Archive for August, 2004

Watching Cheers at the moment. It has been raining all morning which sucks as I need to go out this afternoon and tomorrow. But that is enough filling out space. I finished migrating Worfolk News over to the Linux server and I was thinking, now it has a remote MySQL server we could offer some mirror sites. It would probably require more domains :D.

Anyway so today was a big day. Today saw the submittence of Worfolk News for inclusion of Google News. I havn’t been able to reach the site for days now, I don’t know if it’s my ISP or what although I know it isn’t my computer. My anyway they were emailed from Worfolk Online so hopefully the site should be included.

So far we have got an automated response:

Thank you for your suggestion. We will review this source for inclusion
in
Google News.

We appreciate your support as we work to
improve Google News.

Regards,
The Google Team

Looking good so far. I will keep everyone posted.

Today is a good day – I logged onto my Google AdSense account earlier this morning to discover I had earnings! After I started running the ads on TV Forge, I have so far had two clicks and earned around $0.06. Not exactly loads I know but when you consider that TV Forge only had one hundred page views yesterday it’s not too bad.

Hopefully with more episode guides and news, etc I should be able to wip up more traffic and make real earnings. If the ads do well I may also extend them to Emo Movies and Worfolk News. Although Fallen Nation will be sticking with the good old system of classic graphical ads.

As for what I am going to spend my newfound riches on, I am not really sure. I might be forced to bid on a Dawson’s Creek boxset today as I need one for my media project (yeah, that’s the reason ;). Although I am a long way off, I also fancy a new MP3 player but that is something else to complain about in the next paragraph.

Of course the obvious choice is an iPod. But I can name 6 reasons why it’s not suitable for my needs. One of them being I don’t want it to skip when I am jogging – they can claim it won’t all they want, a hard drive spinning at the speed they do these days is not mean’t to be violently shaken. Also I want to be able to swap around the memory so I want a DS / MMC based one – and I can only find one on Amazon!

I realise this is close to my first post but I have quite a few ideas I wanted to get down which are fading fast. My working title is of course relating to Channel 4’s showing of the movie She’s All That last night. When I get round to it I think I will be posting it on Emo Movies. It’s probably not going to make the homepage though, I have Shawshank Redemption to feature when Coyote Ugly has had enough.

Yesterday did see some productivity despite the internet outage (well the combined problems with my connection and the web hosting being down). I get several sites updated and fixed the problems with Maze Radio. You can now listen to all seven of the shows that we have so far recorded!

I need to have a good moan about MP3 players sometime too, that’s on my to do list. Though of course many of the ideas that could make Nerd Federation posts, do not as because they are so crazy, we tend to forget them before reaching the site.

One other thing I did want to mention is that I kind of went shopping on eBay again. Preparing for a skate video shoot this Wednesday with James, I bought a PCMCIA card to give me some new Firewire ports as the mini firewire port on the back of my laptop has gone. It was weird though as PayPal still had my old eBay username and didn’t update it when I updated it on eBay. So much for intergration.

I didn’t manage to get on and post at all yesterday, though that’s not though lack of topics. Some of the connections that our webhost uses got DDOS attacked so the IP’s has to be null routed for most of the day – leaving Nerd Federation, Branch Planet the new version of Worfolk News and several other sites offline. When they did come back online they were hideously slow.

I spent most of the night getting Worfolk News back online. The database is still in Windows server due it not requring to setup access hosts and because many other sites are set to loo there. But the main site is now on the Linux server. Hopefully Worfolk News can get included into Google News this month. After all it does have stories posted daily most of the time.

What else is going on then? It’s currently pelting it down with rain. I need to make it to Crossgates sometime today which isn’t looking too hopeful. I have several pictures and posts that I want to make that I will get round to eventually. As soon as I get all my thoughts out of the way.

I think I set the timer right to adjust for the sever location but anyway it is 8 am here. It feels like 6-7 though as when I first woke up I was wasted. Not sure why, I wasn’t up that late. I signed off messenger about 11:30 and watched the last 20 mins of She’s All That (well I watched it all, just the last 20 mins I was in bed). Then I read though an ASP.Net tutorial. Not the smartest thing to do at near midnight but I got some good information ;).

I am going to write some more articles for Cool Forge I think. Once I get my head around ASP.Net properly, I will write a first steps type article as I found it really confusing so I am guessing there are others in my situation. I mean ASP is my main scripting language and I still found it confusing. It looks simple enough when explained though.

This first paragraph you can skip if you are familiar with Google AdSense. I’m not too sure how well know AdSense is outside of the webmaster community so I thought I better mention it here. After Google launched AdWords, the boxes on the right of your search results that people pay for they decided to expand – Google AdSense was born, allowing webmasters to put AdWords adverts on their websites and get paid.

That’s the basics out of the way, now for the story. I was excited about AdSense when it first came out. Though Google rejected Audio Senate, they did accept Fallen Nation into the programme. So I logged and and added the code to the site, then sat back and waited for the revenue to roll in. But it never did. I served around 50,000 ads and made something like $0.20.

I had soon scrapped AdSense. Though logging into my account the other day I realised I must have it in circulation somewhere. But that isn’t the point – the point is I got rid of almost of all it, it earned me no money. The problem was that Fallen Nation is an online gaming site – very little content. So, finally after months of not using AdSense I decided to give it a chance of TV Forge.

TV Forge is very content based – the average page has over 500 words on it, with the episode guides ranging from 500 to over 1,000 words per page so Google has plenty on track onto. Hopefully then, this time I will get plenty of good ads (the ads I have seen seem nice and relevant in most cases) and if successful I will extend the tests to Emo Movies too.

Well I had to watch it. If for nothing else than being able to make jokes about the people who rescheduled their entire lives around Big Brother. Not that Big Brother is anything specially, many other shows could and do provide such fixation. But Big Brother was geared for it – almost 24 hour coverage on E4 and complete coverage online allows your live to disappear into the show addication.

Anyway more on the social commentary at some later point in my life. If for some reason you don’t know what the result was and are waiting then you will probably not want to click the more link. Still, I am guessing pretty much everyone will want to know. Of course my mum on holiday will so I am seriously tempted to make something up :D.

I guess deep down we all knew Nardia was going to win – in reality it is not like it was close so the tension built around was false.  If this year has shown us anything though it that it is likely to get eviler, tackier and with more characters in next year until the show finally dies a long and drawn out death.

Hmm, depressing and down beat I know but that’s the truth. I mean there are few shows that end with dignity, either drawn out or on the other side prematurely canceled. Endings like X-Files, Fraiser and to quite an extent Friends are welcome in today’s network executive ruled culture even if it does mean the show ending.

Today has been a pretty slow but I guess productive day. I updated Branch Planet and did a database backup. I also added Leann Rimes lyrics to Lyrics Burger. But anyway the result of this left me with a whole of TV to fill while I worked. So after eating Lunch while watching a classic episode of Frasier, I left Channel 4 on to see what was on.

Anyway the result is it was Without a Trace. I had seen the trailers for it a few days ago and thought, hmm, that seems pretty cool though my understanding of then was it was just an FBI drama about finding people who had run away from home and such. I actually really liked it though.

Today’s episodes (or possibly episode I think it was a double bill but anyway) a guy held up a bookstore with a load of hostages. As usual the cops managed to diffuse the situation and sort everything out though. That’s why I like Law & Order – bad things happen. Whereas in shows like CSI and I am guessing Without a Trace, the cops always win.

Still it still makes for a quite entertaining show.

Well sort of anyway. But an explanation of that later. The important thing is, after only starting to explore RSS this morning, I know have built a working feed for one of my websites, Branch Planet. The sort of refers to the fact that Nerd Federation already has several. But they came with the package, I custom coded this one.

My basic problem was, I didn’t want to, well to be more correct, wasn’t going to update it manually – it had to be done automatically, taking stories from the database. Therefore I needed a server side script with a content header. Thanks to a PHP script and mod_rewrite, it now has a .xml address too!

You can check out the feed at http://www.branchplanet.com/recent.xml. It contains the latest 10 updates with the post date / time, the first 50 words of the story and a link to the full page. So it’s a good job I added that individual news stories page a few days ago.

RSS is here to stay according to Apple so I am happy that I have got into it. I am probably going to do a feed for Worfolk News sometime in the near future. If you are producing a feed, there is a primer by Who Is Hosting This, check it out here.

Well, I managed my quest to find a way to get RSS, and it’s integrated into Firefox too. I went back to that original Firefox plug-in page and found it had been replaced by a link to a new page – http://sage.mozdev.org. After a quick install and figuring out how to use it I was RSS’ing away.

A quick Alt+S brings up the sidebar – I have already added SitePoint.com, M_Branch Yahoo Group, Ask Yahoo, Wired, Slate, News.com, CNet Reviews, BBC News, GameSpot, MSDN and Nerd Federation.

Of course, I realise my use currently is due to the novelty factor which will inevitably die down. How much practical use I will get out of it I do not know, although I would like to think some.

The reason I got RSS was not so much for the practical use, though. I mean sure lots of websites now do RSS which I would find useful but I mainly wanted it to remain at the forefront of technology. I am a nerd after all and I think I should know about these things.

I was thinking about Microsoft Studio and hopped along to MSDN to look at some stuff. The end result is I found a link I had not seen before, a link to MSDN Blogs – http://blogs.msdn.com. I guess deep down we all knew it was only time before Nerd Federation caught on. First the Onion and now MSDN :D.

The end result is though that between writing blogs and making short videos for MSDN’s new website, Channel 9, does anyone at Microsoft actually do any work? If the experience we have had, running Nerd Federation is any guidance, the answer is no. Sure it looks like we are working but really we just post random stuff here and discuss Buffy (occasionally) on BuffyTalk.

Check out this blog on MSDN. The author is Alex Barnett who seems to talk to himself more than I do. Still, maybe it is more a thing aimed at other MSDN developers. After all, few probably understand all the comments and phrases on Nerd Federation other than the other authors of the site. And sometimes, even we are not sure ;).

I guess what I am really trying to say is, when will Robert Hess make a new video for Channel 9?