Monthly Archives: October 2007

Donncha's Friday Links

Links are back, for now

  • Stumble Crumble displays your Stumbled links in your sidebar.
  • GRAMPS – open source geneology software for Linux and Windows and can be compiled on Mac OS X, FreeBSD and Solaris too. Via an Irish blogger, can’t remember who, comment and I’ll update the post! Via James Galvin, thanks for commenting!
  • Thanks Photub for linking to the GIMP lomo plugin I released a few days ago.
  • Remember LOLcats? Now there’s LOLCode.net. Will someone write a PHP interpreter/compiler? Thanks Alex!
  • Holy Shmoly! is now Gravatar enabled, although I haven’t signed up myself yet. Must see to that this morning. Enabling it on WordPress is really easy. Yes of course, Automattic own Gravatar now.
  • The blogroll update (homepage) plugin opened my eyes. I didn’t know how the “last updated” field in WordPress links was updated, but there’s a file called update-links.php which can be called from Cron to interrogate Pingomatic. Unfortunately api.pingomatic.com is down and Weblogs.com seems crap so I’m going to patch the blogroll update plugin to use Simple Pie to grab my blogroll’s feeds once a day.
  • Why do I have all my best ideas when away from the computer? I need a waterproof pad for the shower…

Update – Ryan says WordPress 2.3.1 will be out soon. Expect the new WordPress MU shortly after. There are enough security and bug fixes in .1 to make waiting worthwhile.
Update 2 – api.pingomatic.com is back up and running thanks to Barry. Must get that plugin working over the weekend and finish adding sites to my blogroll.
Update3 – api.pingomatic.com still seems to be causing problems. It returns “XML-RPC server accepts POST requests only.” when update-links.php queries it, even though the query is a POST request. WordPress 2.3.1 went live a few hours ago! Time to upgrade, there are important bug fixes in there!

Life after Text Link Ads

Hi, my name is Donncha and I used to have text-link-ads on my blog. They’re gone now but only after Google slapped me into submission and reduced my page rank to 4. Initially I felt angry and shocked that this happened but I have no excuse, I heard it from the horses mouth, I knew it was coming. I was one of those evil unscrupulous demons who manipulated the pagerank of other sites for money. My guilty conscience is somewhat alleviated by the fact that I refused to show a text link ad for a Viagra spammer yesterday morning. Oh well.
Google’s own advertising, Adsense, is still running here, as is Kontera, (leave a comment and you’ll never see them, isn’t that nice?) and the competitive ad filter advice I gave out a few days ago really makes a difference to your bottom line. Just ask Justin!

What’s in store for the future? Keep an eye on this blog. WordPress MU 1.3 is coming real soon now. There are going to be lots more free and GPLed WordPress plugins, including a pretty cool digg proof cache that also works in WordPress MU. Think of it as WP-Cache on afterburner! A couple of sites are already testing it with positive results. I’m watching the access_log roll by on a server as a digg is happening now. Load average is hovering around 1 and the page loads quickly. Sweet.

When is an Alfa Romeo really a Maserati?

When it’s the new Alfa Romeo 8C Competizione. This is the first rear wheel drive car from Alfa Romeo since 1992 and there are only going to be 500 made in the first production run, with 500 made in the second in 2009. Don’t bother going to your dealer, they’re all sold out! As you may know I’m a bit of a fan of the Alfa Romeo 147 having owned one a couple of years ago. Such beautiful cars, and just about within the reach of a single, non-mortgage-paying software developer like myself. Times change however, but I wonder if I’ll ever be able to afford the €159,000 asking price of the Competizione.

alphamainorig_222019a.jpg

Jeremy Clarkson has quite a breathless review of the car, although he does finish by saying the steering isn’t up to scratch. Who wants to let me drive theirs to find out for myself? 🙂

Climb aboard the new Alfa 8C and you’re immediately aware that it feels “just right”. It’s a fairly intangible quality, but it means the cabin makes a Porsche’s interior feel almost dowdy by comparison. And as your eyes rove around, they avidly consume acres of leather, plentiful carbon fibre and generous milled aluminium before settling on the slightly swollen front wings that are visible through the little windscreen. It has to be said that the aroma of leather with the 8C truly reeks of promise.

What makes it a Maserati?

The only real question is whether it’s an Alfa Romeo at all. It was designed by Fiat’s in-house styling centre, and uses a Maserati platform as its basis. The engine is a development of one already in use by Maserati, and just to make matters a little more complex, the whole is assembled by Ferrari.

The gearbox and suspension are also derived from systems used on the Maserati Quattroporte and the car is built, not by Alfa Romeo in Turin, but instead by Maserati in Modena. And when those lucky 41 British buyers need their beautiful new vehicles serviced, they will drive them to Maserati dealerships rather than to Alfa garages.

There are a few promo videos on Youtube, and a boring spy camera video too, but this promo seemed to be the best. Just turn down the volume please!

We can have a good world

it@cork Innovate and Connect conference

Watch Hans Rosling’s great talk at TED 2006 where he, “demonstrates how developing countries are pulling themselves out of poverty. He shows us the next generation of his Trendalyzer software — which analyzes and displays data in amazingly accessible ways, allowing people to see patterns previously hidden behind mountains of stats. (Ten days later, he announced a deal with Google to acquire the software.) He also demos Dollar Street, a program that lets you peer in the windows of typical families worldwide living at different income levels. Be sure to watch straight through to the (literally) jaw-dropping finale.”

It’s amazing to see how quickly Chile and other less developed nations have caught up with the “industrialised world”, and are about to surpass them in terms of health care. He’s speaking at the it@Cork conference on November 28th this year and should be very entertaining and insightful.

Why you need the Adsense Competitive Ad Filter

While it didn’t invent search-triggered ads, Google figured out a far more efficient way of turning web-users into buyers. Rather than doling out premium space to the highest bidder, as its competitors did, Google used another algorithm to work out how relevant the ad text was to a given query and the odds someone would actually click on it. This meant ads were targeted at the users most likely to respond to them. The result was that Google’s ‘click through’ rate (the number of times users click on ads) was twice as high as its nearest competitor’s.

(Sunday Times)

You signed up for Google Adsense, verified your home address, typed in the secret code they sent you and now you have adverts on your website. Are you earning the most you can from them? Probably not. Read the quote above again. I’ll wait.

Done? Many advertisers already know this and exploit how Google pick their adverts so their low-paid adverts show in preference to higher paid ads. A whole industry has sprung up around this to create “Made For Adsense” or MFA sites. MFA sites make money because the link clicked to get to them costs them less than the money they make from the adverts your visitors click on their sites. Google took action earlier in the year and disabled many MFA accounts but it’s easy enough to get an Adsense account and they’re coming back. Here are the Alexa graphs for a couple of MFA sites who were stopped in their tracks in June:

megasearchinginfo.png
1helponinfo.png

And here’s an inappropriate site I don’t want advertising on my site.

10-topcom.png

Unfortunately despite the culling of MFA sites in June there are still plenty of low-paid adverts in the Adsense inventory. That’s where the Competitive Ad Filter comes in useful. At least once a week, or maybe more often I browse through the most popular posts on my sites looking at the adverts. If a URL looks particularly suspect I manually type it into a new browser window (don’t ever click on your own ads!). If the page that loads looks like an MFA site it gets added to my ad filter.

Criteria for MFA Sites:

  • Content free. The site will have very little content, or the content will be ripped from elsewhere. Sometimes this is easy to pick up on.
  • Lots of adverts compared to content.
  • Directory site. The front page is a list of unrelated subjects.
  • Front page lists link directly to product affiliate links.

Basically, spammy behaviour.

How do I know if cheap adverts are being served? Log in to Adsense and check the “Page eCPM” column on the Reports Overview page. Is it lower than $5? You could probably do much better! eCPM stands for “Effective Cost Per Thousand Impressions”. From the Adsense help page:

From a publisher’s perspective, the effective cost-per-thousand impressions (eCPM) is a useful way to compare revenue across different channels and advertising programmes. It is calculated by dividing total earnings by the number of impressions in thousands. For example, if a publisher earned $180 from 45,000 impressions, the eCPM would equal $180/45 or $4.00. However, please keep in mind that eCPM is a reporting feature that does not represent the actual amount paid to a publisher.

I document changes to my Competitive ad filter on notspam.org. The sites listed in those posts suit my sites, but if you don’t use the ad filter in Adsense it’s a good starting point. Hopefully you can increase the eCPM of your Adsense account above US$5 with only a few small changes.

Ubuntu Gutsy on the Dell Latitude D630

I previously documented my problems with Ubuntu and the DVD in the D630 but the upgrade to Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy From Feisty went almost painlessly.

ubuntu 710 upgrade

All the packages downloaded and installed through the nice GUI front end. I was able to work away while they downloaded and for most of the time during install too, but when I rebooted I found that sound wasn’t working! I found this solution but I didn’t want to compile a kernel again. That’s so 90’s and this is 2007! Instead I checked my grub menu.lst and found there was an older 2.6.20 kernel listed there. A quick reboot later and sound works again, and it’s even louder! WiFi never stopped working thankfully but if you’re having problems, the page above explains what you need to install to get it working.

I haven’t tried the eye candy features yet, but so far the system feels springier and lighter, even with the old kernel. Let’s hope it stays that way!

Bah. GIMP 2.4rc3 broke a lot of the Script-fu scripts I use. I read about this somewhere. Time to get my hands dirty in my lomo plugin for starters.

Nice! Gthumb supports RAW images although it takes ages to initially process them initially.

The end of the world

How will it end? I watched Earthstorm last night in which the moon was hit by a huge asteroid causing a gigantic split in the surface of our closest neighbour and potentially slicing off a bit that falls into the Earth killing everyone. Luckily, demolition expert John Redding (played by Stephen Baldwin who’s the spit of his brother) saves the day and everyone lives happily ever after. Well probably. I didn’t bother watching the last few minutes.

I can’t believe Dirk Benedict appeared in this awful film.

Anyway, here’s another way for the world to end. Thanks Alex for the link! WTF?^^

The first mention of “youtube Earthstorm” took me to this television commercial for NicoDerm. Guess there are more fans of Anna Silk than of the movie!

PS. First Christmas advert of the season spotted while I fast forwarded through this film on Sky+!

Howto: WP-Cache and protected posts

If you use protected posts on your WordPress blog you may have noticed that WP-Cache doesn’t cache those password protected posts properly. I didn’t know this, but James Farmer did so I went looking and found a fix.

In the plugins/wp-cache/ directory, open wp-cache-phase1.php in your favourite text editor and look for the following line:

if (preg_match(“/^wordpress|^comment_author_email_/”, $key)) {

Replace that line with this one:

if (preg_match(“/^wp-postpass|^wordpress|^comment_author_email_/”, $key)) {

Save and upload the file if necessary and clear your cache. Password protect posts should be cached properly now!

Ironically, this post wasn’t being cached by WP-Cache because the url contains the string “wp-“. Here’s how to fix that bug. Open wp-cache-phase2.php and look for the following line:

if (strlen($expr) > 0 && strstr($uri, $expr))

Change it to read:

if (strlen($expr) > 0 && substr( $uri, 1, strlen($expr) ) == $expr )

Phew. This post is now cached.

Close

Ad-blocker not detected

Consider installing a browser extension that blocks ads and other malicious scripts in your browser to protect your privacy and security. Here are a few options.

  • uBlock Origin is a free, open source, ad blocker for your browser.
  • Use pi-hole if you have a spare Raspberry Pi on your network.
  • Set the private DNS settings on your phone to dns.adguard.com to block adverts and trackers.