Archive for the ‘WWW’ Category

Allegedly.  I’ll come to that in a minute.

Most spam is annoying but once in a while the bots assemble two random concepts that make a slightly surreal or scary combination.  Once in a while those are so out there and look so like real messages that they make it past the spam filters.  Here’s one I got today (I’ve pixellated out the site’s info not because I don’t want to embarrass them but because I don’t want to give them any publicity) about my post about gobos the other day…

I’m not going to go into the rubbish about SEO other than to say if they’re link building this way how do I know they’re not doing all sorts of black hat SEO that’s going to get them blacklisted as a bad neighbourhood and do me more harm than good.

In this case the bot found some of my recipes and some of my stuff about gobos and decided that there was a chance that there was some sort of long tail search that it could optimize for.  Given the money being mentioned for some of that kind of automatically written content it’s no wonder that companies are trying to get in on the act.  This one though takes the biscuit.  Or as the American’s might say the cookie.  Cookies are made with Cookie Cutters which is a term sometimes confused with gobos although strictly speaking cookies and gobos are not the same thing which is why I think the bot may have made its blind leap of machine logic.

What I find funny is the idea that they would include gobos in a recipe database.  Gobos.  Pieces of glass that are etched or otherwise treated so as to project images or patters from lights.  I can’t help thinking they would be a little bit chewy and might cause some indigestion.  Not quite as funny as Monty Python’s Albatros or Crunchy frog but not too far away.

Anyway it amused me but I’ve not explained the Edible Underwear connection.

So what does any of this have to do with Edible Underwear?  Not a lot really other than something that happened when out drinking with some friends who do a bit acting.  They’d been eating the left over sugar glass props (bottles and some glasses used in a fight scene) from a play to see how one of the bar staff they knew would react.  One young lady who was normally quite prim and proper who had probably had a bit too much to drink said it tasted like edible underwear and promptly went a fetching shade that matched the beetroot red of the wine bottle she was nibbling on…

I noticed awhile ago that I was blogging less.  Partly I put it down to frustration with the time it took me to add a page to my web site.  If I couldn’t easily add a page about something I didn’t need to blog about the page.  Partly it was a disatisfaction with the blog and site not being integrated.  Partly it was a concern about what I was blogging about.  I like posting about fun little discoveries – you tube videos, interesting web pages, announcement and all the other stuff thats going on.  However I was always picky about how much of it I posted.  I knew it could easily swamp out my own stuff in a huge noise to ratio disaster.  Its bad enough that I choose to post on several different themes I’m interested in rather than focusing on one theme.  Thats why I use categories and tags to classify my blog posts.

So I delt with the first two problems by switching my site to using WordPress as a Content Management System.  I know some people will say WordPress isn’t a CMS.  Frankly if it isn’t a Web CMS then every other Web CMS I’ve ever worked with isn’t either including the one those people are touting.  Yes it’s a blogging platform but that doesn’t stop it also being a CMS.

The third problem, the noise to content issue, I’ve pretty much put to rest by the happy accident of using microblogging.  Now I signed up to Twitter sometime in 2007 to see what all the fuss was about.  I didn’t really do anything with it till this summer when I needed to know about it for work (and probably foolishly removed my few early tweets since I was using it to test a development at work).  Anyway I’ve been using Twitter for a couple of months now for amongst other things the noise stuff and just consolidating the posts to my blog once a week.  Twitter has the added bonus that unlike blog comments, which tend not to end up being conversational because the lack of a consistent alerting system, twitter can have at least a bit of a discourse.

And the point of this post? I’ve no idea really.  Maybe that blogging, like the web, is still evolving.

Anyway I’m off to do something more useful instead.  Just as soon as I’ve checked Twitter…

Kim Knox Rox my Sox Button - The Unofficial Kim Knox Fan Club

Kim’s now got her very own unofficial Kim Knox fan club. Won’t be too long before she has a has a twitter hash tag all of her own too #kimknox

I’m not really a twitter user, I’ve got an account but while I’ll post a certain level of boring mundanity here I’m not into the recording the minute up to the minute stuff. I just don’t think it or I’m interesting enough and while blogging is probably a bit weird tweeting just goes over the line. Odds are I’ll get into it about the time something new takes over in microblogging: in the same way I bought a PDA when they were about to start the slide to obscurity as netbooks took off.

Anyway today I’ve been doing some work on Twitter at work to get a live feed of tweets onto a site during a streamed video from a conference. It would have been absolutely straightforward had I not run into something a bit obscure to do with hash codes. Our friends at the vinspired wanted a hash code #generationdigital. Fair enough everythings up and running to pick it up and display it on the site. Except it just wasn’t showing up. After some messing around we worked out that the presence of digital in the hash code for some reason stopped it being picked up by searches. #digital exists and works. #digitalXXX seems to be OK too. #XXXdigital or #XXXdigitalXXX is right out. #XXX-digital or #XXX_digital also work but just feel a bit clumsy. No idea why digital runs into a brick wall or if other words can do to. Anyway, since the hash code hadn’t been publicised in advance we decided to just use a different hash code.

One odd little discovery along the way though was a hashcode in German that left us a bit puzzled. Our, admitedly school boy quality translation, was that the hash code would have been #nocheesecakeprincess_digital. The mind boggles.

Trekkies Bash New Star Trek Film As ‘Fun, Watchable’

Daniel Munteanu’s show reel at the Moondash project is well worth a look.

I’m a bit late with this but it did amuse me. The Evan Davis’ blog on the BBC web site explains it. I found some of the comments amusing just because they say more about the commenters than the piece itself. A few obviously don’t get there is a difference between an advert being viral (which it could be if people do things like copying it to their blog) and guerilla (which this isn’t).

This is so much cooler than a standard bit of card… Lego’s Business Cards.

Well almost a year since I last posted about Joomla and I find myself gearing up to a development based on it.

I use the Liverpool to Norwich rail service several times a year to get to a variety of destinations. Central Trains were never perfect but East Midlands Trains seem to take pride in getting it wrong. Where Central Trains would provide vouchers as compensation when late with an explanation of the cause I’ve yet to see anything from several delayed journeys on East Midlands Trains. Instead they employ an SEP field. So I was pleased to discover a campaign site has launched to try to change their ways: trainsardine.org.

January 2011 Update: The website no longer seems to exists but the problem is still there at least some of the time