So, I read this post in the digg blog with much fascination.

it shows this:

<script>
digg_url = \'URLOFSTORY\';
</script>
<script src=\"http://digg.com/api/diggthis.js\"></script>

Which is pretty cool because then it makes it easier for users to digg a story on your site even if they found the story through some other means. But there's a pretty huge problem with the widget...

The workflow for this is something like:

1. write story
2. wait for someone to digg story
3. find URL of the digg story
4. add widget to my site
5. rejoice

It would be really nice if I could just automatically add that little snippet of javascript to everyone one of my posts and rather than saying "URLOFSTORY" it would be "URLOFORIGINATINGSITE" and then on the Digg end you figure out the most likely story that it should relate to. I know this is tough because of the whole duplicates thing, but that's why you make the big bucks.

Because then the workflow would be something like
1. write story
2. rejoice

And that's clearly a better workflow.

If the answer is "we just can't do that" then I've got a surprise someone else will do a better job and you'll be forgotten.

I read the Inside AdSense Blog because monetization is FUN! Today I woke up to see that they now have a search box that will give results right inside your own page which is a great step beyond their previous effort (the previous effort allowed you to do some basic theming of the results page...pretty useless). So, I got all excited and hooked it up on UAGDSE.com and if you try it out what you'll find is that the search code and Drupal get mad at each other.

A Little History

Drupal, like many web applications, originally used URL parameters to create its URLs. Things like ?q=node/3 or ?q=admin let the system know that the user is requesting the "node/3" page or the "admin" page. Over the years people figured out fancy ways to make URLs work without the ?q= but Drupal still supports this notation in case your configuration doesn't allow the rewriting magic necessary. It's also handy for when you recompile apache and forget rewrite and your site breaks - then you can still get into ?q=admin/settings and fix stuff.

The Google vs. Drupal conflict

The way this becomes a problem is because Google's search expects to be able to use the "q=" parameter and it creates URLs like http://uagdse.com/uagdse-results?q=term which then confuses Drupal into thinking that I'm asking for a page named term which doesn't exist. The funny thing is that when you do a google search for a path that actually exists and is available (like node/198) then Drupal returns that page quite nicely.

I'm not sure what the fix is. I can imagine one solution being to use a more specific url parameter than "q" like "dq" but I doubt we're going to get the millions of people using Drupal to change. I can also imagine a setting in Drupal for "no really, ignore, I only want clean URLs so please ignore any q= in the URL parameters" but that doesn't feel right. Of course, part of the reason I'm writing about this is a little lazyweb plea for someone with a better idea on how to fix it.

Dear Lazyweb,

When I get stressed I have a habit of jutting out my jaw.

I'd like to stop doing that.

I have the following solutions:

1. Duct tape my jaw to the back of my head
2. Dig out my head-gear from middle school and attach it to my bottom teeth this time
3. Get my mom to sit next to me all the time and say "ah, ah, ah" whenever I jut it out

Technique 3 was my solution last time I had this problem. Sadly, last time I was 4 years old and bringing her to work would just be weird and work (surprise) is where I get the stress that makes me jut the jaw. If I worked from home or something, that might work, but I'd have to work from her home.