StopBlock
So, the debate has raged on whether Ad-Block is ethical or moral or whatever word you would like to use to describe it. Regardless of your personal opinion, it has given some publishers so much angst that they have chosen to block all Firefox users (Why Firefox is Blocked) because of an inability to exclude visitors using the Ad-Block extension for Firefox. Well, suffice to say, there is a fairly simple bit of code that can be used to determine if a person is blocking advertisements on your site. The Ad-Block extension not only blocks ads, it hides them. This means that the space previously consumed by an advertisement will disappear. So, the simple solution is two put two elements, in my case 1px by 1px images, above and below the advertisement. I then use...
Why Not Pre-Install World Community Grid on Ubuntu?
I have been using the World Community Grid as my default screen saver for quite some time. For those of you not familiar with the project, it basically creates a massive computing network (your computer and everyone else using WCG) to solve some of the most difficult problems facing science, such as curing AIDS. The software is available on a wide variety of platforms, including Linux. There is even an Ubuntu Linux Team (my distro of choice). Yes, you can create teams and track how much good you and your friends are doing! What blows my mind is that, with all of the crappy, cheesy screen savers built into operating systems, World Community Grid hasn’t been. If WCG were the default screensaver for every Ubuntu release going forward, what kind of difference...
Click Fraud Assistance – Yahoo Dupes Google
Looks like Yahoo! one upped Google once again in launching their Traffic Quality Center several days (8 to be exact) before a weak attempted launch by Google at the same thing. To Yahoos merit they have created a web site with more “bling” which explains what efforts they are taking to battle the prevalent click fraud issue surrounding cost-per-click programs and more importantly what you can do to prevent it as well. To put it bluntly; Google’s Ad Quality Resource Center is fairly lame. Aside from being a usability experts wet dream, Google’s center consists of a couple sheets put up by someone who probably got called into the manager’s office for a good talking to. While this project may be expanded upon, there is obviously a...
The Genius of Microsoft Windows
So here I am minding my own business, uninstalling old programs from a company computer, and what happens? I get a nice little popup: Hm… Wonder which I should choose…. P.S. And no, that’s not an altered screenshot No tags for this post.
Exclude-by-Keyword: Thoughts on Spam and Robots.txt
Note: This solution is for spam that cannot be filtered. There are already wonderful tools to help with comment / forum / wikispam such as LinkSleeve and Akismet. However, this proposed method would prevent the more nefarious methods such as HTML Injection, XSS, and Parasitic Hosting techniques. Truth be told, I rarely use the Robots.txt file. It’s functionalities can be largely replicated on a page-by-page basis via the robots META tag and, frankly, we spend a lot more time on getting page into the SERPs than excluding them. However, after running / creating several large communities with tons of user-generated content, I realized that the Robots.txt file could offer a lot more powerful tools for exclusion. Essentially, exclude-by-keyword. The truth is,...
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