monkey!

August 19, 2008

How hackers mess up your blog without you knowing it

Earlier today I was updating one of my older blogs to a new version of Wordpress. With the update, came a small change in my blogs template. As I opened up the template editor I noticed something strange

Literally thousands upon thousands of links to various spam-related subjects.

But how come I didn’t see them when I visited my blog?! Very simple actually. A lot of spammers now inject all these hidden links, but they only show up, and literally cover your page when you are visting your blog from a search engine, or another specified referer. A direct non-referal visit to your blog yields no links and your page looks perfectly normal.

This happened simply because my Wordpress install was very old, which was prone to exploits. Yes, despite the awesome and easy update process of a Wordpress blog I got lazy on that one

Really the best solution to this is to just keep up to date on your Wordpress installations and periodically check your source. It’s as simple as Viewing Source and you will quickly notice any strange quirks.

May 17, 2008

Google AdWords Trick: Tracking Keywords

Here’s a neat trick I learned that doesn’t seem to have much documentation: Using Keywords in your Google Ads. There are actually two methods you can use these.

 #1 Within your ad

This allows you to have “dynamic” ads, as it will take the keyword the user actually typed, and place it in your ad. For example, let’s say you have an ad like so:

Your site has a variety of games, so you want to show that to the searcher. What you can do, is setup a Keyword in your ad so they’d get whatever they searched for, like so:

Great {Keyword:Games}!

What would this do? If the user searched for “adventure games” in Google, your ad would now display “Great Adventure Games!” The “Games” portion after the keyword is the default, incase their search was too long and couldn’t fit in your ad space.

Now, remember this phrase: It’s all in the keyword. What does that mean? Well, depending on how you type “Keyword” it will modify your ad text. For example:

 With this, you can get some significant increase in click rate as your ad will be more focused on the search, plus you’ll get the bolding benefits of a keyword match! Now of course, use this carefully as it can turn into wasted clicks if your campaign isn’t setup correctly.

#2 Logging the keyword

This is a simple but useful trick if you are more tech-savvy. Add the following:

?kw={keyword}

to the end of your ad url (You can also append something like  /{keyword} then write up some .htaccess ReWrite Rules). With this, you can figure out the exact keyword the user typed when they were seeing your ad. This is useful if you are using a lot of broad matches in your campaign and want to figure out what keywords people are using (Effectively, saving you money by adding the more obscure words)

So that’s it ! Two very neat and useful Adwords tricks that will easily save you a boatload of money regardless of what you are doing.

April 9, 2008

A startup to look at: Clickpass.com

Startups launch left and right (Hell I plan to launch my own in the next few months!) but a lot of them don’t stick out. Clickpass.com is one of those that sticks out for me, but has been kind of flying under the radar lately.Clickpass allows you to use a single login for all your sites. It’s basically OpenID, but they’ve done it right and have actually made OpenID very easy to use. Even a few of my friends who could never “get” OpenID because it was just a hassle to work with, loved ClickPass.

So far with Clickpass, I am only using it on HackerNews which makes it kind of pointless for me as I am still having to log in, but currently no other sites I frequently use Clickpass, which is one downfall of it. Adoption for it is slow, but hopefully it picks up.

What’s great about Clickpass is once I’m logged in, all I have to do is click the “Clickpass Enter” button on any supported site and I will be logged in, no need to retype information. Additionally, I can mange my details and avatar straight from Clickpass without having to deal with multiple sites.

Unfortunately, as I mentioned above the adoption is slow. Despite a story on TechCrunch and some initial media, it’s now kind of flying under the radar. I haven’t seen any sites added to the supported sites list in the past few weeks and I hope that they get some more adopters.

Needless to say, I know when I launch my own user-oriented site, I will be supporting Clickpass. It makes sense from a user standpoint and as long as the user isn’t confused, which Clickpass does very well in not doing, then it works very well.

Either way, check out Clickpass.com and see what they have to offer. You can also integrate it into your own blog (I will when I actually update to Wordpress 2.5)!

March 22, 2008

The ultimate internet TV box

I’ve been playing around with various online tv providers lately. It’s a huge growing market, with Hulu being a huge player (But U.S only!) and Miro, a free, open source, available everywhere player that focuses on RSS feeds to fetch episodes across the net.

Despite all these advances in trying to push major and freelance broadcasting online, the mass market simply isn’t going for it. Sure, us geeks and early adopters can enjoy these services, but most people like good old fashioned T.V.

However, with all these services we have all the shows we usually watch, but whenever we want, with pause, rewind, forwarding, no commercials, social features, and much more. Why hasn’t there been a huge adoption of these services?

Simply put, people like to be able to sit down and channel surf. People do not want to watch their favourite shows on a 20″ LCD 3 feet away from them. They want a comfy couch, a remote, and a lot of variety. So how can we get this?

Bring something like Miro, to a set-top box

Miro is in my opinion the best idea so far when it comes to internet T.V. You subscribe to channels (Like you would in any regular cable package). It automatically downloads new episodes of the shows to your library and you can watch them whenever you want. To make it easy for you, it also by default deletes old episodes you’ve watched after 5 days (You have the option to keep them).

Now that you know a bit more about Miro, why not bring this to a set-top box? A small computer running, simply downloading and displaying the content. Miro is very good at doing this for all the various free video casts out there, but how do we get the major networks on it?

A monthly subscription service, like we pay now would work perfectly.

I would be more then happy to pay a set fee each month to get my favourite T.V shows. If Hulu.com can be free, why not do almost the same idea but on the T.V with a monthly fee? Let me create a package of T.V Shows, Series, or Channels. Let’s say I’m a big fan of House, Family Guy, The Simpsons, and Lost. Toss this together for me in a package, throwing in any extras and charge me a small monthly fee of say $5 for just those shows. Let’s say I want episodes from the Space Channel, History, and Discovery. Charge me $10 /month to have a good stream of episodes from these networks and I’d be more then happy to pay that.

All the shows would arrive onto my box, via a subscription like service. Create a model that makes it very easy for me to subscribe to more T.V Shows or channels.

Of course, the problem here lies that we have hundreds of channels, all from different corporations and a bunch of legal issues come in hand. This is why I am loving free internet T.V. (Mostly) quality content produced by people who simply love what they are doing. No legal issues, no fees, just entertainment.

We won’t get this in the near future.

Unfortunately, knowing all the restrictions and legal hassles involved in getting the major t.v broadcasting to other locales, I do not see something like this coming any time soon. In the mean time, I am building a small $200 P.C that will incorporate services like Miro to get free internet T.V on my television so I can watch shows on the comfort of my couch.

February 26, 2008

Why Microsoft adCenter sucks.

Today for work I decided to signup for Microsoft adCenter to try out some advertising on other platforms. We’ve already had great success with Google Adwords so I figured since competition must be much less we could give MSN a shot.

After signing up and creating my first add, I was able to get into the adCenter control panel and begin actually doing things. Regardless, I will get straight to the point. Here is why this thing sucks:

•  After creating my ad in the initial process, it never warned me I had dis-allowed content in my ad (MSN doesn’t like phone numbers!). No, it created my ad all fine and dandy, and only after I had logged into the panel and checked it out did I see my ad was not approved.
• Everytime I load the godamn site in IE7 I am asked to install some ActiveX stuff. I loaded the site in IE7 because when I tried to use it in Firefox, it seemed buggy and unresponsive. This was actually the case regardless of browser.
• Too much Loading …. What the hell is going on. I am not on a 56k modem anymore, why is it taking over 20 seconds for a simple page to load? It’s not a huge report, all it has to load is my single ad I’ve created so I can modify and look at it.
• They charged me $5 to setup an account. Sure, I got a promotional $25 of credit but why do you have to charge me $5 to get going? Sure, it’s pennies for a business but Google never asked me for money until I actually started getting clicks.
• The site, like many other Microsoft sites simply does not work in Firefox. Fuck you guys.
• The interface is not intuitive at all. Where are my stats, how do I get them? I .. don’t understand at all. I click on Keywords for my campaign and I do not even SEE them unless I click a very subtle link.

For a product that you are literally throwing money at, this sure is a piece of crap. I am glad this won’t be the main advertising platform we are using but the competition is so slim (I wonder why, because it sucks?) that putting ads up on here will benefit us in the long run.

If you’re looking to sell your product/service, Microsoft adCenter will be good for the fact that you will be paying much less per click, but you will be getting less exposure and you have to deal with a horrible interface. Advertise on Google, then put in some extra cash to here for some extra cheap clicks.

December 30, 2007

Someone create this deal/savings mobile service

As I was walking to the grocery store two days ago I had an idea for a simple service that would allow for anyone with a simple internet-enabled cellphone to get deals and special offers at the store(s) you’re going to.  Here is how it would work:

Deal Database (and website)

Create a database of deals. You can do this one of two ways, either create a community-driven site where people would submit special offers and savings from the stores in their area, or create a mash-up of all the current deal sites out there. Only problem is, there are not that many (If at all?) sites that display deals for brick-and-mortar stores, and most focus on online shopping. Each deal would be tagged with the store name, as well as GPS (Or Street address) location.

Using the service

The service would be very simple to use and have two ways you could use it.

• Simple search: With this method, I could be heading to my local Walmart and go to the services website and type in “Walmart Waterloo”, or “Walmart N2V1K7″ (Postal code search) or any other variety of searches to narrow down your location so you can see the deals for that specified store.
• Multiple deal search: Similar to the simple search, this one would allow you to search via city, postal code, street, etc and display all the deals from stores in the given area. This way, I could be heading to the mall and get all the deals from the 50+ stores within the mall.
• GPS/Location search: This one could work for GPS-enabled phones as well as any phone that can access Google Maps as it can now track your location as well. With this, I could simply log into the site and see all the deals within my area via a Google maps mash-up, or maybe a simple text feed depending on the power of my phone. Additionally, you could also simply search for “Walmart” and it will know your location via GPS and show deals for the Walmart near you.

With user settings, the user could simply setup what they would like to always use, but the initial setup would promote a more simple search, unless we can check and identify if the phone is GPS-enabled (Can you do that?)

That’s my idea in a nutshell, obviously there is a bit more to it but this is just a simple blurb on it. As for making money, programming it and publishing it, that’s another story.

If anyone is interested on working with me on something like this, let me know, otherwise tell me how silly my idea is.

November 27, 2007

Sorry guys, Digg does suck now. Mixx is pretty cool though

I’ve been using Digg for roughly about 2 years now. It was the staple of my Google Reader, it was the reason I had to actually use an RSS reader because I couldn’t easily keep track of the hundreds of stories it gets in a week.

There’s been some recent lashing of words back and forth between Digg and new competitor Mixx.com (Which I previously wrote about here and here), and despite some big names defending Digg I just simply can’t stand it anymore and must rant. So here is why Digg does indeed suck now:

Faulty system and spammers get terrible content to the front page

I can’t stand this anymore. In the past month, I’ve opened so many Digg articles titled “What <X> would look like with <Y>!” thinking it would be something mildly amusing. Turns out it’s total shit. Yes, absolute shit. I was almost annoyed out how this crap is hitting the front page. Today, an article about Google designed in Comic Sans hit the front page with 100 diggs. It was probably the least amusing thing I’ve seen in a very long time

That comment was one of many that showed how unfunny and terrible this article was. There was no 50/50 split of like and dislike. NO ONE liked this tripe, yet somehow it hit 100 Diggs and got on the popular story list, showing up in my Google Reader, causing me to waste my time with this shit.

That’s one of the major problems with Digg. It’s grown so big, and with various friend features now spammers can add hundreds, or even thousands of friends and send them a link to their crappy story whenever they publish one. With so many friends, you are bound to get at least a nice percentage of Diggs.

So much repetition it hurts.

After reading Digg for 2 years, I’ve honestly seen the same crap over and over again. Hell, some articles are titled “This is old, but you have to see it again!” Ok great. Digg is supposed to be a news site, showing new content not old, dried out internet memes. I understand with such a large user base and where pretty much everything is user-moderated it can happen, but when it happens this often, at such levels, it gets very very annoying.

I don’t care what people say about numbers mean your the best, at a certain point you turn into stale shit, and that’s what Digg has become.

Mixx is a growing alternative, that can make it great.

Mixx is a new one out there, and it can do things right but it needs to make sure it doesn’t turn into what Digg has become. With the correct moderation and some more content (Basically, users) I think it could grow to be something awesome. Mixx has a nice look, the user base so far is very friendly, it just needs content

As of this day, I’ve added the Mixx Popular feed to my Google Reader and put Digg away for now. If I actually enjoy the stories from Mixx and find myself reading them, then I will definitely hold onto it.

November 16, 2007

Making the most out of your Google Adwords

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