1.15% to 1.23% in the last ~30 days.

- StatCounter says that Chrome topped 2% recently. Click through to see fewer people using Internet Explorer and more people using Firefox and Chrome over the weekends. StatCounter provides CSV export, so I made a separate chart for Chrome:

- Clicky says that in the last 60 days, Chrome has gone from 2.099% to 2.479%

Not shabby for a little over six months since Chrome was released. My favorite Chrome links recently are:

- The dev channel switcher to get the latest/greatest features in Chrome. For example, the dev channel uses the F11 key to switch to full-screen mode. You can also delete auto-form-fill suggestions by cursoring down to them and hitting the “Delete” key.

- The Chrome Experiments site demonstrates how well Chrome handles JavaScript. My favorite demos are Browser Ball, Ball Pool, Wavy Scrollbars, and the bizarrely addictive Twitch.

How do the browser stats look for your site(s)? And does anyone know of other sources for browser marketshare?

The rough summary is:
2006: 1.7M visits and 2.9M pageviews
2007: 2.3M visits and 4.8M pageviews, plus 31K RSS readers
2008: 3.4M visits and 5.7M pageviews, plus 46K RSS readers, 7986 followers on my Twitter stream, and 1607 subscribers on FriendFeed.

My most popular posts had nothing to do with search engine optimization (SEO). The top traffic-driving posts of 2008 were:
- My Gmail power tips post.
- My “Best Business Card Ever” post.
- The series of blog posts about Chrome that I did in September 2008.
- My two posts about my Halloween costume and Google’s anti-zombie robots.txt on Halloween.

In addition, my how to hack an iphone article was posted in Sept. 2007 but continued to drive especially strong traffic. If visitors were all I wanted, I’d write about nothing but the iPhone.

Almost as interesting were my traffic sources:

Google and direct visits were a large fraction of my traffic, but so were sites such as Digg, StumbleUpon, Google Image Search, Techmeme, delicious, and Twitter. It’s a good reminder that social media sites and places like image search can drive quite a bit of traffic.

All of this data is courtesy of FeedBurner and Google Analytics, which make this sort of analysis quite easy. What do your 2008 traffic stats look like?

Rough browser numbers are

OneStat says that they see 0.54% share for Google Chrome. Net Applications provides an hour-by-hour graph, which is nice, but they hardwired it to look for the string “Chrome 0.2″ when Chrome is on version 0.3 or 0.4 by now. Just eyeballing the Chrome 0.3 version stats, it looked like about 0.85% market share according to Net Applications. Hey Net Applications folks, any chance you’d be willing to roll up all the Chrome versions into your hourly report?

I hadn’t realized that Internet Explorer usage had dropped so low for my site (~26%). What does your browser marketshare stats look like for the last month or so for your site(s)?

P.S. Stephen Shankland writes about switching to Google Chrome because of the speed, while ExtremeTech also concluded that Chrome is speedy. And if you haven’t seen it, there’s a new version of Chrome (0.4.154.25) that adds a couple nice features:

Bookmark manager with import/export.
Use the ‘Customize and control Google Chrome’ (wrench) menu to open the Bookmark manager. You can search bookmarks, create folders, and drag and drop bookmarks to new locations. The Bookmark Manager’s Tools menu lets you export or import bookmarks.

Privacy section in Options.
We grouped together all of the configuration options for features that might send data to another service. Open the wrench menu, click Options, and select the Under the Hood tab.

Personally, I run the dev channel version of Chrome because I like to see what cool features are coming soon. I think the dev channel has averaged weekly updates, which is really nice because you can literally watch plug-in fixes and other improvements arrive every few days. It’s wild to see client software updated that often instead of every few months.

Update, 11/28/2008: Somehow I missed the getclicky.com browser marketshare stats from 60K+ sites. They peg Chrome at 1.55%, with a little bit of 1.6% to 1.7% in the last week or so.

“Matt, you idiot! How you could run a modern WordPress blog without caching turned on?” you may ask. The first answer is that I’m stupid and figured that I was boring enough that I wouldn’t hit digg or Slashdot for anything.

The slightly-less-stupid answer is that turning on WordPress caching interacts really badly with the FreeBSD systems that my webhost Pair runs (I’ve written about this before). That means that for me, upgrading WordPress takes hours and is a pain in the butt. The last time I upgraded my WP install, I didn’t install Supercache simply because it was such a headache to uninstall before.

I have to do some thinking about what I might change (blogging platform, webhost, etc.) in the future to make this less painful. Frankly, the idea of racing to update my software every few months (so that I don’t need to worry about getting hacked) strikes me as a little backwards; I’d prefer to host my blog with some web service so that I never have to worry about security releases or downloading/upgrading software myself. I don’t blame WordPress or Pair, but the combination doesn’t work well for me right now.

One suggestion for WordPress: integrate caching functionality more tightly so that managing caching isn’t a multi-step process and doesn’t involve juggling plug-ins. Another WordPress suggestion: lower the price of VIP hosting ($600 setup fee + $500/month is too high; if you lowered that a lot, you could probably attract a bunch of people who don’t want to fiddle with WordPress upgrades) and make it trivial to do a CNAME like blog.mattcutts.com to VIP hosting. One suggestion for WP-Cache and Supercache: make an option that clears out all cache files and deletes all directories created by the caching plugin, then atomically disables caching. Maybe that option is there and I’ve missed it somehow. One suggestion for Pair: if I am the owner of a parent directory, let me delete any file or subdirectory from that directory. Then I could delete silly cache files that are owned by “nobody.” Again, I know the fault is primarily mine for not turning on caching, even if it’s a hassle.

Since you’ve been so nice to read my self-absorbed tale of woe, here’s a picture of my cat Ozzie, helping me hack on the blog:

1. Don’t make hard promises about the future. One of the beauties of web-based software and services is you get to decide when to push out changes. Don’t give up that freedom by promising a feature to the outside world by a certain deadline. Maybe later you’ll decide that a different feature is a bigger win. Or you may want to hold off for a week to polish down the last rough edges on a product.
2. Don’t trash talk a competitor. Your product should be strong enough that you don’t have to diss a competing company. Back in 2002, an article in the Boston Herald showed up about another search engine. The article claimed that “The entire XXXXXXXXX Catalog is updated every 9 to 11 days.” I knew for a fact that wasn’t true and at first I wanted to rip that claim to shreds like a bulldog. But (with the advice of some wiser Googlers), I decided to take the high road instead of picking a fight. In fact, claims like that motivated Google to be fresher and faster. Now I believe Google has the freshest index of any of the major web search engines.

   Sometimes other companies will throw dirt in your direction. In that case, the challenge is to correct any misperceptions without picking a fight. But first ask yourself: do you really need to respond at all? If not, then maybe it’s better not to get pulled into an argument where everyone involved loses a little credibility. So far I’ve written 10-15 draft posts (and who knows how many I’ve written in my head) where I was snarky about another search engine, and then not published the post. Each time when I look back after a few months, I’m glad that I didn’t post.

3. Don’t post when you’re angry. This is probably the most important tip. If you have to write something, go ahead, but don’t press publish until you’ve slept on the situation or had a chance to calm down completely.

I’ve broken each of these rules, and regretted it almost every time. What tips would you suggest when blogging about your company?

• Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP), by mitcho (Michael 芳貴 Erlewine).
• Similar Posts, by Rob Marsh.
• Aizattos Related Posts, by, um, Aizatto, I guess. This plugin no longer seems to be maintained officially, so that link is to an unofficial mirror.
• WordPress Related Posts, by Denis (Hua?).
• Wasabi Related entries plug-in.

I did a little digging on each of these. My criteria (in order) was: the easiest plugin to install, that appeared to be actively maintained, and ideally would give me lots of options. The first one I ended up trying was Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP), and mitcho has really done a fantastic job on it:

- It’s trivial to install.
- You don’t have to edit your WordPress template.
- The relevance is good: the suggested posts are related, and you can tweak thresholds and how things are computed if you want.

So I think I’m happy. Even the things that I might want down the road (show the date of posts, RSS feed support, and sentence-aware excerpts) are on the to-do list. But the plug-in is very usable even without any tweaking. I’ll include a screenshot of the options page in case you want to see what sort of flexibility you have:

Well done, mitcho! If you feel strongly that another Related Posts plugin is better, feel free to say so in the comments.