Technology

The following is a quick idea I had. It isn’t fully though out and may not actually be that useful. But read it anyway - you should be intrigued by now.

I used to run an online game called Galaxia. And it had some forums. And the game changed and it moved and my forum software changed and all sorts of things happened to make me lose the forums. It occurred to me that blogs could be used to essentially distribute the forums.

If some user had a problem with the game they could write a blog entry about it and tag it appropriately (“Galaxia-Support” for instance). Somewhere on the Galaxia site would be a list of such posts (using Technorati for instance http://feeds.technorati.com/feed/posts/tag/galaxia-support). People could then reply as neccessary (or even trackback from their own blog).

All that would be needed would be a list of the tags the site wished to use (which should be complicated enough to avoid collecting the wrong posts but simple enough to remember) and an area for non-bloggers to post entries.

As I said I’m not sure how useful the idea is but the whole distributed content things feels like a good idea.

Have you heard of hReview? It’s a microformat aimed at marking up reviews of things in a consistent way with web pages (or any XML based document). The wiki discussing it links to implementations and SiteReviews.org implements it and so gets a link.

Whoopee!

A quick search on Technorati for “ppc” reveals lots of cool information I didn’t know about.

MSN, Ask Jeeves and Yahoo! have all either recently released a competitor to Google Adsense or about to and Google are about to considerably change their keyword state algorithm. You will soon be able to keep badly performing keywords active by simply bidding higher (meaning if you “pay” $50.00 per click you can rank number one - even if you get no clicks).

The only thing left to wonder is if the competitors will offer a Google Adwords type program to web publishers too.

The Marketing Microscope Search engine optimization and Online marketing

I’ve apparently installed two pugins for Wordpress. One is simpletags allowing me to add Technorati tags to posts easily, and the other is bstat, a nice stats plugin. So we’ll see if they work.

If you don’t know about it already, checkout Google SiteMap.

Have a look at:

http://www.oliverbrown.me.uk/vocab/reading/en-fi-1.xml.

You will need a fairly new browser to see this properly.

Whether I can be bothered to make a whole website out of this, mirroring (and possible helping) my own attempt to learn Finnish, who knows…

Microsoft are now offering free versions off some of their Visual Studio products. And although they are slightly limited compared to the complete version they seem to allow commercial use (from the FAQ: “Create fun and interesting applications for their personal enjoyment or to share with their friends, or even commercially distribute your programs. “)

http://lab.msdn.microsoft.com/express/

They won’t stay completely free though. Once the products leave beta they will supposedly be available for $49 each. Which is still affordable for us students though :)

Why is it so hard to get people to pay for things over the internet and so easy to get them to pay for things on their phone?

Well the two aren’t really related I suppose. Most of the people who buy stuff over the internet are under 18 and don’t havea credit card so they don’t really have a way to pay for stuff over the internet. So I’ll rephrase:

Why do people pay for stuff on their phones when the same stuff is free on the internet?

I was looking in a magazine (a TV guide) and you could do a numerology love test for £1. Just text your name and your (possibly) beloved’s name and get a percentage back. There are hundreds, possibly more, of those on the internet completely free so why would you ever pay a quid for it?

The other thing that got me was the advert had most popular ringtones. Why would you want one of the most popular ringtones? I thought the whole point of a custom ringtone was so your phone didn’t sound like everyone elses (although a train completely full of crazy frogs would have a certain humour about it).

Maybe people between 16 and 18 are just more prone to idiocy…

Or maybe this is the evidence that mobile phones cause brain damage…

The following produces an error:

function hex2rgb($hex)
{
    for($i=0; $i<3; $i++)
    {
        $temp = substr($hex,2*$i,2);
        $rgb[$i] = 16 * hexdec(substr($temp,0,1)) + hexdec(substr($temp,1,1));
    }
    return $rgb;
}

function hex2rgb($hex)
{
    for($i=0; $i<3; $i++)
    {
        $temp = substr($hex,2*$i,2);
        $rgb[$i] = 16 * hexdec(substr($temp,0,1)) + hexdec(substr($temp,1,1));
    }
    return $rgb;
}

But not the error you might expect. PHP doesn’t even get to complain about redeclaring a function with the same name since the second function is full of parse errors.

I have a vague idea what the problem is but I’m not sure. Any takers? :P

Sorry about the dodgy display…

http://developers.technorati.com/wiki/hReview

A clever idea for distributed reviews of things. Well I think the reviews at SiteReviews.org (on the main HTML pages) follow the standard. Bits of it confused me though.

Either way it meant I finally made the site XHTML compliant. Although considering how much user-contributed stuff there is on there (like most of it) various pages will undoubtedly fail…