April 2006 Archives
Over the last few months I've been running adsense on a wide variety of sites with varying degrees of success. I have been using adsense since the program first launched, but I've been using it on a wider variety of sites over the last few months.
One thing I have noticed is that although higher levels of traffic help it is not the deciding factor.
Has anyone else noticed similar trends?
A possible explanation is the topics themselves which give higher payouts per keyword.. but even then that would not explain the overall results, as I don't have any sites or pages that lend themselves to the really high paying keywords
Things I have noticed:
Forums do not pay out as well as normal pages
Blending pays dividends
Adsense for search does not work (at least for me)
Text links are more popular than I would have thought even when it is blatantly obvious that they are not part of the site's navigation
The competitive filter may take hours to update
I was brought up in a household where newspapers were bought and read regularly. Nowadays I usually buy at least one Sunday newspaper, while I read a certain amount of news online.
Whenever there is a big news story you can expect bloggers to reference "authorative" sources, such as newspapers, be they Irish or international. However the reverse is not true. Irish newspapers do not seem to care about the blogging community.
Earlier today I came across a post on Frank Michlick's blog which referenced the Washington Post. The Washington Post, in turn, embeds a little box into the article:
Not only do they track which blogs are talking about the article they also encourage you to bookmark it using delicio.us
Now why can't Irish newspapers do the same thing?
Considering that most of them sell advertising space on their sites, wouldn't it be a good thing if they were able to generate more traffic?
Not only do they track which blogs are talking about the article they also encourage you to bookmark it using delicio.us
Now why can't Irish newspapers do the same thing?
Considering that most of them sell advertising space on their sites, wouldn't it be a good thing if they were able to generate more traffic?
I've just made available a few desktop wallpapers with Blacknight branding :)
We were getting them done for the office pcs anyway, so I thought I'd give them away also...
While doing some a random search on Amazon today I found this book
There isn't a lot of information about it, but according to the publishers, it will have enough so that:
- Readers will learn how to get the most out of their blogs and Web sites using the advanced power of WorldPress 2.
- Provides complete instructions for installing, using, and customizing WordPress for beginning and intermediate users.
A lot has been written about optimising blogs for maximum revenue. I've reviewed a couple of Wordpress themes that may be of interest.
Bank of Ireland's online banking service has been targetted by a phishing attack.
In common with many of the previous phishing attacks against Irish financial institutions the fraudsters fall down on the cultural issues by their misspelling of the month "April" (they used "Aprill")
The phish site itself (http://www.365online.com.cg1-bin.com/BankofIreland/banking.html ) is quite simple and asks you to enter ALL of your details before redirecting you to the BOI main site!
Hopefully the site will be taken down quickly
The ICT Expo is on next Thursday and Friday in the RDS. I'll be there on the Friday for most of the day, as I am giving a talk in the afternoon on Open Source software in the enterprise.
If you're going to be around during the day let me know :)
I just installed one of the nightly builds on a new blog and it all works perfectly. No issues with permalinks. No weirdness with templates (at least not with the ones I've tried so far). No strange things with posts.
The new features that will be included in the upcoming release are not going to be groundbreaking, but they will improve some areas.
I haven't been keeping up with the wp-testers list, but from some basic initial testing it looks like they've sped up quite a bit of the code, so the page I am currently viewing (for editing a new post) should render in about half the time.
Ken has setup a Frappr group for Irish Linux users (aka ILUGers)
Nice idea :)
Frank Michlick, in his most recent article, explains the concept of "traffic testing" domains:
A list of domain names is registered for a period from 1-5 days and then deleted again if the amount of traffic (or income) has not reached a certain threshold. Some of the testers will display a ‘parked page’ with PPC advertising and some of them will just display an empty page during the testing period.So which domains are they testing this with? Previously owned ones seems to be the answer. So if you let your domain get deleted and it has traffic, then you can kiss it goodbye .......
Eurid's ADR (Alternative Dispute Resolution) court is going to be kept busy in coming months.
Its first decision in the case of pst.eu has already been published with the ADR adjudicator finding no fault in the initial registration.
The basis for the decision is quite worrying:
. Taking into consideration the provisions of articles 10.1 and 10.2 of the Commission Regulation (EC) No. 874/2004 of 28th April 2004; article 12.3 of the same Regulation; article 14 of the same Regulation, according to the documentation filed with the Case File it is inferred that PST Business Solutions VV is owner of the trademark registered b the Benelux Trademarks Office “PST” nº 0779280, with publication date 01-01-2006; 2. Bearing in mind that although the Complainant has filed an opposition against the aforementioned trademark, according to the documentation filed by EURid such an opposition has finalized, without any statement that the trademark has been rejected; 4. Bearing in mind that PST Business Solutions has applied for the domain name on December 7, 2006 at 11:01:21.274 h. and Peripheral Systems Technology B.V. has applied for it on December 7, 2006 at 1:07:59.072 hr.; 4. Bearing in mind that the Registry shall register the domain name on the first come, first served basis, as per article 14 of the Commission Regulation (EC) No. 874/2004; 5. Bearing in mind that it is not realized that the Decision made by the Registry conflicts with the European Union Regulations (ADR Rules B (1) 11. d. (1) 2.), I decide to reject the claim and confirm the decision made by the Registry.
IEDR unlike Nominet does not have a democratic structure, nor does it have committees or other organisms to oversee rules, regulations and many other aspects of the registry's development.
Who is even on the board of the IEDR?
Who chooses the board members?
While personally I think this should all be addressed I have to admit that some areas of the registry's activities are cause for more concern than others.
While the rules and regulations have developed over time they are still sorely inadequate for the Ireland we now live in.
As things stand the IEDR is lumbered with a number of rules that while aimed at protecting the national domain name space are actually doing more to hinder its development.
A case in point is the personal name rule. While there are ways and means to circumvent this restriction the question begging to be asked is why the restriction exists in the first place.
The other one that springs to mind is that of "indecent" or "offensive" domains.
On the plus side IEDR management can smirk (or possibly gloat) at the chaos in Eurid.
I've been trying to get the k2 theme to "play nice" with me, but have met with little success. Whether this is due to me attempting this late at night when I should know better, or simply my lack of php skill is open to debate.
A bit of digging around led me to a nice little plugin for k2 which gives idiots like me a bit more control over what appears in the sidebar on which pages.
I can now put the sections I want more or less where I want them!
Prior to the Blog Awards I took delivery of an iPod Nano to give to the winner. At the time I was sorely tempted to get a nano for myself, but I resisted.. at least for a while
Anyhow my personal iPod Nano arrived on Friday afternoon. It was shipped from Hong Kong, as I had it etched with the Blacknight Logo. It looks kind of like this:
Unfortunately I couldn't get the text bit onto it, so it's just the logo at the top, but even so it looks very cool.
Under Windows there is iTunes to manage your playlists and send files across to it, while on Linux I've been experimenting with gtkpod, which seems to be more functional than iTunes.
The next question, of course, is whether I want to put linux on it or not...
Unfortunately I couldn't get the text bit onto it, so it's just the logo at the top, but even so it looks very cool.
Under Windows there is iTunes to manage your playlists and send files across to it, while on Linux I've been experimenting with gtkpod, which seems to be more functional than iTunes.
The next question, of course, is whether I want to put linux on it or not...
One of the few things that Eurid seem to have done properly is providing a DAS server to supplement whois lookups.
While a whois query on a .eu domain will return none too verbose results the das query is simplistic:
whois -h das.eu:4343 get 1.0 mneylon
% .eu Domain Availability Server 1.0
%
% (c) 2005 (http://www.eurid.eu)
%
%% RC = 0
Domain: mneylon
Status: REGISTERED
If you are interested in talking about domain names then maybe the new TalkDomains.eu site may be of interest :)
A lot of the existing domain discussion forums have a US focus, while this forum will hopefully cater more to the European market.
As always feedback is welcome
The Ubuntu project's upcoming release - the dapper drake - is now in beta.
Over the last couple of days the various project teams have released beta versions of Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Edubuntu etc., so the clock is now ticking until final release.
The graphics are taking shape and there are probably lots of tweaks and changes under the hood. I am now seriously considering a fresh install on this desktop pc, as there seems to be a lot of junk leftover from old installs, tests and accumulated junk.
Jason mentioned text links ads recently, so I thought I'd signup to see what all the fuss was about.
What caught my attention was that not only do they offer both publishers and advertisers a wealth of options they also offer some very slick integration techniques for a wide variety of website platforms.
If you are running Wordpress, for example, you can integrate the ads using an actual Wordpress plugin, so instead of messing about with code all you need to do is add a new template tag.
If you want to put the ads on a vBulletin site they offer plugins for that software also.
The CMS/software supported at present is:
- Wordpress
- Drupal
- vBulletin
- Movable Type
- PostNuke
Thanks to Darren for highlighting a new Adsense feature - text referral links.
Google have finally decided to offer textual links for their "referral" products ie. adsense, adwords and Firefox
Unfortunately you do not have any control over the actual text itself, which is a real pity. You have to choose between four available options ....
Another thing to beware of is that the text referral code is only available under English US and not under English UK
Whilst debugging my self-inflicted Wordpress issues I noticed that FeedBurner hadn't updated my feed since this morning. Normally a quick sync resolves these issues, but it doesn't seem to be making any difference.
I've reached the conclusion that Wordpress hates me.
The templates went nuts again this evening for no apparent reason!
I'm seriously considering dumping Wordpress in favour of Movable Type.. though I've no idea how I'm going to handle permalinks...
*sigh*
EDIT: Turning gzip compression back on fixed the issue.. But why????
Google's website builder - Google Page Creator - is accepting signups again, as long as you have a gmail account.
The user interface is simple and quite intuitive, though it is obviously limited in its functionality.
Some of the AJAX tricks they've used to make it all work are pretty nifty and really fast!
Unlike some of the other site builders I've tried over the last couple of years, this one works perfectly in Firefox, so I presume it will work equally as well in Internet Explorer. If the CSS hacks in the stylesheet are anything to go by it is probably as cross-browser as possible.
I put a couple of pages online very quickly just to test it (don't expect a work of art - you'll be sorely disappointed!)
While you can customise the first part of the page title you seem to be stuck with a default string for the second part.
The title tag contains:
<strong>Michele's Google Test</strong> - michele.neylon's Home Page - Navigation - if this is aimed at novices helping them to give meaningful navigation to their "sites" is a must
- Repeat Elements - Footers on most websites are uniform throughout the site. This new "toy" doesn't allow for this.
ICANN are looking for people to fill a number of roles:
* Three members of the ICANN Board of Directors * One member of the Council of the Generic Names Supporting Organization (GNSO) * One member of the Council of the Country-Code Names Supporting Organization (ccNSO) * Two members of the At Large Advisory Committee (ALAC)Further details on the ICANN site
The codename for dapper +1 has been announced - The Edgy Eft
I'd love to know where they find some of these names :)
An Eft is a youthful newt, going through its first exploration of the rocky territory just outside the stream.Some of the planned additions sound very interesting:
So dream a little about Xen for virtualisation, Xgl/AIGLX and other wonderful wobbly window bits, the goodness of Network Manager, a first flirt with multiarch support for true mixed 32-bit and 64-bit computing on AMD64, the interesting possibilities of the SMART package manager... and other pieces of infrastructure which have appeared tantalisingly on the horizon.
If you want to sell to me you need to market to me effectively.
Sending me and most of my staff an email without a subject line but with a 3 megabyte attachment is not the way to do this.
So shredit.ie / dmg-services.com welcome to my killfile
So how many .eu domains are being squatted by Irish cybersquatters?
While the nationality of a cybersquatter normally wouldn't be of that much interest, the .eu cybersquatters seem to be following some interesting patterns.
The only thing is that many of them do not seem to realise how much trouble they are going to cause themselves.
If you are a Scrubs fan and aren't patient enought to wait for Series 5 to be shown over here, then you could try iTunes, where you can get the entire series for $35.
For some reason it's not available on the Irish iTunes shop, so I probably wouldn't be able to get it even if I had an iTunes account, or would I?
The Data Retention Directive has been published in the Official Journal. (You can download a copy of the directive here in PDF format.)
This means that "the clock" has started ticking .... Over the next few months ISPs and other vested interests will be doing their utmost to make sense of the text and see what impact it will have on their business
What bothers me about all this is that there are a large number of Irish hosting "companies" who seem to think that this kind of legislation does not apply to them as they do not either own hardware or manage their network - preferring instead to use cheap servers based in the US.
Sorry boys - but the minister will probably be contacting you all about this too.
Why is it against the law to sell alcohol on Good Friday in Ireland?
Can anyone explain it to me?
The IIA in association with Engineers Ireland is organising a half-day seminar on blogging, podcasting and all that funky stuff...
Brian Greene is currently talking about the finer points of podcasting... How to do it and what it is.
Bob Parsons, CEO of Godaddy, has posted again about the .EU sunrise fiasco with an analysis of the "phantom registrars"
It seems that my suspicions about Delaware LLCs were well founded..
So, the question now is will someone do anything about this?
Is it acceptable that london.eu and dublin.eu are ceded to opportunistic cybersquatters?
Will the EU take action or will our politicians ignore the farce?
As John points out, this is unlikely.
Marc van Wesemael, the head of Eurid gave an interesting interview a few months ago. Some quotes:
Notre modèle économique est calculé sur la base d'un million de noms de domaine.So that's been dealt with already...
Eurid est une association à but non lucratif.Really? So the 3 or 4 hundred extra registrars you signed up recently didn't help your finances? 400 x 10000 euro = a LOT of money And what are they doing with the money?
Nous devons encore financer de lourds investissements, en serveurs notamment.Maybe that got overlooked before Friday? And what about cybersquatting?
Avez-vous déjà remarqué des cas de cyberquatting ? Tout dépend ce que vous appelez cybersquatting. Si quelqu'un a déposé une marque imitant celle d'une enseigne connue, mais avec une différence orthographique, et que cette demande a été acceptée par les instances compétentes, nous ne pouvons nous opposer à l'enregistrement de son nom de domaine. The man should go into politics!
No matter who you ask the number of speculative registrations during both sunrise and landrush for .eu was obviously high.
Eurid has stuck its head in the sand and is claiming that the trademark laws were at fault not them.
No matter what went on in the lead up to landrush one thing is sure - the domain aftermarket is booming.
Sedo, which is one of the largest domain brokers, has over 36 thousand EU domains listed. While some of them are not legitimate listings (ie. none of the pending applications has been accepted by Eurid) that is still a high number so short after the landrush.
So are all these registrations likely to stick?
This could be a moot point, as the .es registry was forced to rollback a large number that were snapped up on opening and that was a ccTLD not a regional TLD.
It's pity that the ADR site doesn't have an RSS feed .............
EU landrush is a fiasco.
Why?
Eurid and the EU dropped the ball completely.
While you may have been lucky enough to get the domains you wanted under landrush (or one of the sunrises) a lot of people are going to be very upset due to the tactics employed by several hundred registrars who abused the system to their own end.
The courts are going to be kept busy for the next couple of years sorting out the squatters from the legitimate registrants.
Unlike other registries Eurid is governed by the EU, so in theory at least it should be less susceptible to abuse and under EC reg. 874/2004 cybersquatting / bad faith registrations are not allowed:
1. A registered domain name shall be subject to revocation, using an appropriate extra-judicial or judicial procedure, where that name is identical or confusingly similar to a name in respect of which a right is recognised or established by national and/or Community law, such as the rights mentioned in Article 10(1), and where it: (a) has been registered by its holder without rights or legitimate interest in the name; or (b) has been registered or is being used in bad faith.Of course this is theory. Fact is another matter entirely and a cursory glance at some of the domains registered since Friday morning would reveal some very telling signs of abuse. Add to that the number of .eu domains already up for sale on aftermarket sites and the outlook is very bleak indeed More coverage on jmmc's blog and a nice explanation of how the system works over on Bob Parson's (just ignore the jingoism)
Since I upgraded php to php5 the other day I've been having some very interesting issues with Wordpress themes.
Basically the only theme that will display correctly is k2. The others all give a blank screen and don't throw any errors in my logs.
Is there something in k2 that the other themes don't have or vice-versa that makes it compatible with php5?
I'll be doing some more investigation, but if anyone has any insights I'd really love to hear them, as this issue is really annoying!
EDIT: I finally found the culprit! A plugin I was using to rewrite the post titles was causing issues, so it's now disabled
My housemate has been blogging since he arrived in Ireland, however he does so in Polish, not English.
If you want to see some fantastic shots of Ireland his blog is well worth checking out.
So how many other non-Irish nationals are blogging about and from Ireland in languages other than English?
I've come across a few on some of the aggregators in the past, but it would be really fascinating to find out more. How do they view life in this country?
What kind of issues do they face?
The EU registry opens to the public today at 11am CET
Whether .eu will take off or become another .info or .biz is hard to say at this juncture, but there should be plenty of "fun and games" over the next few weeks as the ADR procedures take place
I'm now using php5 (apt forced me to).
It seems that my choice of template was causing issues, so I've moved to a new template until I can work this out.
I've been following the marketing antics of some of our industry competitors closely.
Some marketing ploys are quite interesting and in some cases even innovative, however there are some techniques that I find almost laughable
A particular competitor seems to be having serious issues with their maths or maybe their comprehension of the English language.. To be honest, I'm not 100% sure.
According to this particular company they have X thousand clients, however any statistics that I have seen would show that they do not have anything close to that number of clients, while they may host DNS for that number of domains.
So why are they inflating their figures?
The Irish Internet Association has just launched their new blog.
Let's hope that they make good use of it ....
Julian has announced the release of MailScanner 4.52 stable, which brings some more improvements to the phishing filters:
There is now an option in the Phishing Net settings that will make it slightly less strict. If you have a web server email.domain.com pretending to be www.domain.com it will not complain as the "domain.com" strings match. It also knows a pretty complete list of all the second level domains used by many countries. So email.domain.org.uk and www.domain.org.uk will match. But www.domain1.org.uk and www.domain2.org.uk will _not_ match. This is because it knows that ".org.uk" is a generic domain name used by the UK to cover a whole group of different websites (UK non-profits).The update may be downloaded from the main site or the Irish mirror
