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

I’m an iTunes Affilliate

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Single of the Week

Earlier this week, I tossed a link to my linklog to Apple’s new iTunes Affiliate program, but didn’t write up anything more about it, as at that point, I didn’t really know much at all. While I was there, though, I went ahead and tossed in an application…and what do you know, last night I got my e-mail telling me that I was accepted into the program (a little amusing, as they turned down my favorite online soap opera, As the Apple Turns!).

So far, it seems to be fairly straightforward. Basically, once you’re accepted into the program, you’re given a selection of Apple-approved and created text links and banners that can be placed into web pages or e-mail messages that have a special ID in them, so that any sales initiated by a click on one of your links sends a few pennies your way. So far, so good — rather like the Amazon Associates program, in fact.

The one aspect of it that I haven’t figured out yet is how to make links to individual items or searches within the store that tie to my Affiliate ID. Either that part of the program isn’t active yet (since this all just started up this week), or I just can’t find the information on how to do it anywhere. Linking into the store without an Affiliate ID is already easy enough — right-clicking on items in the store gives you their target link, and there are ways to link to iTMS searches — but neither of those includes my Affiliate ID to track the sales.

Once I figure out that part of the process, then it will be extremely similar to the Amazon Associates program — any iTMS link on my site that prompts a sale will send a few pennies my way, and every little bit helps. For now, even though I’m not able to set up links directly to individual items, I have added an iTunes logo in the lower right of the sidebar, and small iTunes links to the “what I’m listening to” line at the bottom of posts. Hey, I may be selling out to The Man and including advertising on my site, but I’m at least making an effort at making it as unobtrusive as possible! ;)

One minor criticism, though (hopefully nothing that’s going to get me rather suddenly dumped from the program): as a web geek, it really bugs me that the provided HTML code to create the links is a little dodgy. No width or height arguments in the img links, un-escaped ampersands, and for some reason, the img tag is capitalized (as IMG), even though all other tags are correctly left lower-case. Nothing that’s terribly difficult to fix, of course, but it is a minor little grumble.

Anyway, that’s that. Should you feel like going shopping at the iTMS, I wouldn’t complain at all if you kicked off your shopping spree by clicking through one of my links…

iTunes “Last One” by Days of the New from the album Days of the New (1999, 4:42).

Untrusted content, nofollow, etc.

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Phil Ringnalda pointed to an idea that Ian Hickson just tossed out while brainstorming ways to battle the ever-increasing issue of comment spam.

I’m thinking that HTML should have an element that basically says “content within this section may contain links from external sources; just because they are here does not mean we are endorsing them” which Google could then use to block Google rank whoring. I know a bunch of people being affected by Web log spam would jump at that chance to use this element if it was put into a spec.

Personally, I’d love to be able to wrap the comments section of my individual entry pages in something like this — and actually, it reminds me a lot of a technique I used to use when I had my website running on my own webserver. At the time, I had a good number of pages that weren’t part of the weblog, so rather than using MovableType‘s built-in search engine, I used the Fluid Dynamics Search Engine (May 9 2019 update: This link is now dead and has been removed).

FDSE is a very solid system, and one of the things I liked was an extra FDSE-specific tag that allowed an author to designate sections of a page that the search engine would ignore when performing its page scan. In addition to respecting the standard meta tags of index, noindex, follow and nofollow for a full page, FDSE also allows you to use those tags within HTML comments to section off areas of a page that should be treated differently from the page as a whole.

For instance, on my individual entry archive pages, the only real important content as far as a search engine is concerned is the entry itself. As the sidebar in my design is repeated on every page on the site, there’s really no great reason for a search engine to include that text in the database for every page, so I would wrap the entire sidebar inside a noindex, nofollow declaration.

I’d also do the same for things like the TrackBack section headers that appear on every page. As they are repeated on every single archive page, trying to search for an actual discussion on TrackBack is nearly impossible — but when I was using the FDSE and hid that section header from the search engine, it was very easy for me find discussions about TrackBack, as FDSE was only indexing the actual content of each page, rather than every little bit of text that the page contained.

I’ve wished for a long time that Google either supported a way to do the same thing, or just adopted FDSE’s method. According to FDSE’s author, he submitted his technique to Google as a suggestion quite a few years ago, but nothing more was ever heard about that.

Maybe Ian’s suggestion will get something moving in this direction again. Here’s hoping, at least.

iTunes: “Never Say Never (Hot Tracks)” by Romeo Void from the album Edge, The Level 1 (1995, 5:47).

Comments from the Peanut Gallery

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I spent a little time last night reorganizing the blogroll on the site. Actually, I split it into two, and added a bunch of links.

Since I had the phrase “comments from the peanut gallery” running through my head for no discernible reason whatsoever, I went into the e-mail folder where I dump all the comments that I receive on the site, sorted them all by sender, and started scrolling through. Anytime I saw an address with a good number of comments, I snagged any URL that was left with the comments, and added them to the new ‘Peanut Gallery’ blogroll in the sidebar.

So, in theory, I should have caught most, if not all, of the most frequent visitors that leave comments, as long as they have a site to link to. If I’ve missed anyone, or if for some reason I’ve linked to you and you’d rather I didn’t, please let me know!

The next step is making sure that all of those sites are tossed into NetNewsWire…

iTunes: “Gumbo” by Phish from the album A Live One (1995, 5:14).

It’s not all bad, really!

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Last month, I mentioned that I’d been in contact with a magazine reporter who was working on a story about weblogs and some of the potential pitfalls that can come about when recording your life online for the world to see. As I mentioned at the time, while I at first wasn’t terribly concerned about the tone of the article, as our conversation progressed, I started to worry that it was going to end up all gloom-and-doom.

It appears that Anil has also been contacted by a reporter working on a similar story (possibly the same reporter, or another reporter also working on the story for the same publication, though I can’t be absolutely sure about that), and he ended up having some of the same reservations that I did. In his response to the reporter who contacted him, he expressed a desire shared by myself and, I’m sure, many others in the weblogging world: rather than focusing solely on the things that go wrong, that the media also look at the things that go right, and just why we all keep our weblogs going even in the face of the potential downsides.

One thing I would suggest is considering a, well, more uplifting angle. There have been an awful lot of “blogs can cost you your job!” or “make money fast with blogs!” stories, and very few that cover the positive reasons people have weblogs.

For a lot of your audience, this is their first impression of what weblogs can be, and frankly, if they were all about dire consequences, there wouldn’t be millions of people publishing weblogs every day.

Most of the people in my social circle have met their spouses/significant others, gotten apartments, gotten jobs, made friends, or (in my case) all of the above because of their weblogs. All that plus they get to participate in a new medium instead of just passively consuming media.

From what I know of [name of publication], the audience is one that appreciates a good positive human story, and it’s also much more likely that you’ll get some good cooperation or participation from people in the weblog realm who can help strengthen your story.

I’ve just sent a link to Anil’s post to the reporter I’ve been talking with, in case we are dealing with separate people. With any luck, should this article eventually appear, there will be a bit more to it than mere horror stories.

Meme Propagation Test

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This posting is a community experiment started by Minding the Planet to see how a meme represented by a blog posting spreads across blogspace, physical space and time. It will help to show how ideas travel across blogs in space and time and how blogs are connected. It may also help to show which blogs are most influential in the propagation of memes. The original posting for this experiment is located at: Minding the Planet; results and commentary will appear there in the future.

Please join the test by adding your blog (see instructions, below) and inviting your friends to participate — the more the better. The data from this test will be public and open; others may use it to visualize and study the connectedness of blogspace and the propagation of memes across blogs.

The GUID for this experiment is: as098398298250swg9e98929872525389t9987898tq98wteqtgaq62010920352598gawstw98qwrt189849813907azq4

(this GUID enables anyone to easily search Google for all results of this experiment). Anyone is free to analyze the data of this experiment. Please publicize your analysis of the data, and/or any comments by adding comments onto the original post at Minding the Planet; Note: it would be interesting to see a geographic map or a temporal animation, as well as a social network map of the propagation of this meme.

INSTRUCTIONS

To add your blog to this experiment, copy this entire posting to your blog, and fill out the info below, substituting your own information in your posting, where appropriate.

(Note: Replace the answers below with your own answers):

  1. I found this experiment at URL: http://www.jluster.org/node/249
  2. I found it via “Newsreader Software” or “Browsing or Searching the Web” or “An E-Mail Message”: Newsreader Software – NetNewsWire
  3. I posted this experiment at URL: http://www.michaelhanscom.com/
  4. I posted this on date (day, month, year): 03 August 2004
  5. I posted this at time (24 hour time): 00:30:57
  6. My posting location is (city, state, country): Seattle, WA, USA

OPTIONAL SURVEY FIELDS (Replace the answers below with your own answers):

  1. My blog is hosted by: TypePad
  2. My age is: 31
  3. My gender is: Dangly Bits
  4. My occupation is: Copy geek
  5. I use the following RSS/Atom reader software: NetNewsWire
  6. I use the following software to post to my blog: ecto
  7. I have been blogging since (day, month, year): Verifiable: Nov. 25, 2000. Unverifiable: Sometime in ’98 or ’99.
  8. My web browser is: Safari

iTunes: “Lovesong (Extended)” by Cure, The from the album Mixed Up (1990, 6:20).

As the Apple Turns RSS feed

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I’m tossing this up here because until today, I had never, ever, ever seen nor heard of any mention of an RSS feed for everyone’s favorite Apple-flavored soap opera, As the Apple Turns (I even just dug through their help pages and v2.0 FAQ to be sure I wan’t entirely off base — at least, as far as this is concerned). However, in a typically off-the-cuff mention, the heretofore super-secret-ninja-RSS-feed address has been leaked (and leaked by no less august a personage than the AtAT team themselves): http://www.appleturns.com/rss/.

Hey, I thought it was exciting.

Google to me in eight clicks

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Meme time, started by A Whole Lotta Nothing, and being tracked by Kottke: how many clicks to get from Google’s homepage to your website without using the search box?

For me, it’s eight.

  1. Google »
  2. More »
  3. Blogger »
  4. Knowledge »
  5. Working With Blogger »
  6. How Not to Get Fired Because of Your Blog »
  7. Seattle Times: Microsoft Fires Worker Over Weblog »
  8. eclecticism

Awww, shucks!

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This was rather flattering to run across tonight…

Which blog has your favorite design?

Only one? eclecticism, by Michael Hanscom. It is the most intentionally designed blog I know, and the design is significant, a protest of stereotyping blog designs according to gender. Go Michael!

Thanks, Alicia!

Amusingly enough, I’m starting to run ideas around in my head to expand the choices a bit, too. No clue when they’ll show up, but hopefully they’ll be appreciated also. :)

iTunes: “Happy Phantom (Live)” by Amos, Tori from the album Y Kant Tori Read (and Other Rarities) (1994, 3:37).

Meme fun

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This was originally a LiveJournal meme, but it was so goofy and intricate that I had to join in the fun. So. Bear with me.

  1. Take your LJ username and replace each letter with the corresponding number (A=1, B=2, etc…). If your name contains numbers, you’ll need to convert them to letters first before you can convert to numbers.
    • Michael Hanscom = 13 9 3 8 1 5 12 8 1 14 19 3 15 13 (Since I’m doing this here, rather than on LiveJournal, I’ll use the name I post under on this weblog — which, conveniently enough, just happens to be my real name.)
  2. Add all of the numbers together to create a kind of super number.
    • 124
  3. Make a note of the first digit of this number, then add the digits of the number together.
    • First digit is 1.
    • 1 + 2 + 4 = 7.
  4. Find the post of this number in your LJ. If you don’t have that many posts, add the digits together again. Keep doing so until the number is smaller than your pathetic number of posts.
  5. Take the digit you noted in step 3, and count that many words into the post.
    • Just
  6. Use the resulting word in a Google Image Search, and select a picture from the first page. Post the results for us all to see.

'Just Try It' from Anger Dog StudiosA quick note regarding this image: while it was by far the best of the images that Google found for me, it was found on this journal page (no permalink, entry “Wow wow wow!!!” from Jan. 25, 2004), where it had been re-posted from Anger Dog Studios. I debated re-re-posting it here, but liked the image enough that I decided to go ahead and toss it up with credit to the original artist, who I’ll also be e-mailing and asking formal permission to leave the piece up. There’s a lot more excellent artwork at Anger Dog Studios, too, so feel free to wander that way and peruse what’s available in their galleries.