Category Archives: Web

How to accidentally erase your ad filter

When you’re adding sites to the Google Adsense “Competitive Ad Filter” please do not do what I just did.

As my filter has the maximum 200 urls I have to delete entries before adding new one, but I had deleted a couple of urls so I thought I’d have space for just one more slightly-dodgy low paying ad site. Unfortunately I didn’t and the familiar “Too many lines” error showed.

Normally I would search out another url to delete but I wanted to be done with it and not bother with my last change so I hit return on the url, this url, https://www.google.com/adsense/filter-save.do – thinking that it would reload the old list. It certainly did. It brought me back to day 1 when I had no entries in the filter! You know that sinking feeling? That moment when something has gone really wrong? That was me a few minutes ago.

Thankfully hitting BACK on my browser and confirming the POST operation restored the list and I quickly removed the offending LCPC site. Phew.

Someone should tell Google, this would be a rather quick and easy way for a malicious someone to mess with a person’s filter. They should check for the existance of some POST variables before overwriting the filter. It’s a bug!

Simply because a blog post isn’t a blog post without a link, here’s where I talk about my competitive ad filter. MFA and LCPC sites galore. The MFA sites listed in this post finally made it into the ad filter this morning.

Yet another twit signs up

Yes, I’m on Twitter now. No. I’m not a pregnant goldfish but the first thing I like about Twitter is their support for RSS. Conor’s twitter popped up in my meta search a few minutes after he twittered.

twitter+flickr+webcam+stockpix=flussgeist via Topgold on Twitter. Pretty cool. Listen to that Trocaire Ad banned on Today FM and other non-RTE radio stations.

How I know who's talking about me

I’ve been meaning to write about this for a while but Scott Adam’s post about using Google Alerts to find people talking about Dilbert prompted me to put fingers to keys this afternoon.

When someone anywhere in the world mentions my name in a blog post or even a comment, on Flickr, on Zooomr or anywhere with an RSS feed I know about it within a few hours. Occasionally it might take longer, maybe a day or so, or even a few months sometimes, but that would be unusual.

How? I use a “news aggregator” called Bloglines to track my favourite websites. Bloglines also has a search engine to search through their database. Nothing extraordinary there, but the magic happens when you subscribe to that search. “Subscribing” is just like subscribing to a magazine. You’re sent updated news and information as it happens at the source. When you subscribe to a blog, every time that blog is updated their new post appears in your aggregator. No need to fret about missing the latest news any more.

Instead of having to reload a search page every few hours Bloglines does that job for me automatically. The Bloglines feed list reloads periodically. A quick glance at it’s page in my browser window shows me if someone mentions me. It’s less stressful than checking my email all the time and news is delivered into my browser where I want it.

To be sure I search as much of the Internet as possible I do the same search on Technorati too.

I wonder will Scott find this post or comment on it? Probably not but hopefully someone else will find this useful.

Too Frickin’ Cool

Counting down to the 2007 Blog Awards

It’s not long to go before the Blog Awards on Saturday. Damien says that there’s extensive media coverage of the event including interviews on radio and spots on RTE news. I’m looking forward to seeing who wins what on the day. I’ll be keeping an eye on Irish Blogs.ie for updates that evening, but I’ll be staying at home here in Cork while everyone is partying in Dublin!

Meanwhile, Blarney suffered yet another power cut. This one lasted for well over 2 hours. Have laptop, have dvd player, watched “United 93”. Frighteningly real and shocking film. I still remember being in my boss’s office watching on a little portable TV as the smoke poured out of the World Trade Center that day and later hearing from clients on that campus that they were ok.

Edit: While on the subject of Irish blogs, Haydn Shaughnessy asked if Irish blogging is about to peak just as blogging becomes mainstream elsewhere? I never got around to commenting on it, but if I had I would have asked, “Does it matter? People have been nattering and gossiping forever and a day and they’ll do it in whatever forum they can.” His article appeared in today’s Irish Times, so go buy the dead tree version, or read the comments on the post above.

Find new stuff with the image wall

While everyone seems to be running to the new kid on the block, Google Reader, I stuck with Bloglines because I prefer the old-style interface and the sorting options over the new fangled web 2.0ish Google upstart.

At the same time, I’ve lusted after some of the new features of Google Reader but Bloglines have been busy with a new feature I quite like called the Image Wall. The wall is basically a collection of images grabbed from the latest posts that Bloglines sees. The wall refreshes continuously bringing in new content as you’re watching. Clicking on an image leads to the Bloglines preview of that post where you can then click through to the actual post.

It’s not perfect. The images don’t always fade in correctly, sometimes stuttering or suddenly appearing or changing for some reason. That’s only a minor problem compared to the big one. When you hover an image, a popup appears with a large verson of that image, and allows you to mark offensive images. Unfortunately to get to an image in the middle of the wall you have to move your cursor over other images, thus suffering more popups. If you haven’t tried it, image what it would be like to mouse over a Snap Preview powered page full of closely formatted links. Ugh.

Besides that problem I really like the idea. I found a blog with an hour’s worth of Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody remakes yesterday because they included a screen grab from that song’s video. Unfortunately my browser crashed shortly afterwards so I can’t share it with you. I can see you’re disappointed.

Just in case you’re worried about such things, you have to click through the following disclaimer each time you activate the wall.

The Image Wall is comprised of dynamically generated images from user feeds and may contain material of an explicit sexual nature or other adult content.

You do read the small print don’t you? Don’t go complaining that you weren’t warned!

bloglines-imagewall.jpg

Edit: Looks like Bloglines have listened to the complaints and have responded.

Effective today, Bloglines will move the Image Wall to its own, new domain at http://www.bloglinesimagewall.com. Now, any school, library, parent/guardian or third party filtering service can add this full domain to their list of restricted domains to be blocked.

Is Flickr under attack by spam?

Has anyone else noticed an increase of spam comments on Flickr lately? I noticed my first spam comment there only last week, complained about it, and the comment and user were both deleted shortly afterwards. I thought nothing more of it.

This morning I got an unwelcome shock when I checked my Flickr comments through Bloglines. More spam comments. There’s a screenshot below. When I clicked through to the photos in question both comments had been deleted but later on another spam comment appeared and I now suspect any comment left by users with usernames starting with “a” with a mixture of upper and lower case characters and digits. Maybe it’s time they invested in an Akismet license for Flickr.com? Thanks Lloyd for the reminder!

Continue reading “Is Flickr under attack by spam?”

How to graph your Adsense Earnings

adsense-graph.gif

Michele blogged about a new simple and easy to use Adsense earnings graphing tool this morning that generates nice graphs.

Besides graphing the average earnings per day it also displays two moving averages which are useful as another indicator of growth. Finally, the gold line is a trend line for the future based on the data submitted.

Before you try it, read the blog post with a more detailed explanation and instructions, then give it a whirl for yourself.

What I would love to see are width and height parameters so I could resize the graph before it’s generated. Resizing afterwards antialiases the text and makes it difficult to read.

Yes, as you can see from the graph, December was a good month.

Voting in the blog awards is easy

How to vote in the Irish Blog Awards in three easy steps:

  1. Visit the voting page at http://www.awards.ie/vote/
  2. Enter your name and email address.
  3. Scroll down to “Best Photo Blog” and select “In Photos” from the drop down list.
  4. In “Best Contribution to the Irish Bloggersphere” select “Donncha O’Caoimh”
  5. In “Best Technology Blog/Blogger” select “Donncha O’Caoimh” again.

There, no confusion. No wondering who all those people and blogs are. Hope that helped and thanks for voting!

PS. Thank you to Damien Mulley, the brains behind the awards, and to the sponsors of the above categories: Pixenate, First Partners, and Bitbuzz!

PPS. Damien will enter everyone who votes into a draw for a copy of “Vista Home Premium”. That of course might not be to everyone’s tastes, but you can always give it away to your worst enemy if you win..

Who wins Irish Linkbaiter of the Year?

A number of Irish blogs and sites attracted a great many links and attention over the past 12 months but I think I can safely say that the Irish Blog Awards deserves the much coveted “Irish Linkbaiter of the Year Award”. If Damien didn’t delete his own blog from nominations he’d certainly be up for a gong or two!

Not to be left out, I’ve linked to the Awards site too, and I noticed that I’ve been nominated in three categories:

  • This blog is nominated in the best technology blog category.
  • I’m nominated in the “Best Contribution to the Irish Bloggersphere” category
  • Finally, In Photos has been nominated in the best photoblog category.

I voted a few days back and I remember nominating In Photos (hey, why leave things to chance?), but thanks to whoever nominated me in the other categories. Now all that remains is for everyone to vote for me! Go on, you know you want to!

I won’t make it to the awards ceremony this year either but Ryan will be on hand to take a few photos. I look forward to seeing his brilliant black and white shots of the event. My reason for not attending are the same as last year, but thankfully, this year it’s under much happier circumstances!

The voting page doesn’t link to the participating blogs and personalities, but Jason Roe came up with the goods and has linked to them all. Fire up your browser and open them tabs! Ah yes, the Red Cardinal has done the same.

Meanwhile, in typical Rebel Cork style, the Gamma Goblin is holding his own alternative blog awards where, “I’m gonna have my own awards and give ye all nothin! I’m gonna print up flyer’s and stuff, and have cake, and pop… and then maybe a raffle. None of you cretins will get any of the tickets, I’ll keep all the tickets, that way I will definitely win the spot prize’s, which will consist of, a collection of items, and a pile of things.” Go on GG, blow your own bugle, you’ll enjoy it!

We are live from BarCamp South East!

Here I am blogging away at BarCamp South East. It’s been a great day so far. My talk was scheduled for 10:50am which was a relief to get out of the way. Feedback has been positive too and horrors of horrors, I actually enjoyed the talk! Video and podcasts will be online eventually and I’ll update this post when they’re available. Elly left Bernie’s dictaphone on the seat next to me, Joe and Conor had video cameras so I’m sure you’ll get to hear or watch me talk about WordPress one way or another if you’re interested!

Thank you all for the comments on yesterday’s post. I’m hopeful that things will return to normal sooner or later on inphotos.org!

Now, I’m off to look around and mingle with the rest of the attendees!

Just spotted on Lifehacker, is How to manage kids in the home office, a topic brushed upon in my talk.

I’m sitting in the Drupal talk now by Alan Burke and Stephane Corlosquet on the laptop. John Handelaar is showing off his voter site written in Drupal. It’s a great presentation on the power of Drupal and it’s plugins.

Ken McGuire has a review of the day, and apart from everything else, and it was great to talk to Justin Mason finally.

Great day. I think everyone’s looking forward to the next one in May!

Conor O’Neill has posted videos of my talk on his blog. I could embed them here, but he went to all the trouble of uploading them, so go visit his blog and check them out. There are bits there about scaling WPMU by hashing blog_ids and partitioning databases, as well as how to get past the 32,000 file limit of ext2/ext3 in the blogs.dir files directory. Also, if you work from home I discuss my experiences doing the same, and communicating within a virtual company.

Bernie has posted the first podcast of my talk. He’s posting the second half tomorrow about working from home and in a virtual company.

The second part of Bernie’s podcast is online today! In this part I talk about working from home and balancing work and home life. Should be of interest to everyone working from home!

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