Test Post
June 30, 2006 – 2:03 pmThis is a test
Better Ads
November 25, 2005 – 3:57 pmFor quite some time I have been using Google’s AdSense ads. Today I tried changing some of the individual and category archives to the beta of theYahoo Publisher program and also tried out Kanoodle’s BrightAds. In two words … they stink. While the Google AdSense at least had ads on blogging and creating your own blog, Yahoo and Kanoodle had what is normally found in spam - mortgages, degrees and generic Vonage ads. So instead I switched everything back to Google.
However, while doing that, I was thinking about whether I can use the category, title or tags on the post to help focus the ads. So what I came up with is simple but breathtaking - I used Amazon’s associates links for the book search to get listings of books relevant to a specific category or tag. Suprinsgly it works very well - for example, if you look under the Linux category - you will find plenty of Linux books. The rss tag has books on blogging and building RSS feeds. I almost never got such good results from Google itself. Plus the commission that Amazon pays is much better.
How did I do that? Simple - take the code from Amazon’s Associates Program links section for featured product search and use the MovableType category name tag (or in my case the MTArchiveName tag) to pass it to Amazon as a keyword instead. The results are stunning.
Pending Move
October 28, 2005 – 4:10 pm(This post was part of a separate “Standards Blog” which has been merged into my main blog)
All posts in this blog will be merged with my main blog under a new category. I will try to preserve comments. You can point to my main blog feed http://feeds.feedburner.com/NetwizardsBlog or use this convient button to subscribe: 
Single Click Subscriptions for RSS
October 10, 2005 – 8:49 amA few months ago Dave Winer mentioned the so called “Yahoo problem” - the proliferation of subscribe buttons for different aggregators. Instead he proposes to have a single service which stores user’s RSS feeds in an OPML file and different aggregators will access it. Of course this service will need to be supported by the aggregators.
To me personally it seems like a bad idea since the whole notion of the Internet is decentralization and this would make blog feeds very centralized (and liable to fail as a single point of failure). Additionally, the financial arrangements involved in this could make anyone’s hair being torn out. And what about open source aggregators which do not have the resources for this?
Instead, what I like is a semi-decenterlized solutions - have a service where any aggregator in the world can upload an RDF or an OpenSearch Query Language file, and this site will automatically include the aggregator in the subscription service. The actual subscription service will come into two flavors: server-side and client-side. The server-side is a website where a user can redirect a subscribe button and it will give choices of aggregators to subscribe to and then redirect to their subscription pages. The client side will be a javascript that can be included on anyone’s blog and give a choice of aggregators when clicked on. Additionally, it would also be nice to have automatic parsing of auto-discovery link tags in the originating site so the owner doesn’t have to do any maintanance and just include the javascript file. And did I mention the ability to handle multiple feeds and aggregators?
So far, I have found three services like the one I am describing but none do everything that I mention. The Syndication Subscription Service allows aggregators to submit their RDF files but doesn’t have a good interface or a javascript option. The SoloSub service is a bit better but also doesn’t have the ability to do javascript and doesn’t support RDF files. QuickSub is a pure javascript option which doesn’t have RDF files.
Ideally, what would be even better is a service that has an OPML list of references to RDF descriptors while the actual RDF files reside at the website of each aggregator service. This way, they can change their subscription methods while automatically updating the central service.
More on this to come later…
Blogging Temporarily Suspended
June 28, 2005 – 11:10 amDue to my wedding tomorrow, I am temporarily stopping this blog. There are just way too many things to do.
My new Blog on Standards
April 22, 2005 – 5:52 pmI started a new blog covering Internet Standards and related topics - The Standards Blog.
UPDATE: All entries from this blog have been merged into my main blog here.
How-to Recover an Erased Blog
September 23, 2004 – 12:36 pmRecently I ran across a mention of an certain blog that was maliciously hacked into and erased, with the personal information of the original author in its place. This specific blog which shall remain unnamed happened to be criticizing a certain organization, which did not make it popular with its members. The blog was hosted at one of these big blog sites like Blogger, LiveJournal, TypePad, etc. This of course makes it interesting how actually they managed to hack into the site. Three choices are possible: an inside job, an unknown security hole in that specific service, or most probably a weak or guessable password. Leaving aside the question of how it was erased, the more interesting question is whether the contents are recoverable. The original author did not make backups, and the content of the blog goes back about seven months, containing about 100 entries per week, with the total of about 30 weeks with 30,000 posts. That’s a lot of posts to lose in one shot.
Read the rest of this entry »
An overdue update
May 2, 2004 – 2:40 amI finally got around to update my homepage. It has been now changed to match the blog layout and split into multiple sections.
Blogger housekeeping
September 24, 2003 – 12:07 amDid some housekeeping on the weblog: changed the template, archiving options and enabled title display. Also added some extra links and sections to the homepage.
