Blog

Site updates and anything else related to the technology of blogging and my site(s).

ecto 2

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So ecto 2 is updated, and one of the nifty new features is Amazon integration. It’s pretty slick, with a handy little search window within ecto to find items, one-button posting once you’ve chosen what you want, and a few options for how you want the finished link to appear.

I do have one concern about the link format, though.

I’ve been very careful to make sure that all my Amazon URLs are formatted a specific way, after reading this from kottke early last year:

I’ve noticed lately that when I browse items at Amazon, the URLs now take one of two forms:

http://amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0684868768/ http://amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0684868768/

The former URL style has been around for some time, but the latter is relatively new. If you’re an Amazon Associate, the proper way of linking to an individual item (per their linking guide) is to append your Associate code (mine is “0sil8”) to the first URL style, like so:

http://amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0684868768/0sil8

But if you run across an item at Amazon with the second type of URL, this won’t work:

http://amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0684868768/0sil8

If you’ve linked to items using that style of URL (something I’ve seen on several sites), check your reports at Amazon…you’ll find that you’re not getting any Associates clickthroughs or credit for those purchases.

Obviously, since I would like to get credit for any clickthroughs I might receive (rare though they may be), I’ve been very careful to make sure to use the ‘ASIN’ format of link, and not the ‘tg/detail/-‘ format.

While experimenting with ecto’s new Amazon integration, I put together a quick link to Neal Stephenson’s ‘Quicksilver’, and checked the URL — and, unfortunately, it came up with the ‘tg/detail/-‘ format (though I’ve fixed it in that link). After poking around in ecto’s settings for the Amazon integration, it doesn’t appear that there is any end-user control over the links (that is, the URL format, not the format of the link itself) other than manually fixing them after they’re inserted. While this really isn’t a major dealbreaker — it’s essentially what I’ve been doing for a while anyway, and the ecto integration does make it much easier to find items — it does leave me with a few questions…

  1. Most importantly, does this still matter? Or does Amazon now give credit correctly for both styles of links? On the assumption that it does still matter…
  2. When constructing the link, does ecto receive the entire URL string from Amazon, or just the ASIN?
  3. If ecto only receives (or needs) the ASIN, can the URL string be changed to the ‘ASIN’ style of link in the next update to ecto?
  4. If ecto receives the entire string…
    1. …is the returned string always ‘tg/details/-‘ format, or does it switch between that and ‘ASIN’ format?
    2. If it’s always ‘tg/details/-‘ format, can that be automatically adjusted within ecto to ‘ASIN’ format?
    3. If it switches, can ecto watch for that string and adjust it when necessary?
  5. And lastly, according to the tail end of Jason’s post, adding ‘ref=nosim/’ before the Associate ID forces Amazon to skip the “You may also be interested in…” page and send you straight to the actual product page. Can an option be added to ecto to add the ‘ref=nosim/’ string in the right place for people who might worry/care about such a thing?

If not…well, I’ll live. I can hope, though! :)

iTunes “Leæther Strip Part II” by Leæther Strip from the album Penetrate the Satanic Citizen (1992, 6:00).

MSN Spaces reactions

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Robert Scoble is collecting reactions to MSN Spaces, including mine:

Michael Hanscom: “Power users and web standards geeks (who are probably not the target market anyway) will definitely want to look somewhere else.” (Scoble’s note to Michael: hey, did you see the Macintosh in the video?)

I actually haven’t taken the time yet to watch either of the two introductory videos that Scoble posted, so no, I hadn’t seen that yet. :) I’ll try to get a look at them later today, maybe this evening.

iTunes “Get to Know Ya” by Johnson, Jesse from the album Pretty In Pink (1986, 3:35).

MSN Spaces launches

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Microsoft finally makes their long-rumored debut into the weblogging service arena with MSN Spaces. I got curious, and it’s free, so I went ahead and signed up for a Space of my own to try it out. I have no intentions of moving over…I just wanted to kick the tires a bit, so to speak.

My MSN Spaces site

Signup is pretty easy, as long as you have a MS Passport (I didn’t…but now I do). So far, it seems to be a fairly decent option for beginning bloggers — it’s free, there are a decent number of design templates (though there’s only so much customization you can do, much like the entry-level TypePad system), you can choose whether or not to syndicate your blog (with RSS 2.0 only), comments and Trackback are both supported (interestingly, Trackback has three options: disable, accept from everywhere, and accept only from other MSN Space weblogs, with the last option being the default [and I don’t seem to be able to switch it off of the default so that I can allow Trackback pings from everyone]), there are a few default categories and custom categories can be added…all the basics, and some frills.

MSN Spaces apparently ties in tightly with both MSN Messenger and MS Outlook (though I can’t play with that, being a Mac user), and as such, adds a special privacy option that can restrict visibility of your weblog to only people on your MSN Messenger Allow list, along with an option to only allow selected contacts in your MSN Address Book to see your blog.

secure.spaces.msn.com

There are settings for moblogging (blogging via cell phone) — amusingly, though, when I first clicked on the “Mobile” settings tab, I got an “unknown authority” error dialog. Not having a cell phone, there’s not much here I can play with.

You get 10 MB of storage, with no indication if there’s a way to increase this (or if there will be a way in the future). That should be fine for a good amount of text, but enough photos will eventually eat into that, so there’s a simple file manager to allow you to delete any photos you’ve uploaded.

Finally, there are some simple statistics available, showing total page views, views this week, today, and in the last hour, along with a referrer list (no idea how extensive the referrer list is, as I’ve got all of three hits so far while poking around with things).

So far, so good — it looks like a decent entry-level weblogging service.

One thing did catch my eye, though, and it could be a big one: apparently, posts have to be written with paragraph tags (\<p> and \</p>) or linebreak tags (\
), otherwise your text gets all smooshed together into a single paragraph. I was surprised enough that this would be the default behavior after I posted my first test post, but looking through the interface, I can’t see an option to turn on any sort of automatic linebreak conversion that would allow someone to type normally and actually get paragraphs. I can see this causing some serious headaches from HTML-ignorant newcomers who expect to see paragraphs and instead get huge blocks of unseparated text!

(Caveat: I am looking at this via Safari on my Mac, so it’s entirely possible that this actually works correctly with IE/Win — though if that’s the case, that’s another strike against the system, in my view.)

There is a note on the bottom of the posting screen that “Some HTML tags may be removed from your entry for security and formatting reasons” — unfortunately, they don’t list which tags may be removed. And what’s this “may” bit? Are they or aren’t they? Will the list of which tags get removed change from time to time, and if so, why? Odd.

Clicking the “Trackback” link takes you to the comment entry form, and I can’t find a Trackback link to send a ping to. I can’t find a Trackback address in the source code, either, and auto-discovery from the MT QuickPost interface isn’t coming up with anything either. Perhaps that’s due to not being able to set the global Trackback acceptance flag?

Permalinks are ugly — for instance, the permalink for my first test post is http://spaces.msn.com/members/michaelhanscom/Blog/cns!1plKnLKPq0gBtnAfWaupqTNA!106.entry. Ouch.

Source code is also ugly (though honestly, that’s exactly what I expected). Heavily table-based, lots of crud and cruft. Running it through the W3C validator returns 193 errors, and that’s after the validator displays a big warning that no Doctype was found so it’s guessing 4.01 Transitional.

End result: it’ll keep newbies and MS fans happy (assuming that that bit with requiring paragraph or linebreak tags is fixed), but power users and web standards geeks (who are probably not the target market anyway) will definitely want to look somewhere else.

(via Scoble)

iTunes “Making Plans for Nigel” by XTC from the album Rock and Wave Vol. 1 (1979, 4:10).

Four Years

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The actual day isn’t until tomorrow, but as I’m not planning on doing much in the way of weblogging on Thanksgiving day, I figured I’d go ahead and toss this up ahead of time. While I’d been keeping hand-updated websites since ’95 or so, November 25th, 2000 marked my first foray into using a software engine to keep track of the random rambling I occasional put up on my website, starting me stumbling into the world of weblogging.

Four years it’s been since then.

Semi-randomly chosen highlights follow…

Read more

2004 Weblog Awards

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Nominations are now open for the 2004 Weblog Awards.

I’m not sayin’. I’m just sayin’. ;)

Categories I might be eligible for, if I were nominated: Best Overall Blog (not going to happen), Best Blog Design (again, not going to happen), Best of the Top 100-250 Blogs or Best of the Top 2500-3500 Blogs (as ranked by the Blogging Ecosystem, where I’m currently ranked as either [#215][] [Large Mammal] or [#2525][] [Adorable Little Rodent] depending on how the URL is written — and I don’t think I’m popular enough to grab a win in either of these categories, either).

Still, it’s fun to dream, right?

iTunes “Funky Music” by Utah Saints from the album Two (2001, 3:36).

New Reads

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Thanks to tdavid‘s creation of an easy-to-import OPML file of Wednesday’s Meetup attendees, I’ve just added a good number of local webloggers — essentially, everyone who was at the meetup and has an RSS feed available — to my daily reads.

I’ve noticed from time to time just how few local writers I’ve had in my daily reading list, this should be a nice change.

Until I take the time to update the blogroll here, the curious can peek at my current reads through my Bloglines page.

Weblogger’s Meetup

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Just got back a bit ago from this month’s Seattle Weblogger’s Meetup.

Weblogger's Meetup

Roundabout 20-something people in attendance, of whom I knew three or so beforehand. A full list of attendees can be found at 8 Bit Joystick. Nice evening, lots of chatting.

Now I’m tired, though, and will be heading to bed before too terribly long.

iTunes “Chickasuarus” by Pigface from the album Preaching to the Perverted (2001, 5:04).

Googlebomb Spam Attack

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Looks like someone’s come up with a new, not-really-all-that-clever use for comment spam: using it to attempt to Googlebomb someone that they’re ticked off at.

The following showed up in my inbox three times, with three different IP addresses:

IP Address: 202.175.26.151
Name: Whiny Communist Bitch
Email Address: commie\@mamamusings.net
URL: http://www.mamamusings.net

Comment:

I just can’t shut my pie hole.

Normally, that’d be a sure sign of the standard comment spam, but I was pretty sure that mamamusings.net was another weblogger, so I headed over to be sure, and to give her the details.

Turns out that she already knows, which is good.

Heartening to know we can all be so mature, isn’t it? Didn’t “commie” go out of vogue as an insult a couple decades ago, anyway?

iTunes “Honey” by Amos, Tori from the album More Pink – The B-Sides (1994, 3:49).

From the vaults

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I’ve been playing with HTML for quite a few years now. Every so often over the years, I’ve actually been bright enough to make a quick copy of my website and archive it. Tonight, in a mad burst of misplaced nostalgia, I pulled them all out of the digital dustbin and have put them back online. As an added bonus, this allowed me to put some really old entries into my archives, from the pre-“blogging” days when I was just hand-coding pages and updating them as I saw fit. My archives date back to 1995 now!

Curious enough to check out just how my design and web skills have evolved over the years? Feel free to wander through. Some links will work, some won’t — caveat emptor and all that.

  • February 27, 1996: Yup, you read that right — 1996. We’re talking seriously old-school here (“Netscape 2.0 Enhanced”, even). Looks best if you shrink the width of your browser window to just a bit wider than the graphics, as this was back when 640×480 was in wide useage. Check out that announcements page, too — reverse chronological order, date and time stamped…blogging before anyone knew what blogging was (eat your heart out, Dave Winer)!

  • February 14, 1997: One year later, and things have improved dramatically. This basic design would last through the next three archives, and while it’s a bit broken now, I still like the general idea. Featured one of the first incarnations of a Gigs Music Theatre site, though it’s just a single page here.

  • April 21, 1997: A few months later. A little less content, as I started to focus on expanding the Gig’s page. Design is the same (and is still slightly broken in modern browsers).

  • March 30, 1998: Another year goes by, and things are still pretty static. The design is the same (though by this point, it works in modern browsers). The Gig’s page has evolved into a full-fledged site by this point, though.

  • August 5, 2002: Whoops! Four years went by with no archiving. I’ve been kicking myself for this of late, as I was doing some hand-coded “blogging” back then that I don’t have copies of anymore. Still, at least I have this. By this point, the design has changed majorly, and I was using MovableType to handle my weblogging.

My lord I’ve been doing this for a long time.

iTunes “Kat-A-Mandu” by Poems for Laila from the album Katamandu (1992, 5:11).

IQ redux

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Almost a month ago, I signed up for the free StatCounter statistics tracking service, and I’ve been checking in every few days to see what kind of traffic I’m getting on my site.

From the 11th to the 31st of October, I’d been averaging around 1,333 page loads per day, with 1,090 unique visitors, 1,022 first-time visitors, and 68 returning visitors (keep in mind, those are all averages). Not anywhere near the top of the ‘net, but not terribly shabby, either.

Then, over the past few days, I’ve suddenly been watching my traffic start to spike, topping out (so far) yesterday at 2,757 page loads…

Graph Daily Summary

A little curious about what was causing the spike, I checked out my referrers and search terms. Turns out that the majority of the spike is caused by people searching for information on how states voted combined with the state’s average IQ, which first started going around the ‘net back in May regarding the 2000 elections. The table that was flying around the ‘net was later declared a hoax, but apparently the meme is still fairly popular, and a lot of people have been landing on my post because of that.

Turns out that someone has actually updated the table for the 2004 election — though they’re using the same data for the IQ, so I’m sure the table is just as faulty for this election as it was for the 2000 election. As it still seems to be amusing people, though, I added a quick update to my original post noting the new table (and calling attention to the fact that it’s a hoax, though most people probably won’t care about that), and in the meantime, I’ll just enjoy the upswing in traffic.

iTunes “Tripnotized Vol. 1 (Part 1) (full mix)” by Various Artists from the album Tripnotized Vol. 1 (full mix) (1995, 1:11:25).