What Is Simplewebs

I did a GoogleSearch http://www.google.com/search?q=DateAndDarwen to find my refactorings of DateAndDarwen. I was surprised to find two things in the first page of results:

c2.com did not appear in the result
a site called http://simplewebs.com/c2/?DateAndDarwen

There was also a hit on my wiki which was not unexpected: http://mahi.ucsd.edu/cgi-bin/ChrisGarrod?DateAndDarwen I kept some notes on my refactoring there.

I looked into the simplewebs site, and found the information I expected to find on c2.com. On c2.com, I was modifying my HomePage, and after saving it, I asked simplewebs for http://simplewebs.com/c2/?ChrisGarrod and it found my new page. I then asked for http://simplewebs.com/c2/?RecentChanges and found that it was dated 20070423 - about a week old.

My question is: Why is simplewebs doing this, and do we on WardsWiki care? When I click on one of their EditPage buttons, I get an url like: http://simplewebs.com/c2/?edit=RecentChanges that doesn't mention the CodeWord at all, so I presume their changes stay there. Are they trying to hijack our content?

And lastly, why didn't Google find the pages on c2.com with DateAndDarwen?

-- ChrisGarrod

Oh and also, these came up as hits too, and I didn't trust the web to visit them:

The above URLs had our WikiWords in them but the content was more of a listing as in a harvest. Who knows anything about those? The cryptic portion of the URLs are so similar.

And lastly, why didn't Google find the pages on c2.com with DateAndDarwen?

Chris did his investigations in April 2007, back when GoogleHatesWiki.

I just came upon the simplewebs site. RecentChanges is up-to-date, as is RubyOnRailsRulesTheUniverse. I edited RubyOnRailsRulesTheUniverse from simplewebs, and the edit took. No CodeWord needed. The RubyOnRailsRulesTheUniverse changes show up on the usual c2 site. Who the heck hosts simplewebs? -- ElizabethWiethoff

Whois says:

Registrant: Jeremy, Backus Jeremy Backus 1726 Woodland Drive Vienna, WV 26105 US

Domain Name: SIMPLEWEBS.COM

Administrative Contact, Technical Contact: Jeremy, Backus jerien@gmail.com Jeremy Backus 850 Washburn Avenue 280 Louisville, KY 40222 US 502-425-2408 fax: 999 999 9999

Record expires on 22-Feb-2008. Record created on 22-Feb-1999. Database last updated on 16-Oct-2007 18:13:25 EDT.

Domain servers in listed order:

NS1.ASPNIX.COM 216.183.116.203 NS2.ASPNIX.COM 66.179.186.240

So I guess this would be a question for JeremyBackus ...

BTW, the trick to seeing the simplewebs pages is to turn off JavaScript. With JS on, simplewebs just redirects to the usual c2 page (or sometimes twirls & blinks in confusion). For example, try visiting http://simplewebs.com/c2/?DateAndDarwen or http://simplewebs.com/?DateAndDarwen with JavaScript turned on, JavaScript turned off. Once there (with JS off), you can look at the page source. You'll see that the page contains loads of other JavaScript stuff amidst weird, invalid HTML.

Simplewebs could be a proxy hack: http://www.seofaststart.com/blog/google-proxy-hacking. Even if it's not, failing to prevent proxy hacking could explain why GoogleHatesWiki sometimes.

-- ElizabethWiethoff

What browser are you using? With JavaScript on, I have no problem viewing the simplewebs site or source in FireFox.

I wonder if simplewebs wasn't a Ward-sanctioned effort to develop a WardsWiki successor - with full integration to the "old" WardsWiki to ease migration - that never made it to production. Or, that has yet to make it to production... -- DaveVoorhis

Firefox 2 on MacOsx. Yes, Simplewebs might be Ward-sanctioned. On the other hand, JeremyBackus's page lists a couple links (snap.com and nichebot.com) which give me the royal creeps, and I'm engaging in guilt by association. In either case, duplicate content can get WardsWiki (or Simplewebs) dropped ever since Google started incorporating dupe detection in its indexing algo. -- Eliz

I noticed something interesting looking at simplewebs.com/?DaveVoorhis. The first sentence reads as follows: "Note: As of 01Desimplewebs006, [...]". That looked odd to me, so I checked Dave's page on the real c2 wiki, and the first sentence is actually "Note: As of 01Dec2006, [...]". They ran a (much too simple) search-and-replace, changing "c2" to "simplewebs". My money is on this not being Ward-sanctioned in any way. -- MichaelSparks

Yup. Based on that evidence, I change my position. -- DV

Though, on second thought (somewhat later), it might be an innocuous mechanism - the device to transform URLs like http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?AccountingModeling to http://simplewebs.com/?AccountingModeling might be nothing but a crude global text replacement, built on the mistaken assumption that 'c2' would never appear in normal discussion except in URLs. Or, the mechanism might not have been completed. Maybe. I've emailed Jeremy Backus about this, so we'll see what he says, if anything. -- DV

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