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I received this in email today:

ZTMC is interested in advertising text links on schinckel.blogsome.com, or other websites that you might own.

ZTMC manages a network of advertisers that range from large corporate sites to kid friendly sites.Many types of advertisers are represented in the network, with the exception of adult sites and warez (hacker/pirated software) content.Again, no warez or adult sites ads are displayed.We would like to display four links randomly on your site, ideally on every page of your site.Home page only or run of sub-section ads are also an option.Typically, the ads are placed in the footer of your site but they could also be in the header or a side bar.Payment for these ads would be upfront each month, the first month being paid once the ads are live and reviewed for proper setup.

Our monthly agreement would continue indefinitely, and we will pay you in advance based on the day of the month you began running our ads, providing your site performs as expected.

These ads are not banner ads, they are simple one line text links.You will be able to theme the links, adjusting the size and color to fit your site as you see fit, as long as they are properly visible to the users.

I hope you agree that this is an interesting way to help you grow your website and monetize your hard work.

Please contact me if this interests you.I will provide examples of these ads on existing sites and hopefully we can agree on a monthly fee that will be mutually beneficial.

Thank you for your time,

Nicole,
Marketing Manager
ZTMC, Inc.

Now, this is actually the first Spam email I’ve ever seen that might be selling a product I might be interested in. Apart from the fact that I don’t use that website anymore (although they have addressed this), and I already have an Ad system. Not that I’m really that happy with Google AdSense, but I’m close enough to actually receiving a payment after several years I can’t stand to leave.

And finally, I cannot bear to respond to a Spam email. So bad luck, Nicole, you should have chosen a more appropriate method of trying to get new business.

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I’ve had lots (and I mean lots) of Spam comments lately. Akismet has nabbed most of them, but a few have gotten through. And I keep having to moderate those snagged by Akismet.

Tempted to try another, additional level of Spam protection.

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9000 hits upon my site.

Even if you factor in images, scripts, etc, there is no way there are that many pages.

207Mb downloaded by Yahoo! Slurp. I have less than 1/6 of that in data.

Especially since I get less than 1% of my traffic from Yahoo!

I’m fairly tempted to block their stupid crawler altogether.

Fuck You, Yahoo!

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Well, I’ve moved over from Blogsome to NearlyFreeSpeech.net

It’s very cool, and looks to be pretty cheap. I might have a high bandwidth bill for the last two days as I had to keep uploading SQL dump files (much faster than editing using nano over ssh!).

When I imported all of my comments, the posts weren’t updated with the number of comments they each had, so I needed to run the following PHP script:

<?php
require_once('admin.php');
echo "Approving comments...";
// Approve all comments
$wpdb->query("UPDATE $wpdb->comments SET comment_approved = '1'");
echo "Updating post counts...";
// Populate comment_count field of posts table
$comments = $wpdb->get_results( "SELECT comment_post_ID, COUNT(*) as c FROM $wpdb->comments WHERE comment_approved = '1' GROUP BY comment_post_ID" );
if( is_array( $comments ) ) {
foreach ($comments as $comment) {
$wpdb->query( "UPDATE $wpdb->posts SET comment_count = $comment->c WHERE ID = '$comment->comment_post_ID'" );
}
}
echo "Done.";
?>

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Well, I’ve actually felt like I outgrown Blogsome for some time. Don’t get me wrong, she’s been excellent to me, but there is lots of stuff I can’t really do properly that I want. For instance, I have some serious javascript hackery going on to get the data I want displayed. Stuff that does find and replace on dates, for instance. It would be much nicer to have this all done in PHP on the server. But some of it is very cumbersome to do in Smarty Tags, which are all Blogsome allows.

I also have stuff scattered across various servers. The scripts for this site, for instance live at http://scripts.schinckel.net, which is just a redirect to somewhere else. http://files.schinckel.net is also another redirect.

So, I’ve considered a hosting plan. When I originally registered schinckel.net, it came with 12 months of free hosting with DreamHost (originally, it appeared to be free for life, but as soon as I realised it wasn’t, I didn’t bother using it), and I’ve looked at them for hosting this, and several other domains.

From what I can understand, you can point limitless domains there, and host them all under the one account. I’ve read the terms and conditions, and from them I also think I can resell my hosting space. That is, I can be webmaster for other domains, and have them all under the one hosting plan.

Their data limits are far more generous than other hosts I have come across, and they are also rather inexpensive. $9.95/month for monthly payments, which drops to $7.95/month if you pay 2 years in advance.

I might set up one of these accounts, unless anyone knows of a better place to host. And by better, I mean cheaper, with similar data limits (ie, very large), whilst still fairly stable.

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I’ve had issues with uploading images from ecto to Blogsome, but I wasn’t sure if it was an ecto or a Blogsome issue. It appears to be a Blogsome issue, which the following result from an attempted upload via MarsEdit tells me:

Oh, and I can’t figure out how to retrieve categories via MarsEdit. Not that I’m unhappy with ecto, anyway.

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I’ve commented before on how people use my template conversion, and remove the attribution to myself, and more importantly to Patricia, the original person who did all of the work on the template for vanilla wordpress.

What is quite funny is that they remove the tags that attribute me, but usually leave in the AdSense code. Which means anyone clicking on ads on their blog will be doing me a favour.

Not that I’ve ever got anything from AdSense. I can’t even log in, since there is a clash between my original AdSense login and my new hosted domain google account. Which they haven’t fixed, last time I checked.

Perhaps I should write into the code that attribution needs to be left in. I must check…

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Internet Explorer has some interesting foibles. And by interesting, I mean annoying.

For instance, if I’ve visited a page on my site, such as:

http://schinckel.blogsome.com/wp-admin/

Internet Explorer seems to remember it as

http://schinckel.blogsome.com/wp-admin

Notice that the trailing slash is missing. Blogsome will report that “Page Does Not Exist”, or if it looks like a Post page, “No posts made”.

With access to the HTTP server, this would be easy to fix (just create a rule in the relevant place that allows for URLs of this form), but on Blogsome this is a bit harder. You need to be able to check the last character of the URL string, and if it isn’t a /, append one. This should work fairly well in all cases, since every reader visible URL ends in a /.

So how to do this? Getting the URL is easy: {$smarty.server.REQUEST_URI}. However, getting the last character is a bit more difficult. Or so it appears. But Smarty allows for accessing strings as an array, so {$smarty.server.REQUEST_URI[0]} will get the first character. To get the last is a therefore possible. {$smarty.server.REQUEST_URI[-1]} fails, so I’ll need to get the length of the string.

{$smarty.server.REQUEST_URI[$smarty.server.REQUEST_URI|count_characters ]}

also fails, but

{$smarty.server.REQUEST_URI[smarty.server.REQUEST_URI|count_characters ]}

works.

Now, we just need to test if this value is “/”, and if it isn’t, then reload the page with that added.

Which I can’t seem to figure out how to do with Smarty…

•

Of course, doing the same with JavaScript is a piece of cake:

if (document.URL[document.URL.length-1] != “/”)
    document.location = document.URL + ‘/’

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Thanks to some simple Smarty capture and comparisons, it’s possible to have custom error pages in Blogsome.

Read about how to do it at : About How to customize a 404 error page in your free Wordpress blog November 2006 - WebTips

See it in action at /404/

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