Violet Blue and Boing Boing Debacle

Filed Under Geek, Internet, News, Pranks, SF Bay Area, Websites |

For those that don’t know, Violet Blue is a well-known sex educator and Boing Boing is one of the most(?) popular blogs on the internet. If you haven’t heard about Violet Blue’s posts getting pulled from BoingBoing, there’s more than enough press out there about it. Even the LA Times picked up the story. I don’t want to get into a long post about my thoughts on the matter, but I did want to share something I thought worth sharing.

I setup VioletBlueVioletBlue.net to house all of the Boing Boing posts that had been “unpublished”. These posts are all taken directly from archive.org where the old versions of the posts are kept. Boing Boing publishes their stuff under Creative Commons, so I am redistributing their work with attribution. I wanted this content to remain around and in a form that is easily locatable, i.e. not buried in archive.org’s wayback machine. If you have a blog post that previously linked to the post on Boing Boing, then feel free to link to its equivalent on VB2. These posts aren’t getting unpublished any time soon.

If I missed anything or made any mistakes on the site, please let me know. I make no claims to being perfect by any means.

3 Comments

Domain Buying Scam?

Filed Under Internet, Scam, Uncategorized |

I got the following email today:

From: Anne Gaskins <shuja@emirates.net.ae>
Subject: Your Website

Hello,

Browsing on the Internet I came across your website [domainname.com] . If you are interested in selling it, please email me back your phone number, so we can discuss it.
I have cash to buy today!

Thank you in advance

My first thought was why in the world do they want to buy this domain? It’s old, outdated, and the comments have been spammed to hell so it hardly even ranks in Google. Yes, it’s a site I totally neglected because a) I tossed it up in 20 minutes and b) it has only made $224 in Google Adsense in the 2.5 years it’s been up. I was planning on emailing them back just out of curiosity, but then I saw this post pop up in my news reader. Looks like I’m not the only one.

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Zappos + Twitter

Filed Under Fun, Geek, Internet |

Looks like Zappos is doing a Twitter experiment while they’re in town visiting the Twitter offices. Not sure what they’re up to, but I’m game.
The original twitter:

If you r in San Fran area, write “Zappos” on back of left hand w/ marker & twitter @zappos link to picture of it. Why? Details to come, 4 PM

And my response:

1 Comment

Full Screen Firefox and Safari on OS X

Filed Under Apple, Apple - Good, Apple - Solution, Geek, Internet, OS X, Software, Tools |

Maxmize to full screen on OS X

Anyone that has talked to me about what I don’t like about OS X has heard me complain about the inability to maximize an application to take up the entire screen in one easy step. Sure you can drag the corner out, but that’s an annoying “work-around” in my opinion. But thanks to Todd Dailey I have a more acceptable work-around for Firefox and Safari at least.

All you do is add a Bookmark to the Bookmark Toolbar (commonly called a Bookmarklet) that has this snippet of JavaScript instead of the URL that normally goes there:
javascript:window.resizeTo(1440,900);

Of course you’ll want to set the values to the same size as your screen resolution. You can check your screen resolution in System Preferences -> Display. And on Safari you can make it even simpler if you make this bookmarklet the first one in the list. Then you can just hit Command+1 and have a full screen web browser instantly.

This is also handy for web developers on all platforms. Want to see what your site looks like at 800×600, 1024×768, etc.? Make a toolbar button for each resolution! Quick and easy site previews while you’re working on pages.

4 Comments

Websites as graphs

Filed Under Art, Geek, Interesting, Internet, Websites |

Here’s something that’s kind of neat, representing websites as a graph of points. There’s a nifty script that will make one for you by just providing it with a URL. Here is geeked.info (click to enlarge):

Geeked.info as a graph

You can also download the source code and run it on your local machine to create a larger, higher resolution image that’s suitable for posters, t-shirts, coffee mugs, etc.
If you want to check out more of these, there’s a flickr pool of course. Some of them are quite aesthetically pleasing. If you’re wondering what each node stands for, here’s the legend from the site:

What do the colors mean?
blue: for links (the A tag)
red: for tables (TABLE, TR and TD tags)
green: for the DIV tag
violet: for images (the IMG tag)
yellow: for forms (FORM, INPUT, TEXTAREA, SELECT and OPTION tags)
orange: for linebreaks and blockquotes (BR, P, and BLOCKQUOTE tags)
black: the HTML tag, the root node
gray: all other tags

Thanks for pointing this site out exiva

1 Comment

Post to Twitter when you post to your blog

Filed Under Internet, Social Networking, Twitter, Wordpress |

I don’t like doing things manually when I can have software do my bidding. Usually I’ll send a twitter when I have a new blog post on here that I think people are interested in. (I recognize not everyone has my RSS feed in their feed reader…yet) But it’s a manual process and an extra step, so I went out and found Alex King’s Twitter Tools plugin. Alex King is a name forever associated in my head with Wordpress, primarily for his help in finding themes back in the early days of WP. This plugin is pretty full-featured:

  • Archive your Twitter tweets (downloaded every 15 minutes)
  • Create a blog post from each of your tweets
  • Create a daily digest post of your tweets
  • Create a tweet on Twitter whenever you post in your blog, with a link to the blog post
  • Post a tweet from your sidebar
  • Post a tweet from the WP Admin screens
  • Pass your tweets along to another service (via API hook)

I’ve currently got it set up to send to twitter when a post goes live on here. So in theory, when this post went live, it should have shown on my Twitter page.

UPDATE: Looks like Twitter Tools will post any edits to a posts if that blog post has not been twittered yet. Sorry for the twitter flood when I removed the “Uncategorized” category from a couple old posts. I’m going to look into manually adding the “twittered” metadata to all my posts so it doesn’t happen again.

UPDATE 2: Threw together a quick little php script to update the database so old posts aren’t twittered when they’re edited. YMMV, User beware, no warranty, etc. You’ll want to make a backup of your databases, then fill in your username, password, and database_name and then run this either from command line or via the browser.

/*--------code start--------*/
mysql_connect(localhost, "db_username", "db_password");
mysql_select_db("database_name");
$res1 = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM wp_posts p WHERE (p.post_status LIKE \"publish\")");
while ($row = mysql_fetch_array($res1, MYSQL_ASSOC)) {
	//find out if the TwitterTools metadata has already been written
	$sql2 = "SELECT * FROM wp_postmeta WHERE (post_id = ".$row['ID'].”) && (meta_key LIKE \”aktt_tweeted\”) && (meta_value LIKE \”1\”)”;
        print “Post ID: “.$row['ID'].”  \n”;
	if (!mysql_numrows(mysql_query($sql2))) {
		//metadata not found, let’s fake it without twittering
	        $sql = “INSERT INTO wp_postmeta (post_id, meta_key, meta_value) VALUES (”.$row['ID'].”,\”aktt_tweeted\”,1)”;
		mysql_query($sql);
		print ” — added metadata to fake it.  \n”;
	} else {
		print ” — already been twittered.  \n”;
	}

}
/*——–code end——–*/

2 Comments

Dreamhost Accidentally Bills Everyone!

Filed Under Internet |

Dreamhost, one web hosting company I use for non-mission critical websites, really screwed up this time. In an attempt to collect on all the bills that were due by the end of 2007, an automated billing script was run. The only problem was this script was run as if it was 2008-12-31, NOT 2007-12-31. Of course this meant everyone who had not prepaid their account an extra year received an email regarding a bill not due until 2009. Not a big deal, right? Just delete the email and ignore the mistake. The problem is that Dreamhost’s automated billing system automatically charged cards that were on file for the accounts. They assure everyone that they are going through and making things right by cancelling these charges but no word yet on whether or not they’ll cover bank fees for those unlucky ones that had their account overdrawn.

Dreamhost blog post

UPDATE: Just got an email from Dreamhost:

Hi Ed!

Ack. Through a COMPLETE bumbling on our part, we’ve accidentally attempted
to charge you for the ENTIRE year of 2008 (and probably 2009!) ALREADY
(it was all due to a fat finger)!

We’re really really realllly embarassed about this, but you have nothing
to worry about. Please ignore any confusing billing messages you may have
received recently; we’ve already removed all those bum future charges on
your account and already refunded the $313.85 charge on your
credit card.

You should get the money back on almost immediately, within a day or
two max, and there’s no need to contact your credit card company or bank
for the refund.

Thank you very very much for your patience with this.. we PROMISE
this won’t happen again. There’s no need to reply to this message unless
of course you have any other questions at all!

Sincerely,
The Foolish DreamHost Billing Team!

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Blogging from the past

Filed Under Interesting, Internet, Websites |

William Henry Bonser Lamin, World War I Blogger

For awhile now I’ve debated starting yet another blogging project. One where I blog about current events, but set them up so that they are posted 5,10,15, or more years in the future, but on the same date. Basically taking the idea of time-shifting and applying it to a blog. Well it looks like someone’s doing something similar. I came across WW1: Experiences of an English Soldier, a blog being written through the letters of a soldier in World War I. The posts are being published 90 years after the dates the letters were originally written by his grandson. The blog also contains additional posts with more information, pictures, and scans of things the grandson has discovered in his research of his grandfather’s life which, while they may destroy the purity of the concept, provide more context and back story. Definitely worth checking out, especially for those that are history geeks.

1 Comment

BoingBoing Bingo

Filed Under Fun, Funny, Internet, Websites |

It started with a twitter. And an idea started forming. The domain was available and instantly registered. Heather and I worked on the code, and I spent an afternoon downloading and cropping images from BoingBoing to illustrate each square. And now we bring to you… BoingBoing Bingo!

BoingBoing Bingo

It’s simple really, just print out the board, post it on your cubicle, have your friends do the same, and the first person to 5 in a row horizontally, vertically, or diagonally wins.

4 Comments

Winston is a scam

Filed Under Internet, Scam |

I received the following email the other day:

from Winston
to admin@mydomain.com
subject Have a question about the site…

I had stopped by the site and took a look at your ranking and just wondered if you’d be at all interested in having your site appear on page 1 of Google, Yahoo, MSN and a few other major engines - Guaranteed page 1 within 7-14 days 100% to get the most out of the 4th quarter rush. Yes, I’m a real person, Yes, I actually just came back from viewing your site. I already know you get a ton of offers day to day. This is obviously different, I have plenty of references. Call me at home if you want to, I work at home all day long building sites, optimizing adword campaigns, doing press releases, doing graphic design, basic freelance work for multiple people. My number is below, please let me know either way as I’m not going to pester you again if all you have to say is no.

What it is I plan on doing is working to get your listings on page 1 naturally, until I am able to do so, I pay (out of my own pocket) for your sponsored listing/pay per clicks which would appear on page 1, so you really have nothing to lose as you will be on page one either way. In any event, if this would be something you’d be interested in having me do please let me know as I’m only going to do this for a handful of people as it takes time to monitor everything.

Winston
312-275-8558

No Winston, you did not take a look at my rankings, and you probably didn’t take a look at my site. If you had, you would know I rank #1, #3, and #3 for the top three search queries I target, ranking only below the official pages of the device my site is about. I don’t think I’d ever hire someone who is dumb enough to blanket-email and not do the proper research. I would recommend against anyone else hiring this guy too. If you really want to get to the top of the search results, you can either buy a listing directly from Google, or you can learn about Search Engine Optimization.

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