Web – Page 4 – Something Odd!

Is this living?

I spotted this on a large advertising hoarding on the Western Road in Cork this afternoon and snapped it to remind myself to look it up. It’s right by UCC and in the perfect spot to attract the attention of webs savvy students. URLs on hoardings are like honey to a bee with me. I will snap off a few shots of the sign as a reminder and visit later. When I did visit thisisliving.ie I was presented with the following page.

I have to ask, if I’m visiting thisisliving.ie what country do you think I’m in?

After selecting Ireland and hitting “Enter” I was brought into a nice animation of a resort or hotel which built up and zoomed away again, and then repeated with another 2 locations before being brought to a hotel reception. I signed in and clicked around for about 5 minutes before getting bored of all the loading. It reminded me of the days spent loading C64 games from datasette. At least then I had the cool Ocean or Thalamus loading music to entertain me..

The copyright notice at the bottom of page identifies “Sony Computer” and a quick search took me to this post which has the following tv ad for the Playstation 3. Apparently this advertising campaign has been running all over Europe since January. I’m sure I would have come across a games console somewhere if I had persisted!

Game footage in the above trailer does look pretty. Anyone bought a PS3 yet? Someone told me they’re going for about €600 or so. That correct? You could buy a reasonably specced “home PC” for that much! Supposedly Ireland has a less than healthy obsession with everything Playstation so I’m sure they’re selling like hotcakes!

My £30 Adwords Temptation

I’m a sucker for vouchers, if they’ll really save me money that is. I generally read the small print just in case I have to “subscribe for 12 months to take advantage of this deal” and it’s a good thing I read the ones attached to this offer from Google. They’ll give me a £30 Google Adwords voucher to try out Adwords, but according to the terms and conditions written in dark grey on light grey below the main body of the email:

The promotional credit will be automatically credited to your new Google Adwords account once you have entered your promotional code and billing preferences. If you choose the post-pay payment method, the account activation fee (currently £5) will be deducted from the promotional credit before this is credited to your account. If you choose the pre-pay payment method, you must make an initial minimum payment (from which the account activation fee will be deducted) to activate the account before the promotional credit can be credited to your account. You will be charged for any advertising charges that exceed the promotional credit, and you are solely responsible for the payment of any taxes incurred.

Still, if I was interested in advertising my blog I’d go for it. I may yet advertise one of my other sites as I have a few months to redeem the voucher. They’ll have me hooked then! Damn you Google! (Raises fist to air in theatrical fashion and shakes it in anger at the burning sun)

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!

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

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:

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