Get Boggle for your iphone/ipad for FREE today.  I’m downloading it now as we speak.

It’s a great game and only free today. That’s all, enjoy free Boggle!

Now Google, be so kind as to index this please, kthxbai.

Update a minute later – thanks Google, you indexed this in about 30 seconds.

And a few minutes later we get a full post index and an advert:

First of all, the “spinning” technique you guys are using, it’s lame. Replacing {a word|a few words} like this is pathetic.

Second, the email addresses are obviously fake. Also, try harder with this. Make a database of emails with an associated pair name so you’re not sending a comment to my site from “Joe Adams” with the email address Frank.Jones@… Really?

Akismet does a great job of stopping the SPAM. Also the built in stop words. All I have to say is “keep spamming me”, because this is the only way I’ll get less SPAM. Ironic eh?

Here in Costa Rica the internet is terrible. At home it is OK but in the office it is always falling over. We are on a huge waiting list for Wi Max and until then we just have to suck it up. In Canada and the United States, we never really have issues with our internet connection unless we live in remote areas of the country.

At least in the more remote parts of North America we have options. We should all be glad about his because since I moved here, I am somewhat limited. There aren’t a lot of companies who specialize in dial-up internet and DSL service. We’re kinda tied here to the one service provider but things are about to change. Rumours of Comcast coming here and investing is huge right now. The same with the telecommunications monopoly also with five potential new companies coming here.

I wish we had the same flexible options here in Costa Rica that we have in north America.

Check Youtube, Search and all their other products today. I’ll leave you with two more, one is a video April Fool prank on Youtube and the other is in their Search. First the video, after the break…

And now the Search – check the upper right corner of search statistics:

Now, more that ever I feel inclined to track earthquakes since Haiti and Chile had some pretty devastating mass movements, but also because I now live in Costa Rica, which itself is an earthquake zone (see map below). In fact, we felt the fall out from an earthquake off the coast of Chile just last week.

Apart from the US Geological Survey’s latest earthquake site, the best and most concise resource I have found is on Twitter and by following WheresItShaking. These two sites alone can keep me up to date with what’s going on in the world.

At school, I always wanted to get involved with Geology and enjoyed the study of Plate Tectonics. As well as my studies as a Chemist, I won’t ever forget the enjoyment of studying rocks and the earth, most likely because of the fact that the school trips (or at least one of them) was most legendary.

First of all go to your Twitter page and a web browser and look at the source code. From there you should see something that looks a little like ‘http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/6156482.rss’ (this is my Twitter timeline feed RSS). Save this or get ready to insert this into the code later. Let’s move on to making this page.

Making the template page

To make my Twitter RSS feed page, I made a copy of page.php from my theme folder and renamed it to template-twitter.php.

For it to be used as a real template in the WordPress system I added this to the top of the code:

The final page as a regular template now looked like this:

Adding the Twitter code

The code to produce the feed is really simple and there are many more ways of expanding upon it but for the sake of simplicity we let’s go with a plain unordered list of items. First of all we’d like to enclose our items in an unordered list and each Tweet will be a list item. Wrapped around this is he hyper link to the actual tweet on Twitter.

Explanation of the code

This is a call to include the WordPress feed api so we can make use of the feed functionality (software reuse, amazing!)

I added the comment here that we’d be making a feed object from the Twitter RSS. Pretty self explanatory. This is where you insert your Twitter RSS feed.

This is the place to enter the number of items you’d like to display in your feed. Again, pretty self explanatory!

This is where we build out the array and tell it to start from zero items and count all the way up to the number of items specified previously.

If there aren’t any entries in the feed, this will help it be (somewhat) graceful and spit out a string to that effect.

Assuming we have some feed entries, the code begins to step through each value with ‘foreach‘ and creates the array ‘$item’.

The code above is the real meat of it all. This is the code that spits out items from the ‘$item’ array from the Twitter RSS feed. This block of code is all contained within a list item (‘<li>’). Within the ‘<a>’ tag you can see the ‘href’ attribute is output as ‘$item->getpermalink();’ as well as the ‘title’ attribute.

The anchor text is displayed by outputting ‘$item->get_title()’ and is cleaned up somewhat by the ‘htmlentities’ function.

At the end, the date is added in a similar way to how it is added in the ‘title’ attribute of the link and the ‘<li>’ list item is terminated.

Finally, the foreach control structure is terminated and the unordered list is closed.

The complete code is here. You can save this and upload to your /wp-content/themes/THEME-NAME-HERE/.

Now to make the page in WordPress.

From here onwards it’s really easy. All we have to do is make a regular WordPress page and write any introduction paragraph explaining what that page is and then select the template.

Now, because WordPress is super hi tech these days, people can move around certain components of their working installation so you should be looking for something that allows you to select a template which is included in the ‘Attributes’ section (min is on the right hand side).

Here is a screenshot of what it looks like:

WordPress - choose a template

Of course, if you’ve made it to there, you need to choose the correct template, like this:

WordPress - choose a template from the dropdown

The end…

Write your paragraph blurb and make sure you’ve selected the twitter template and loot at your new page (mine looks like this).

I believe Google should introduce some responsibility to it’s results pages so that there are some relative weights given to valid and compliant code (W3C).

Enhancing a site for W3C compliance could potentially bring more users who require accessible websites. I’ve tried to do some research on the law of accessibility but didn’t draw too many good/useful results for this article’s purpose. I did see the US Usability blog which isn’t a terrible read at all but no real info on where governments stand on creating usable and accessible content. There is no doubt that people with disabilities can benefit more from better coding. If we can all try to stick to standards then engineers can develop better methods of delivering the information. That to me, is a good enough reason to deliver standard code.

The accessibility idea is a spin off from standards. Think of coding standards from a logical point of view. You want your website to go the distance, right? Bad code isn’t going to do that for you. To put it frankly, deprecation is a mother f*cker… The chances of compliant features and code becoming deprecated in the near future are not very likely.

So if not for the future of your web content, how about for people who have disabilities? Either way, ignoring compliancy will eventually decrease traffic either from missing a segment of human users (Accessibility) or from losing traffic from service adoption due to deprecation.

Personally, I like gnar gnar bytes the most.

@mattcutts, is it true you said invalid markup has no influence on SEO with Google?

Edward Lewis on Twitter to that guy :P

Update: http://twitter.com/mattcutts/statuses/9994544671

@pageoneresults I believe I made an SEO video about that; if a page has high quality we would like to return it despite errors.

There are quite a few more comments to read on Edward Lewis’s twitter about the W3C valid code and how Matt Cutts hints of it’s lack of influence within the sphere of Google search and SEO.

So now you know the use-case of my Camino experience I’ll take it a little further… I actually like to use it now. It seems light-weight and pretty quick. As for rendering of content, I haven’t looked at how Flash works but for the AJAXified Google Apps it seems to run quite well. I’m even posting through WordPress now via Camino.

So the long story cut extremely short is that Camino is my hot new browser. If you can’t use Google’s Chrome native on a Mac, then give this light weight yet functional browser a shot.

CODE:
# Page has moved temporarily
# domain.com/old_page.html to domain.com/new_page.html
RewriteRule ^old_page.html$ new_page.html [R,NC,L]

CODE:
# SEO / Pretty URLs (no query string)
# domain.com/category-name-1/ to domain.com/categories.php?name=category-name-1
RewriteRule ^([A-Za-z0-9-]+)/?$ categories.php?name=$1 [L]

CODE:
# Pretty URLs with pagination (no query string)
# domain.com/section/title/5 to domain.com/section.php?name=title&page=5
RewriteRule ^section/([A-Za-z0-9-]+)/([0-9]+)/?$ section.php?name=$1&page=$2 [L]

CODE:
# Block referrer spam
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERRER} (casino) [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERRER} (poker) [NC]
RewriteRule .* – [F]

CODE:
# Block image hotlinking
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(.+\.)?mysite\.com/ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteRule .*\.(jpe?g|gif|bmp|png)$ http://domain.com/nohotlink.gif [L]

CODE:
# Block image hotlinking from myspace
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://(.+\.)?myspace\.com/ [NC,OR]
RewriteRule .*\.(jpe?g|gif|bmp|png)$ http://domain.com/nohotlink.gif [L]

In case you haven’t downloaded version 3 of Firefox, here is one good reason – password remembering. In the old FF it would wait for the user name and password submission to be posted before asking if you wanted to remember the user name/password. That sucked because if you screwed it up then you have a user name/password that would stick there until removed or changed.

Version 3.0.1 is my latest Firefox. When I submit a user name and password to a site it goes ahead and processes it but pops an info bar in the top of the browser asking if I want to remember the password, not now or never for this site. It’s just great that it does it after I’ve submitted. Some times I forget my password and it’s good to see it go through successfully before telling Firefox I want to remember it.

When I optimize a website and its pages for search terms it makes me feel all warm and fuzzy when I check the logs and see that I am getting a large percentage of my traffic from search engines and more importantly from the search terms that I have optimized my pages for.

I also like to see my site in the top 10 on a SERP for a phrase I am optimizing for.

Unfortunately, I don’t see Google apply a page rank to my sites and pages that reflect my top positioning for the core terms.

• If I have a site about “blue widgets”, let’s state the following assumptions:
• the site has the domain blue-widgets.com or bluewidgets.com.
• the site has a moderate volume of traffic, nothing to write home about.
• the site is on page one of Google for the term “blue widgets”
• the site is #1 for the term “blue widgets” since it is a niche site with no real competition
• 90% of my traffic is from search engines
• 80% of the traffic from search engines are from key terms and phrases that I have optimized for, including “blue widgets

I have optimized many sites for myself and for others that fit this framework. What I am finding is that the traffic may me low to moderate in volume but the product or information is being received well, users are clicking on related adverts and everything is looking good with regards to visitors coming to the site because they searched for the right phrases that my site provides information on.

Then Google applies its Page Rank. I get my first Page Rank allocation after a few months. My traffic is growing and the traffic is good and related to what I am discussing/advertising/selling/ranting about. I get a PR of 3, woooot!!! The next 6 months I get upgraded to Page Rank 4, wow! All that hard work and now I have PR of 4! Then what? My site is making a lot of money from the targeted ads I am using and from Adsense. I am the #1 authority on “blue widgets” globally so I decide to make more localized results and pages for specific countries and hope that my PR grows!

After a year it is still a 4, maybe I’ll get lucky and hit a PR of 5. What next? I can go to advertisers and say, “hey I have a Page Rank of 5 and ummm, I am top of Google for “blue widgets” which is what you sell, oh, and my traffic is growing!” I wonder why they would care about Page Rank in that sentence? It is ultimately useless if you’re getting the targeted traffic from the terms you optimize for.

When you download a browser or when you get a new computer with Internet Exploder pre-installed on a Windows PC (or Safari on a Mac), the lil green bar that represents Page Rank, is it there? Or do you have to download the Google search bar?

I love seeing highly ranked pages based on PR that have garbage content. If you see any, please drop a comment in here.

Google “Ayre Force”. What an ego this guy has. The idea that he could in any way be a super hero is a joke.

He claimed on his blog that he was only a brand ambassador which is a big pile of crap. He was the main man behind Bodog. I just think it’s funny to read that. Rant over.

Michael,

We all know that you’ve never been somebody to shy away from saying what you think. I applaud that. Most in Hollywood lack the balls to do that. With that said, I’m curious about your thoughts on and feelings about being called a, quote, “fucking retard” by self-proclaimed filmmaker Uwe Boll.

JamesWalker

This is Michael Bay’s website. What would you expect him to say? Would you expect him to reply and if he cared would he write this?

Re: Being Called a “Fucking Retard” by Uwe Boll
I find people who rant like that – calling shit about both me, and George Clooney – comes from someone screaming because he is not being heard. He is obviously a sad being.

When you ask “do I care”? Not in the slightest.

We’re getting the IP from users who are behind a proxy AND we are getting the IP of that user from behind OUR HAProxy load balanced layer – BOOYA!

Props to Chris at OpenX. I owe you a beer!

Here is the email I sent to Commission Junction:

Customer (MY NAME WAS HERE .) 04/01/2008 02:25 PM

I just received an email from you recently entitled “Save your account from deactivation”.
I would very much like to keep my CJ account because our website is just starting to get really big and CJ has some great advertisers that we would love to leverage.

Can you please NOT deactivate my account because it is a big part of our business model for monetizing our site?

Thanks.

I think this was a perfectly reasonable response because I had made some sales from my site but since I was trying to develop the site for content and get contributors I didn’t have much time to spend on enhancing it for earning from the traffic, hence, I requested that CJ do not nerf me. I was surprised to get a response so soon but check out their response, I found it a little shady:

Subject: “Saving your account from deactivation”

Response (CJ REP NAME WAS HERE) 04/02/2008 09:41 AM

Dear MY NAME WAS HERE,

Thank you for your inquiry. If an account does not generate a commission within a six month period, it will be deactivated. This is Commission Junction’s policy. However, if you are deactivated due to dormancy, you will be prompted to reactivate yourself upon logging into your account manager.

To avoid deactivation, you may want to generate a sale or lead after clicking through one of your links. We do not usually encourage making purchases or generating leads through your own links; however, in this case it will be alright.

If you do not want to make a purchase through one of your own links, and you are deactivated due to dormancy, you will be able to reactivate yourself. Once you reactivate your account, you will have another six months to generate a commission before being deactivated again. Your links and banners will still be intact and your relationships should not be affected if you reactivate quickly. Please note that if you remain deactivated for too long, advertisers may choose to expire you from their programs.

A Dormant Account Fee (DAF) of $10.00 USD is charged to publishers that do not generate commissions for a six month period. If you continue to not generate commissions, the DAF charges your account each month until your account balance drops below the DAF amount. At this point, Commission Junction deactivates your account for dormancy.

We hope this answers your question and we apologize any inconvenience this may have caused. If you have further questions, please don’t hesitate to contact us.

Sincerely,
Commission Junction Client Support

Interesting reply where the rep from Commission Junction encourages me to click a Commission Junction generated/supplied link on my site and buy a product from the store thereby sending a payment and earning a commission and ultimately avoiding account deactivation and this $10 “DAF” fee. More like a DAFt business model to be following here from Commission Junction if you ask me.

Here are some questions on this topic:

• Do you use Commmission Junction?
• Have you had this experience?
• Do you agree with their policy on deactivation?
• What do you think of their idea to click a link and buy a product?

I tagged this “bullshit” amongst others because I think it is retarded.

You can learn more about “Gmail Custom Time” here.

You can click on the image above, visit my Flickr page and see it in full size.

OK, Google April Fool’s part II.

Larry is stopping short of pissing himself laughing. He has this huge grin on his face, so funny. Anyway, this is in relation to the Virgle link on the Google homepage. This is a venture of Google with Richard Branson’s company Virgin, hence Virgle. Here is the video on YouTube:

This is right up there with Google’s other pranks like Google Gulp, Pigeon Rank, Google Tisp, how to install Toilet Internet Service Provider!

• Ad Server development – running locally, serving file from localhost, developing plugins and skins.
• WordPress development – again, running locally and being served from localhost, making/changing/hacking plugins and themes.
• We site development – you guessed it, it’s running locally using PHP and screwing with/tweaking Apacge.

I’m about to tell you the secret – I’m using MAMP. It’s a little like a LAMP except it’s a Mac which in itself is part of the UNIX operating system family with a hybrid kernel type. So Mac + Apache + MySQL + PHP = MAMP. It’s pretty awesome. It has configurable ports, PHP version 4 or 5 availability, Zend Optimizer availability and two choices of PHP accelerator (XCache or eAccellerator).

I don’t usually drop shameless links (except for that time when I thought it would be cool to monetize this site with stupi text links and sponsored posts, bad idea I know).

If you tinker with Macs have a peek at MAMP.

There are definitely groups that are not catered for and they are the everyday John Doe who owns a site and doesn’t have nearly enough page impressions or a “suitable site” to warrant an ad server picking them up as a publisher. Frankly, I don’t think it’s good practice to turn away business based on the size of the client. You know what some people say, “Size matters”, well I disagree.

I have a connection for free ad serving and I would like to extend the offer to anyone who has been rejected by larger networks because of size. I am not into working with porn or sketchy setups but if you have a legitimate interest site and would like to monetize your traffic then get in touch. I can certainly hook you up with 100% free ad serving and the worry free aspect of not having to look after the technology and hardware.

Sidenote, I am still having issues with referring to it as “OpenX” as opposed to “Openads”. Heck, I only just got used to “Openads” over “phpAdsNew”!

I received this email today and replied. It’s been a while since I baited one of these douchebags. I wonder if he’ll reply, perhaps if I showed more eagerness to get involved he will. He basically wants me to pay $95 and he will give me the $8 Million that I am not entitled to.

I will follow up with an email after a few days… Also, the email was sent to undisclosed-recipients so it must have been a BCC batch job. This is funny after watching MSNBC’s show on this type of crap!

I hope he refers to me as “Btard”.

Barry,
That is a shame that you are in Benin Republic as opposed to the Netherlands (where the email is from. I may actually flying to the Netherlands on April 2nd for a work conference.

Regards, Btard

On Wed, Mar 19, 2008 at 1:30 PM, barry.gab <barry.gab@orange.nl> wrote:

Dear friend,
It has been long we communicate last, am so sorry for the delay, i am talking of your cheque of ($800.000.00) that my boss asked me to mail to you as soon as you request for, but due to some minure issue you fails to respond at the aproprate time, and presently the cheque is with me here in BENIN REPUBLIC.

Though i had a new contact from a friend of mine who works with one the security company here in BENIN REPUBLIC that will assit you on delivery you your cheque at your door step with a cheeper rate, which the company said that it will cost you the sum of $95, so you have to register with them now.

Below is thier Contact information:
Name TOTAL SECURITY COMPANY
EMAIL. (totalsecourier@yahoo.fr)
DIRECTOR NAME ( Dr Sam Williams).
Telephone…….+229 939 270 66
Fax………….+229-930-09914.

Make sure you contact them as soon as possible, meanwhile i will go right away to the security company and submit your cheque with them, and i would like you contact them for more information and clearification with thier email address and phone numbers above. I will like to hear from you as soon as you recieved your cheque.

Thank you.
Barry John Danko

It’s all here: http://blogs.mysql.com/kaj/2008/01/16/sun-acquires-mysql/

If you need help with setting up a distributed statistic installation of OpenAds well, join the club! I will be posting about developments with this.