The best solution is to just marry your high school sweetheart… that way you never lose track :-)
Umm, yeah. Nice. I managed to miss-spell your name when I wrote the post. At least I can correct it there… :\
Funny, though. :)
just what i needed: confirmation that i’m wicked old ;)
Before Shelley jumps on me, I should point out that this tip is inherently gender-biased. Women do not have this problem, since men don’t (well, hardly ever) change their name when they get married.
Backstory: this tip originated several years ago, when a former girlfriend contacted me out of the blue and explained that she had overheard my name in the context of some technical discussion, then looked me up in Google and found this site. A few days ago, I was discussing that incident with a friend and realized that the reverse probably wouldn’t have worked. My former girlfriend had long since married after I had lost track of her, so I wouldn’t have recognized the name if I had heard it, nor would I be able to find her online if I tried.
It has since been pointed out to me that some social networking sites include a “maiden name” field, so perhaps this issue will go away over time as more married women publish their maiden and married names in some google-able format.
Truth still hurts, though.
— Mark 
Those of us who stay friends with our exes don’t have this problem. Just a tip.
— Andy
Just a note, your backstory link doesn’t work in RSS.
— engtech
That’s because it’s a relative link, and your feed reader doesn’t relate it to the base URL in the feed. I’d say it’s a bug in the feed reader, although I don’t know for certain whether relative links are allowed in Atom feeds (they’re not allowed in RSS).
Either way, Mark, it’s probably better to rewrite your links in feeds to use absolute URLs. I don’t really see a drawback if you do it automatically (like my feeds do), and it helps in quite a few feed readers.
It’s very explicitly allowed in Atom. If you’re feed reader doesn’t resolve them properly, it doesn’t support Atom.
> your backstory link doesn’t work in RSS.
Your sentence makes no sense; I don’t offer RSS feeds. Perhaps what you meant is that the link doesn’t work in your feed reader. If this is the case, your feed reader is broken, and you should contact the vendor to report it. I don’t want to make this into a big RSS-vs-Atom thing, because people who care about such things already know where I stand on such issues.
However, I will note in passing that this particular relative link is a full pathname that is only relative to the domain, so even if I did include this link in an RSS feed (which I haven’t), it shouldn’t present a problem for feed readers. There are only a finite number of reasonable choices for guessing the base URL of a relative link in an RSS feed — the feed URL, the entry URL, or the channel URL — and even though no RSS spec defines the right one, in this case they all share the same domain so they would all resolve to the same (correct) destination. If your feed reader isn’t choosing any of those, then it’s *really* broken, and I find it difficult to believe that my feed is the first place you’ve had a problem.
— Mark
I attempted to Google a blind date last year and came up empty. No big deal; not everyone lives their life online, right? Little did I know that had I searched using MySpace instead, I would have discovered more than enough about her.
Even to “Google” is to now show your age. What will this mean for the Facebook generation?
Hello… Classmates.com anyone? It’s not foolproof (hardly), but it is there for you.
Sing it! “She’s married now, or engaged or something, so I’m told.”
— Ethan
Regarding the broken link, the bug isn’t in the reader but the feed. The problem is that the link is a same-document reference to a fragment that doesn’t exist in the feed.
According to RFC 3986, the target of such a reference is defined to be within the same entity (representation, document, or message) as the reference. In this case, since the comment isn’t included in the feed content that obviously isn’t true and thus the target can’t be found.
Now you might be thinking that a feed reader should retrieve the full URI before looking for the fragment, but RFC 3986 says no: a dereference should not result in a new retrieval action. The bottom line is that link just doesn’t go anywhere.
Your best bet in this situation is to do as I do: None of my exes want to hear from me anyway, so I have nothing to Google for. (TruthHurts Beta 3.0)
— Josh
I have the same problem: your backstory link does not work in Google Reader (In this case it takes the base URL as, believe it or not, google.com. You might want to try it yourself.
— Chetan
James Holderness, your interpretation of the section in RFC 3986 titled “Same-Document Reference” is incorrect.
“When a URI reference refers to a URI that is, aside from its fragment component (if any), identical to the base URI (Section 5.1), that reference is called a “same-document” reference.”
The link in Mark’s feed points to a URI with a different base URI to the feed it’s self and hence is not a same document reference. Mark is correct in stating that this is explicitly valid Atom.
— Noah Slater
None of this is a problem when you went to an all-male boarding school. Interpret that as you will. I suppose the same is true if you spent high school discussing RFCs or the equivalent.
Noah, you’re comparing the wrong URIs. You should be comparing the link URI to the base URI, not the feed URI. See section 5.1 for an explanation of base URI precedence. In Mark’s feed, the base URI comes from an xml:base attribute in the content element.
Base URI: http://diveintomark.org/archives/2007/01/30/truth-hurts
Link URI: http://diveintomark.org/archives/2007/01/30/truth-hurts#comment-8123
Aside from the fragment component, they are identical. Thus we have a same-document reference.
Wow, by jove I think you might be right.
Does Atom specifically allow this? In which case it’s a bug in the Atom specification, else a mistake of Mark’s.
— Noah Slater
Noah: no, it’s not a bug in Atom. It’s a problematic interaction between RFC 3986 and the xml:base recommendation.
None of this is a problem when you went to an all-male boarding school.
“If you can’t google your high school sweetheart, maybe it’s because you only know her maiden their natal name.”
Less heterosexist make you feel better?
— Maggard