Site Updates: March 2005 Archives

If you want to display this lovely button:

You'd paste this code on your site (if you don't want the image loading lag, you might want to save the image locally and link to it that way):

If you want a text link like this:

subtitles

You can paste this:

<a href="http://blog.fallingbeam.org">subtitles</a>

The button was made with this. The instructions on how to display code can be found here. An idiot-proof-ish code generator can be found, referred from the last link, here.

I'm pretty damn sure that installing graphics drivers is going to piss me off. To be fair, I saw behaviour with Nvidia drivers that I wasn't too wild about, but I can't imagine how things could ever be quite as bad as with ATI - and the process is annoyingly painful. Makes me wonder if a clean install would even fix it. I think there are good reasons why I've become lazy about clean installing, not least of which is that it's a pain. I'm ever so slightly disappointed that no one's tried skypeing me via my link, I've even hooked up my telemarketing gear.

And so I'm getting ever closer to removing most of the ads from my site - the search boxes are annoying me now, and to be honest, their search is pitiful - unless it's just that indexing the site too difficult - the built in search is much better. The ring tones will be gone - I'll just stick to the adsense ads, maybe even cut out the economist link, or at least the image link, along with the other bits from CJ. The buttons I'm also getting annoyed with. Basically I'm just concerned at how long the page load for the main page is.

And so it's done. The old site I can't be bothered. I'm thinking of getting rid of the forum and auditioning WordPress, to see if I can make it not be ugly. I'm also reminded now that my junk fastmail address is starting to piss me off, so I might move to another one and abandon that one. Anyway it shouldn't really matter to anyone other than me, since I tend to send mail and give the address that is personal, and the e-mail link on the site will always be active.

TypeKey Registration

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I'm just sick of having to moderate anonymous comments, and to be honest, I've still not recieved a comment that's made it all worth it, so from now on, you need to go to TypeKey.com and register before you can post - it's not a big deal and you can then comment on any typepad or MT blog that uses this. And so far I've not had a spammer who bothers to sign up, so yay. The easiest way is to just follow the link when you're at a post, it'll ask you to 'sign up'. Any grammar geeks out there can now enlighten me on the circumstances under which you use "" rather than ''. But yes, I allow registered users to post and it'll show up immediately, so no more moderation in that sense, though once you're banned, that's it.

I've updated my Broadvoice post to reflect my recent problems with the scum sucking bastards, you can find it here. I was going to do a proper write-up on my issues, but got lazy and annoyed so I just posted the latest e-mail with the attached history of e-mails. Hello Broadvoice employees - your service, and your customer service, SUCKS ASS.

I suppose I'm getting a little disillusioned with Adsense - there seem to be a whole bunch of other smaller players getting into the market - I wonder what they compete on. Basically my problem is that the ads they serve aren't exactly that relevant, and not surprisingly, because I have so much new content, it doesn't tend to show relevant ads straight away. And the empty banners are always a bit annoying. Though now that I think about it, a lot of things use adsense but mask it - the other players tend to be those annoying smart-tag-like idiots.

So I'm a little obsessed. I've also pinned the UK DVDs to the bottom of the page, though I'm sure most of the clicks I attribute to my phantom audience were probably mine. To be honest I'm sure I'm a bit happy that people (by which I mean random people) aren't reading this, because gauging by what people are writing on these things, that's not company I want to keep. My delusional mind views this more as me being responsible and maintaining at least some form of historical record.

Oh and despite the fact that I found the W3Schools guide to XHTML totally useless, I'm still proud of the fact that at least I'm not a pansy and am able to set dynamic widths on my pages - people who stick to the assumption of 800x600 are just lazy. I'm not saying you don't test at that resolution, because you should, but as evidenced, some people think 1600 is a good idea, so there's the future waving the ride.

Bite the bullet baby, bite the bullet.

I'm finding right-click scroll rather useful in my quest to scam BlogClicker, something useful to do while trying to not watch too much of Dr. Who. I mean, Neverwhere can't have been that much more expensive, but it was hell of a lot better. Maybe they should bring back Greg Dyke, if only because he hated this crap.

Though really, I get the feeling I'm the one getting scammed - at a rate of 2 clicks to 1 view, it's sustainable (I suppose) but not terribly worth it for me yes/no? And really, who are these cocksuckers who keep getting impressions - don't tell me they actually paid to get on. Though this is pretty sad too. It's not actually pyramid selling, but I'm sure there's a name for it somewhere.

If only Billie could be on something worth a damn. She's supposed to start singing again, which might be fun. You just hope she doesn't stray that far. And yes I'm reminded that I don't read Heat anymore.

Mind 'Boggling'

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I should really do a post about the various bog directories and search engines - so much crap so little time. I'm also thinking of moving all the buttons etc. to the bottom of the page or something, cuz they're really starting to piss me off. Cruising people's little boggling endeavours is enough to make me want to stab myself - and not in a fun way.

Okay, I've done my lovely compromise and everything is tucked away that the bottom of the sidebar.

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This is now going to become the post of retired code:

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Blog Explosion

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Believe it or not this was the least annoying banner I could find of theirs.

So they pay you to read other people's bogs - by making other people read yours. Fun huh? So not the fun kind of payment. Anyway, if you sign up by clicking on the banner (or the button), or even this link, I get part of the fruits of your labour. I was even conscientious enough to do the same for the guy who commented on my post - which is how this whole pyramid thing works, in case you were wondering.

It's pretty painful trying to do it with 8x6, and really it's pretty painful regardless because of the frames. I'll have to see how's best to scam it - it'll be better than obsessing about my ads. Though now my pagess seem a bit empty when I see one with proxo and can't see the banner ad.

But yes, if bog-smurfing is your thing (it's not mine), and also an attention whore/slut (like me, though I'm not sure which is more appropriate - hence the /) - then this is just the drive-by colonoscopy you were looking for all your life.

I'm really loving the LiveMessage Alerts by the way - very prompt and effective - though I think you have to be slightly less aggressive with your ad patching if you want the alerts to show up in your contact list.

allaboardgloria@aol.com

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My aversion to watching films is getting a bit pathological. allaboardgloria@aol.com Well aren't you a good sport.

I'm wondering what buttons to tack at the bottom of the individual pages, but I'm starting to lean towards none. But with no ring tones, what *will* I do. Last thing you want is to wind up with a hump. At least when the formatting fucks up in Opera with the LiveMessage frame, it's easy to break out. Ok, I take it back - someone in Norway just bought a ring tone!! How sad is my pathetic excitement.

I tell you one thing, I am *not* paying for dinner. Great - you broke him. Yes, we get it, Pavlov's Bar.

I have the sudden urge to webcam. I'm also wondering if certain sex sites are linking to me, since I keep getting referrals off them. Someone signed me up? They hacked into my super-sexy webcam? Can't quite get an inkling of what that's about, so I've decided to ignore it - I'm sure all I get are horny disappointed people. I get the feeling though, that somehow my stats are being spammed - god knows how - as my old bog is full of referrers from poker sites.

Holland Taylor does the tartness just right.

Abrupt skip to a few seconds of Dr Who, where you realise Billie has learnt that being rich-married means you don't have to be aspiringly svelte any more.

Krista Allen is pretty okay in 2.5 Men - manages to be pretty straight/funny. Very commited - and the slitty eye thing was good.

Hack Me

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Of all the advertising I get, I think I like the political advertising best. If I see another ad for boggling paraphenalia, I'm going to boggle *you*. I'm also wondering if I should get rid of at least one of the lower banners on the individual page - I'm wondering if it makes it less likely than it already is that people discover the comments. I resolve that the next time I fix code, I'm getting rid of the ring tones. Directory still needs to be done, and I get the feeling I should concentrate more on the google ads and less on the amazon links. The amazon stuff is probably more useful through the customised files I make.

I get the feeling that it's not so much my ads being more effective, but more that my friends now understand the nature of them and are doing me a favour - am I wrong? Or are they just paying more attention?

The LiveMessage updates are sort of fun - though the frames annoy the fuck out of me. A lot of these services have a bunch of customisation options, but I really wonder if I can be bothered to pretty them up unless specifically requested. I wonder when I'll capitulate and start using all Feedburner all the time - I take Rice's point that it's probably good to have stats for your feeds to help track traffic/subscriptions for advertisers - but, well, I'll burn the bridge when I get to it, as I always say.

But getting back to the politics thing, it really does encourage me to write more about politics - such an interesting phenomenon, capitalism, in how it directs so subtly our responses. Or some such.

I've just added a bunch of buttons for feed readers/feed aggregation services. All of which seem to about as useful as painting the ceiling. Which brings me to the question - who uses this crap? So far the MSN and Yahoo ones are fine, they do what you ask, it adds it to your personalised portal page as another news source, which you can push way higher as it fits your unseemly desires. Newsgator, Feedster and Bloglines are super-duper incredibly opague in actually showing feeds so the question again is who the fuck uses these absolutely cock-addled pit-holes. LiveMessage sounds fun, but they don't seem to be able to send me the welcome pack. Idiots. Okay, now they've sent it and it seems to do what it says - it sends updates to messenger - which is pretty cool.

I did this so people could use whatever they wanted to syndicate the site, basically to make it all easier - so there. Honestly, the most straightforward way is to just use the RSS icon in your Opera address bar, or use the URL for "Syndicate this Site" - that's the default Movable Type feed. There's Atom and RSS 2 - but you know what those are I'm sure you'll know where to find it (Opera's address bar, again, does a bang up job of it, by the way).

Below are the various button making pages for the various services, in case you're interested, MSN I couldn't find and just figured it out.

Skype
Yahoo
NewsGator
Bloglines
Feedster
LiveMessage Alerts

Well I've since figured out where all the buttons were found in one easy place - FeedBurner does it for you under "publicize", giving you code for all the various services you can shove feeds into. The stats feature makes me consider FeedBurner again, but really I'm only interested in hits for the advertising aren't I? Or for people to post comments or whatever nonsense. When my paid site-manager appears in the future, I could get him to do it for me, in the mean time, Rock'n'roll.

Bandwidth Left

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Apparently blog pimping, even on the now defunct mufftorrent.com, is ever so slightly frowned upon - even if you were helping peeps out to find new places. Not that having an account there would mean anything now. People actually came round though and some guy posted in forums. I don't know, I can't say it's not fun having strangers manhandle my site, it's probably lonely and wants to be touched. The traffic on comments.cgi makes me worried that people are trying me to spam, but hopefully movable type's not that silly. Well, whatever it is, there's still plenty of bandwidth left, so bring it on.

I'm looking at my old bog and it really looks incredibly awful to me now. New one is *much* prettier. I've pretty much inundated the old one with ads, just because that's what it should be good for now. There are links to this place, and a link to the subtitles post, so as long as they're not blind, hopefully they'll move over.

I've put ads in the banner here, only because the space kept staring back at me, so it had to be done. It was a bitch of process, but at least now I know more about CSS - really very good fun. If I say so myself, at least my ads are conscientiously laid out. All the spaces aren't showing ads all the time, which is mystifying, but I assume it has to do with the need for more crawling etc.

I'm wondering when I'm going to stop obsessively clicking through the site - most of the ad serving is me being *really crazy*. I'm also quite taken with the whole thing of my personalised ad-serving Opera. I don't think I'm too cheeky to put this site in the exclusion list for my custom proxo - that's the way it is on my setup, and anyway it cuts out the "ads by google" bits.

Silly OC shop declined, which is probably all for the best. I keep telling myself to get rid of the ring tone ads, but I suppose I should just give it all time. I keep seeing articles recently on how huge the market for ring tones is. A bit mortified at the idea su-lin might have actually though I was serious about asking her to buy ring tones.

Been very conscientious about exploring the ads on RealWorld, if only because they're now the only real repository for TV, and I think this whole experience has been an empathising one, much like seeing 24 woman on Boomtown.

I realise I'm being endlessly repetitive, but I suppose that's what happens when you're doing that much writing in such a short period of time. I'm probably going to change back to 2 days on the main page.





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About this Archive

This page is a archive of entries in the Site Updates category from March 2005.

Site Updates: February 2005 is the previous archive.

Site Updates: April 2005 is the next archive.

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