Category: Web

I just checked my advertising stats and saw that I had gotten 21 ad clicks today. That’s a huge number of clicks, maybe the most ever. I checked further and found that 18 of them came from the DeJumbler page. I thought there must be a really good ad on that page, so I paid it a visit. Interestingly enough, there was an ad for Word Unscrambler web sites, or at least a site that would show you the “top eight” word unscramblers (the ad only seems to show up if you search for word unscramblers on Google and then follow Google’s search results to my page). Competitors! It’s like Honda advertising on Ford’s web site. I thought about writing and asking for this advertiser not to be listed on my web page.

Then I snapped out of my competition mentality and thought that, in terms of money anyway, I make nothing if they use my DeJumbler, but I do make money when people click on ads. So really the point of the web page is to get people to click ads, not unscramble words. Of course I would rather they use the DeJumbler, which is free, but it may not work for everyone (you have to have Word and you have to be able to enable macros).

This week my web site got its 100,000th visitor of the year. In all of last year I only got 81,000 and 16,000 the year before. I think this internet thing might be catching on.

I also got my fourth payment from Google and made my first profit-sharing payment to CARE. They are a global aid group based in Atlanta. I set up a system that will pay them automatically each quarter a few days after I receive my Amazon payment. They will get roughly 30% of my combined proceeds from Amazon and Google which will still leave me with enough money for a new iPod early next year when they come out and a new Palm this Fall. Originally my idea was to do one of those deals where you sponsor a child, so essentially something non-tangible like the web site would be supporting a non-virtual child in the developing world somewhere. But at some point during my research into sponsorship organizations I decided CARE would be a better choice. Maybe I liked that they are based locally. I still think Save the Children is a great organization and may do something with them eventually.

When I was on iLounge I found a new word, “astroturfing”. I sort of thought I knew what it meant, but didn’t look it up. Whatever it was, it was forbidden in the discussion areas. While doing some research on different iPod battery packs, I found one that had glowing reviews on iLounge. But a closer look revealed the person had only made one comment on iLounge ever. While reading some other sites, I found a very similar review. In fact it had exactly the same misspelling in it. I thought this must be astroturfing. But, according to Wikipedia what I was seeing was shilling, where a person claiming to be independent of the company pretends to be a satisfied customer. This technique is used in street cons like 3-card Monty and other places.

Astroturfing is when someone poses as multiple people who discuss the great qualities of some product trying to make it look like it has great grass roots support, when everything is fake (fake grass!). Wikipedia had a great example of this from the Iraq war in 2003 where a number of soldiers had written letters to the editor of their hometown papers saying how great everything was going in the war and how the media distorted everything. Apparently a number of these letters made it into newspapers before an editor who had gotten the same letter from two different people started poking around. A few quick Google searches turned up the exact same letter in other newspapers. In the end it all came down to an ambitious Lt. Colonel in the army who wanted to drum up support for the war.

I remember reading (or maybe Jeb told me; that’s kind of like reading) something about a website that archived past versions of web pages. That way you could go back and see what web pages used to look like last century. At lunch today we were talking about out-of-date web pages and I mentioned the Way Back Machine (which I remembered being the name of the site, but it is not the URL). At this point it was pointed out to me that the original Way Back Machine was how Mr. Peabody would go back in time on an old cartoon. Then we tried to remember whether Mr. Peabody was the dog or the other person and which one wore glasses (the dog did) and what the person’s name was . . .

Anyway, I found www.webarchive.org pretty quickly. I was hoping they would have some links to some of the most popular or interesting websites, but they pretty much leave it to you to look up URL’s and then they show you a list of archived pages of that site from different times. They did have one section of archived websites from September 11, 2001 that seemed like it would be interesting. But I entered GDOT’s URL to see what they had and even found some of the very first web pages that I had ever written, long since modified or deleted on my own computer.

Then I looked for mac.fiveforks.com and found stuff from way back in 2003, before blogs, when the site was called FOKAJ (in the title, FOJAK on the page itself). It doesn’t seem to save large pictures, or maybe it just isn’t saving pictures at all unless they are still in the original location. And the blogs don’t work well because they use separate style sheets that are not captured.

For the Engineers Association website, people submit newsletters to me as Word or PDF documents and ask me to post them to the website. I thought it would be good to have those open in a separate window since they are not html documents. I searched for the tag that would do that, but quickly found that it requires javascript. Also I found a site that said opening new windows was one of the top ten bad things that web designers can do because if the user wants to open a new window they can do it themselves and opening a new window messes up the Back button since you can’t go back from a new window (you have to close the window).

The function I needed was window.open. I found a function that would do it and then you would call the function (in fact I used that when I made the covered bridge navigator), but I wanted it to all be in the link without a separate function call. By searching for “window.open” and “href” I found the exact same guy’s web page, written 4 years after his original warning to avoid opening a window, saying that for non-web documents it was best to open a new window because when people open a .pdf document they usually close the window to get rid of it and then lose their place and have to start the browser from scratch again (which is exactly what I always do). However he did not provide any code on how to do this. I soon found a really good way to do it by using the HREF to go to the .pdf file, but adding an onClick that would cause a new window to open. Then you have the best of both worlds: when someone mouses over the link they see where they are going, they can even download the file by right-clicking it, and the link still works even if they’ve turned javascript off. But if they have javascript running, it will open a new window when they click it.

The code below opens a new resizable window 700 pixels wide (enough for letter size width) by 500 pixels vertical, without toolbars:

<a href=”newsatl06.pdf” onClick=”window.open(‘newsatl06.pdf’,’mywin’,’left=20,top=20,width=700,height=500,toolbar=0,resizable=1′); return false”>February 2006 Newsletter</a>

You can also see it in action