The big news from Cupertino via the WWDC:
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Mac linkage..
While I could be out with Cory I have to do loads of work and stuff. very frustrating. So here’s just a few annoying quick Mac links to end the day with while I’m doing this stuff:
One of the neat features that comes with Blogger Pro is the ability to have your weblog posts e-mailed off somewhere when you publish them. And this presents opportunities to extend your tiny empire right off the web and into people’s inboxes. Why not set up a one-way e-mail list which people can sign up to instead of slogging over to your site each day? Or maybe you would like to start a full discussion list with new debates inspired by your daily fevered rantings!
In order to set something like this up, the first thing you need to do is find a free mailing-list site like Yahoogroups (http://www.yahoogroups.com). Set yourself up a basic list to start off with – and decide whether you want everyone to be able to join in with conversation on the list or not. The only thing you have to do is make sure that the e-mail address you (or you and your friends) use in your Blogger settings are signed up as members to the mailing list and are able to post new messages. When Blogger sends out an e-mail containing the text from your latest post, it will make it look as if it came from your e-mail address. So if that e-mail address is not a member of the mailing list, then it will just bounce right off and no one will get to read it.
The last thing you have to do is go to the settings page on Blogger under the e-mail tab and put the e-mail address of your mailing list in the Blogsend field. If you are using Yahoo then this will be formatted like so:
[name of group]@yahoogroups.com
And you’re done!
Just two more tips for turning your weblog into an effective mailing list. As soon as you click on publish, your post will be sent out to everyone on your list and can’t be taken back. So make sure to edit and revise your post carefully before you publish it – saving it as a ‘draft’ when you’re not working on it. And secondly think carefully about how many e-mails people like to receive in a day – if you’re a prolific poster, why not encourage people to receive all your posts in a ‘digest’ form once a day. That way they’ll never want to kill you with axes.
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e-flight.biz – unethical spammers…
So yesterday I got a comment on an older entry of mine. The comment read, “This wonderful site is worth dropping a line in your guestbook to say thanks!” How nice, I thought to myself. How sweet to send me a note like that… But then I noticed the name of the person who had left the comment – Mr http://www.e-flight.biz. How nice. How… blatant…
So clearly this company is spamming my comments. That much seems clear. Probably they’re after a little extra Google page-rank of some kind – they’re clearly trying to dredge a little traffic their way, get some page impressions, make a little money. That’s all fine, of course – we all have to make a living – but it seems to me that I shouldn’t really be just expected to help them make that living. It seems odd that they should be trying to make money by exploiting the traffic and reputation of my site. I should have a say, surely? I should be asked? Even if – unsurprisingly – the answer would certainly be, “No”.
So I’ve done some research, and it turns out that http://www.e-flight.biz (note that I haven’t linked to them yet) has a bit of a habit of spamming other sites. A quick search on Google finds 591 links to their site, pretty much all of them on guestbooks. But those 591 links don’t seem to be enough. That’s the only reason I can find from moving from guestbooks to sticking adverts in the comments sections of weblogs. Do they not think I’ll mind? Do they not think I’ll object to the precendent they’re trying to set?
So the question is, how do we stop them spamming all of our sites? What’s the best approach? What’s the best way to compensate for every frustrating piece of false advertising they stick on someone else’s online home? What’s the best way to communicate that e-flight.biz spends its time with unethical advertising and unsolicited spam and are therefore untrustworthy? Has anyone got any ideas?
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Stunning Buoys…
During a break from the Aula event we explored the island. Sneaking over a gate, we wandered down by the shipyards. A lone seagull went nuts and tried to kill us. I got a nice picture of some stunning buoys, which may have meaning only for me…
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When burglars go down!
A while ago I found out that they’d caught the guy who committed the burglary on my flat at the end of last year. I was delighted, but also a bit nervous – the whole next part of the process, possibly appearing as a witness, going through the whole legal process (forms!), seeing him in person in the dock – all that stuff scared the hell out of me. Also – that was the time when I found out his name. I didn’t expect them to tell it to me, but there it was at the top of the letter. That brought it all home, really. How personal the whole thing was. Well anyway, today – amazing news – not only has he been arrested, but he’s had his first hearing and he’s pleaded guilty! So he gets sentenced in a few days and it’s all over. Justice prevails! And I might now be able to get a decent night’s sleep.
Addendum: Having said all that, I forgot that last night at two in the morning, the police came around to search my next door neighbours’ flat (our front doors are six inches apart) because their son (who’s a bloody menace, noisy and aggressive) had just beaten the crap out of his girlfriend and she’d finally called the police. I’m not convinced I’m living in the safest area…
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Five by Five (Weblogging)…
Five links about the state of weblogging in depth:
- Watchblog.com
A beautifully designed site which explores the 2004 US election across three weblogging panes, reflecting Democrat, Republican and Third-party contenders. It’s an interesting idea and elegantly assembled. - Bloggers Rate the Most Influential Blogs
“So here we go again. This column is an attempt to show which Weblogs are influencing the media the most. That’s really a vague idea, but that gives me latitude to be wrong just enough to bring your catcalls and counterarguments (please click the “Speak Up” button to the left). “ - Lance Arthur’s New Site
Lance is back – finally. The creator of Glassdog.com and about a million cool other things finally looks like he’s got a … well I’m not going to call it a weblog because he’ll probably stab me. - A Blogger’s Big Fish Fantasy
The New York Times retreads the old, “They’re in it for the traffic” angle on weblogs – writing an article that’s both true and a little frustrating, as it concentrates mainly on people who are pursuing active strategies to get more traffic, rather than letting their site reflect them as people. - Microsoft forming a policy on internal weblogs
Interesting one this – I’ve worked for a number of companies while updating this site – some have been more comfortable about my personal publishing enterprise than others. Through all that time though I’ve tried to never talk about specific decisions or ideas ongoing at work unless it was both in my interest and my company’s. But who gets to decide? Individual’s becoming known for their insights is brilliant for them, and reflects well on a company that employs them. Openness breeds creativity. But where’s the line between being open and engaging with a community and costing your company large amounts of money… I think it remains unclear, and Microsoft’s stance on this could determine a standard corporate policy that’s employed elsewhere. Worth watching, this one…
Five links about the state of weblogging in brief (most via Jason):
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Hacks: A Random Link Button
Some people read a weblog because they like the person who runs it. Maybe they think that person is a highly entertaining, witty and exciting individual. On the other hand, many weblogs are run by geeks (including this one). If you’re a social no-hoper – what are you to do? How do you get people to come to your site and experience the wonderful links you’ve found without forcing them to plough through all the rubbish you feel obliged to write?
The ‘random link’ code does just what it says on the tin. When your visitor clicks onto it, it gives every link contained on that page of your weblog a number, chooses a random one and then follows it. No muss, no fuss…
In order to put a ‘random link’ button on your weblog, you need to insert this simple piece of javascript into the
of your Blogger or Moveable Type template:
<script language="JavaScript">
<!--
// Surprise me button
function goRandom()
{
var numLinks = document.links.length;
var randomNum = (numLinks - 1) * Math.random();
randomNum = Math.round(randomNum);
window.location.href = document.links[randomNum].href;
}
//--></script>
Now you only need to insert the link itself into your template to help take even the slightest effort out of your visitor’s daily visits:
<a href="javascript:goRandom()"">Random Link</a>
This hack was originally supposed to appear in the ill-fated O’Reilly “Blogging Hacks” book. I’ll be putting all my contributions online over the next few days / weeks.
Simple weblogging applications like Blogger can make it a breeze to update your site, but there’s a cost attached – every post on your site has to look pretty much the same. Here’s a hack that means you can style your most recent post differently from the ones that follow. It works by staggering the tags that surround your posts.
Here’s possibly the most basic template for a Blogger you could get:
<html> <head></head> <body> <p>My weblog</p> <Blogger> <p style="background-color: red;"> <b><$BlogItemDateTime$>)</b><br><br> <$BlogItemBody$></p> </Blogger> </body> </html>
The important thing to notice on this template is that the paragraph tags (<p></p>) that enclose the Date/Time tag and the BlogItemBody tag are styled so that they have a red background. This is being done with CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) but you could equally do it with table cells or <font> tags. The important thing is that since everything inside the Blogger tags will be repeated for each and every post, all the posts will will be styled in the same way.
Here’s how you’d lay it out if you wanted to style the first post differently:
<html> <head></head> <body> <p>My weblog</p> <p style="background-color: red;"> <Blogger> <b><$BlogItemDateTime$>)</b><br><br> <$BlogItemBody$> </p> <p style="background-color: blue;"> </Blogger> </p> </body> </html>
What you’re looking for in this template is how the paragraph tags have been staggered around your weblog content. The first paragraph tag is outside the Blogger tags and so – because it isn’t repeated for each post – it just changes the background color of the first post. But the </p> and the <p style=”background-color: blue;”> tags at the end are repeated, leaving a paragraph with a blue background open when the next post is inserted. When the second post on the page appears, its background is blue – and this is repeated for every post after that. All that’s left is to close the paragraph tag that’s left open at the end of the page with a simple </p> and there you have it.
This hack isn’t restricted to background-color – you can change the font-face or size, make the whole post bold or put a background image behind it. You can even use CSS to change the posts position on the screen with margin and padding.
This hack was originally supposed to appear in the ill-fated O’Reilly “Blogging Hacks” book. I’ll be putting all my contributions online over the next few days / weeks.
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Three pictures of Helsinki…
While I was in Helsinki, I finally had the opportunity to play with a camera phone without any sense of consequence – I wasn’t paying the bills! The shift in usage that occurs when suddently you don’t have to worry about paying 50p per MMS is extraordinary. Here are some of the pictures that I took while I was out there:
