Tuesday, June 30, 2009
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Got another bill from XM today. This after they told me I owed them nothing more. I really can't believe this company and their complete lack of customer service. They tell you one thing over and over and then as soon as they get off the phone you start getting bills. Amazing!
Labels: Personal, Technology
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Saturday, June 27, 2009
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So I have been testing out Adsense for Domains. Have a ton of domains and figured I would try to make some money with them. In the past two months I have gotten a reported 529 page impressions and 34 results page impressions but no money. Not sure how you are supposed to make money with this system. But I would recommend using something else.
On to another point to do with Adsense for Domains. Isn't this spam? So Google says that a page should be useful to a user. If you have seen these pages they are terrible. As a person or user of the internet the Adsense for domains pages are extremely un-useful. They just clutter up the internet as do most parking systems. My issue is that Google says don't do this, we will remove you and then turns around and basically builds a doorway page for their advertisers.
I don't get it.
Labels: Technology
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Thursday, June 11, 2009
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You have to love security guys that go all office space on computer gear! Check out their podcast and info @ www.pauldotcom.com and/or the YouTube below. Labels: Technology
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Monday, June 08, 2009
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All I have to say is WOW! That is a super fast browser. Readying my Google Reader, it always takes a bit for each article to load. Lots of javascript with the ads and all in the RSS. Firefox takes a bit to load each time I scroll. Safari 4 does not have this issue. Facebook is crazy fast. Google Analytics loads super quick.
Not sure how secure it is right now, but it is FAST!
Labels: Technology
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Wednesday, May 27, 2009
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I set a few of my domains up on Google's AdSense for Domains. After looking at the pages that it produces I am left wondering, isn't this exactly what Google has said for years and years that it doesn't want? Low quality pages with no real content to speak of and a bunch of PAID links?
I guess ad revenue is what drives the big G now days.
Labels: Technology, Web Design
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Tuesday, May 26, 2009
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So I have been listening to a lot of podcasts lately. One of the best and absolutely most interesting one is from PaulDotCom.com. These guys are pretty damn funny which keeps it entertaining especially since the podcast is about technology security. As a programmer I have learned a lot about writing better code and tools to use to test the programs and websites that I write. Anybody that programs, is into security or basically has a home network should check out the podcast and the website. Got to love their shirts. "Hack Naked" Labels: Technology
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I was supposed to get a call today from a manager from XM radio to talk about the issue I am having with them. Guess what, no call! Amazing.
Earlier I got an email from them saying my account was canceled. So I called them. Talked to a guy that actually wanted to fix the issue this time. So he did what I asked. I got my service for the money that I already paid and working on getting my money back for the over charges.
They do have the worst customer service ever though. Can't see how this company will be in business more than another year or two at this rate.
Actually while I was on the call the guy I was talking to put me on hold because one of the guys behind him was yelling at another customer. Got to love that.
Not happy, but better than yesterday.
Labels: Entertainment, Personal, Technology
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Monday, May 25, 2009
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So I have had XM radio for almost 5 years. I pay for it a year at a time. Always on time. You would think that they would treat a customer like this well. Nope, not at XM. I sold my old Corvette to my father a couple of years ago when I got my new one. He transferred the XM service to his account, well little did I know that XM didn't take that radio off my account. So they have been double dipping. I called tonight because I know that my car is paid up. I got an email saying my service would be shut off if I didn't pay my balance. I talked to one girl saw that the '06 Corvette was on two accounts and removed that radio from my account and credited what was "due" back to my account. She then transferred me to another woman who was supposed to look stuff up and figure out the radios and credits. She did no such thing. She told me it is not possible for one radio to be on two accounts. Said I was never double charged. All this without looking at my father's account to see that the same radio was on there and paid through next year. What she did do was try and charge me another $84 through next May. I paid $77 through November 09 last November. She said I couldn't stay on my current plan because I only have one radio, so I needed to give them another $84. Mean while she was telling me full price for 1 year with one radio is $142 but she is trying to get another $84 which would take my out of pocket for one radio this year to $161. Not to mention the over charges for the other Vette, which according to her can't happen. So I was explaining my stance on not giving them another dollar till November and she transferred me to hold then another lady picked up. This poor woman gets me and I am really angry now. I kept it cool, but with a stern voice, not abusive to the person on the phone at all. So I am waiting for a manger to call me. 3 weeks ago when I was trying to solve this issue, a manager was supposed to call. Never happened. So I am waiting for them to just shut my radio off. I plan to write a letter to the FTC, FCC, my senators and representatives. This is why Sirius and XM should never have been allowed to merge. The new company doesn't care, they have the market and are screwing the customer every which way they can. Sirus/XM Radio is losing customers left and right, this is exactly why. Last quarter they LOST customers. They said it was because the auto industry has slowed. Guess what maybe it is the complete lack of customer service and accountability that the company is displaying. I guess they must need to pay Howard this month and need me to kick in a bunch of extra so they can keep him around or something. XM Radio owes me money and an appology for the monster run around. All this today and no resolution. Don't let them have your card to run as needed. They will run it over and over again. This doesn't even touch the changes of programming that happened where I lost my 3 favorite stations in favor of the crap Sirius version. I'll blog more about this later if they call me back or if my radio that IS PAID FOR THROUGH NOVEMBER gets turned off. Sirius/XM Radio customer service SUCKS!Labels: Cars and Racing, Entertainment, Personal, Politics, Technology
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Tuesday, May 19, 2009
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I have been doing some open source programming lately, actually more of contributing to some open source projects. It is a real change from what I am used to and a lot of fun once that mindset got changed. Today I found this extremely cool site, koders.com, it is a search engine of a ton of open source code. Very nice tool. They have an addin for Eclipse and Visual Studio so you can search from the IDE. Great idea! I am excited to use it in the new future. Labels: Technology
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Monday, July 28, 2008
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There is a new search engine out there called Cuil.com. It was started by some ex-Googler's. While it is different from Google I am not sure it is better. I do like the layout, it is different and the idea of different drill downs and tabs is very nice and makes using the site very easy. It is a cool way to navigate a search engine. As for the search results I am not sure they are that great. They actually remind me of the days when there were tons of search engines out there. The point of Cuil is to go back to content based searching, that is to say that as opposed to Google where the basis for a site being ranked is the sites that link to it. For Cuil it is content only, or so far as their info says and doing some searches using it, that appears to be true. The biggest issue I have run into using it is that I get a lot of old content. Lots of stuff that doesn't seem relievant right. Also doing searches for more than one word, such as my name, doesn't seem to pull anything related to me no matter how specific I make the keywords. This being said the domain name of the site also appears to be very low in their algorythm. Cuil is just getting started and I am sure there are many improvements to come and most likely very soon. I kind of feel though that Cuil could be gamed very easily at this point. Just looking through the results it seems that the old days of doorway pages and spam content might get you ranking quickly. Not sure how often they spider or update their index. Basically, I think Cuil is a nice idea. With the current version I think it might be on par with MSN or just slightly trailing, but Google is still the king and Cuil has a lot to do to catch them. I will keep checking it out and hope to see some great improvements. I think the search engine space as a whole is pretty bad right now. Inovation seem few and far between. It is getting harder and harder to find good information using a search engine, even Google. Maybe Cuil is the answer to new search or is enough to shake Google out of focusing on advertising and start focusing on search again. Just my thoughts. Labels: Technology
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Tuesday, July 08, 2008
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So I finally made the switch. I am ditching Internet Explorer and switching to Firefox. The browser is much easier to use and more stable. I know I am slow to switch but it is finally time. I hope IE 8 fixes the problems with 7. In doing the switch using the Google browser bar made life much simpler. I have all of my bookmarks stored in it. Made life much easier. So I was messing with my blog today and found a great plugin. It is at ScribeFire.com. Makes it so you can post to any or all of your blogs straight from Firefox. You can put YouTube videos, Flickr images and all kinds of good stuff in your posts straight from there. Edit old posts, save as draft all that stuff. Copy content right into your post and do the quick and easy linking to the source. Want to promote your blog, it does that as well. Pick your Technorati tags, trackback URLs and do all your pinging right from your browser. This is a must have plugin for all you bloggers out there! One thing I wish they would add is the ability to set a no follow on the links you add in your posts. But check it out. Technorati Tags: TechnologyLabels: Technology, Web Design
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Monday, July 07, 2008
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I have been working on a lot of websites lately. Building some new sites and updating some existing. I really haven't build these kind of business to customer oriented sites in a very long time, or dealt with customers like the ones I have in a very long time.
Way back when, when I started in the commercial website business it was hard to convince companies that they needed a website, at times it still is, but for the most part companies have a website or if they don't they know they need one.
Well now with the New Web as I call it, there are new things companies need to consider. I say New Web, not to be confused with Web 2.0, a lot of companies don't know what Web 2.0 is and it scares them. They just got up to speed with Web 1.0, they feel they will have to start over to get a Web 2.0 site. That isn't true, but not the point of this post.
To me the New Web means that your website has to be accessible to a lot of different platforms. With all the smart phones out there now and the ability of those phones to use a wireless network, blue tooth networks and the cell networks to access the internet, your website had better be accessible and usable via these devices. The iPhone and upcoming Google Android Smart Phone OS will make this much more important. If you are investing in a site or re-design of a site right now and it isn't Smart Phone accessible you are wasting your money. More and more people are using the internet via their phone. This is the new internet, better to be a head of the curve that is quickly approaching.
The other thing that drives me crazy about websites is when they don't have what is called a favicon. It is a little icon that shows up next to the web address in the browser bar in most browsers. Internet Explorer SOMETIMES shows these. Firefox always shows them. But in a browser that you can use multiple tabs, it makes it so much easier to find the tab you want when you see the company or sites logo in the tab. As I say this I realize my blog doesn't currently have a favicon. But I will correct this ASAP! But as I finish sites now days, I always make a favicon for the site. Found a great free site that will take an image and create the favicon in the proper format for you. It is www.favicon.cc. Works great! Got to love sites like this. If you don't want to create your own, you can download one from their galary. The code to add this to your site is below. Put this between the head tags for all your pages. Be sure to update the path to your favicon.
<link REL="shortcut icon" HREF="/favicon.ico">
But over all my methods and ideas for a successful site continues to change and hopefully advance. But these are a couple of things to consider with your site. Both of these items can be updated with your current site and should be considered when developing a new website.Labels: Technology, Web Design
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Saturday, May 17, 2008
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I have had a couple of weeks off now and been doing a lot of research and a lot of thinking about ideas and what is coming in the next generation of the Internet. One guy I used to work for who thinks he is some kind of Internet guru thinks it is video. Sorry that has been done.
I saw a show the other day about video gaming and how a lot of the new games are very social, I have some experience playing those and it is true. But video games are fun and all, but you lose something in the translation to real life. If you are sitting at home playing video games for hours to days at a time, it is time to get out into the real world.
I feel the next generation of the Internet is with smart phones like the iPhone and Google’s new smart phone OS Android. People more and more want to be connected. The way that works is with your cell phone over 3G or faster connections. It is not a new idea and Google is definitely looking down that path with all their recent purchases.
So what I see happening in the next few years is the Internet being ported to the smart phones. As the phones become more and more powerful and as Google and Apple start to war for OS and phone market share, as they open up the market for individual programmers to build applications. The Internet will take a marked change. Currently 95% of people use it through their PC or Mac. But soon you will have all the basic functionality you want and more from your phone.
Soon your social network will extend to your phone allowing you to interact with your friends, collages and others from there. You can already access a huge amount of data from your phone, but soon it will be presented in a way that makes it much more user friendly.
Soon if your business is not online and accessible from a phone you will be missing out.
I am almost done documenting an idea to take some social media aspects from the web to your phone and use the portability of your phone to add new functionality to it. A team at MIT is working on a similar idea. There are some differences, but I personally see a lot of possibilities for smart phones and new applications that depend on data from the Internet. I am very excited about it.
I actually see it really hitting about 3 to 6 months after the new iPhone hits and the first phones with Android on them roll out. It will be a lot of fun.Labels: Technology
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Friday, April 27, 2007
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All I have to say is it SUCKS!!! Labels: Technology
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Tuesday, March 20, 2007
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Domain names a really heating up. What is also interesting is that the legal issues around domain names are heating up right alone with them. Microsoft has a aggressive program to stop people from holding domain names that are closely related to their product offerings. The university of Iowa recently bought a bunch of domains related to their athletic program, more directly having to do with firing and negative information about their coaches. Companies threaten to sue and do sue over trademark issues having to do with domain names each day. My issue is that these companies can just go to ICANN and say that this person has a domain name that is close to our trademark and that person usually loses that domain name even though they paid for it. The company in most cases doesn’t even reimburse the owner for the registration fees nor is there a refund from the registrar.
I guess my real problem is that companies are using laws that weren’t nessasarily written for domain names to capture what comes down to internet property. Items that do have value to people other than the companies that own the trademarks. It is one thing if it is blatant infringement but these companies are strong arming misspellings. Now it is also one thing if the person is trying to capitalize on the other companies brand but I know of cases where domain names were taken from people and companies who were not harming the company.
I believe that in the next 5 years this will come to a head and there will be some big court cases and hopefully some changes in the law. If it is going to be like this than it should be put on the registrars to check trademark issues or to atleast warn the person registering the domain name that there is a possible issue and that they could lose their registration fees or could be taken to court and loss much more than that.
I listened to an interview with the lawyer leading the team for Microsoft working to “recover” trademarked domain names. He said that in a lot of cases the domains were given to Microsoft without any legal action and most without the exchange of money and that any money paid was paid to Microsoft.
So basically the Domain registering companies and ICANN are the companies making money on this. New laws are needed to help protect the consumer and to further define what infringement is and to define what is squatting, which honestly I think is a bunch of crap, and what is legal. I look at this a lot like the land rush for the late 1800’s. I didn’t see too many Oklahoma Sooners going to jail or having their land taken from them, some may have gotten shot over it, but other than that the worst thing that happened was they got a college to use them as their mascot. But in the early 2000’s you get your property torn from you and given to large companies. Now it might be a little different, but like I said before if it isn’t blatant then I don’t see the issue.Labels: Technology
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Monday, February 19, 2007
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You know there are a lot of people out there that think that they know how to build a good user friendly and SEO friendly website. Unfortunatly for most people there aren't really that many. One of the biggest things that I keep seeing are custom 404 error pages. A 404 Error is a "Page Not Found" issue. You can create a page that will be displayed to the user and/or search engine spider if they come accross a bad link or a link to a page that has been removed from the site.
This is such a bad idea. For the user it serves no purpose except to make your site look like it has a page for anything. For the spiders they keep getting the same page over and over if you have a lot of bad links. If your site has been up for a while and you add, update and remove pages you will not be doing yourself any favors by doing this. The spiders want to save time and only crawl pages that are relivant. If you keep returning the same page that is not really there that page will not be updated in the search engines as quickly. But when the spiders figure it out it will most likely hurt your rankings all over.
So what should you do. Well you can always return the 404 error, create a page that does return a 404 error but looks better to you or return a 301 redirect.
A 301 redirect, redirects the user and spider to another page. The spider reads it as a permant change, the user just sees the page you are redirecting them too. This solves the issue and actually allows you to control traffic.
If you have a product page and that product has been replaced with a new one. You created a new page and pulled the old one down. You would get on your server and create a 301 redirect to the new page. So all of the old links that are on other sites now redirect to the new page. When a spider hits one of those links they are redirected as well.
Don't confuse a 301 redirect with a 302. 301 is like having your mail forwarded because you moved, a 302 is like having a post office box that is then forwarded to your house. People have used 302's for spam and there for the search engines look on them in a negative light.
In any case using custom 404 error pages will hurt your site unless they actually return the 404 error to the browser, which 99% do not. So becareful with those custom error pages.Labels: Technology
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Monday, January 22, 2007
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One of the guys at work got me hooked on this game. It is a blast and very time consuming. Too Much Fun. They should change the name to, World of Warcraft "Internet Crack". Labels: Technology
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Wednesday, December 06, 2006
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So DMOZ.org has been down as far as any new submissions or any new dynamic content for some time now. I guess they had a serious system failure and are having a hard time recovering from it.
This could be a big turning point in the web, or one that goes by virtually unnoticed. DMOZ has been around for so long and is the basis for the early success of Google. If DMOZ can't recover from this may search engines that rely on it to some point will have to rethink their ranking systems. I wonder right now how much this is effecting Google. One of my sites only has any relivance at this point because it is listed in DMOZ. I haven't touched it for years. So if DMOZ goes away or isn't fixed to where Google can reference it by the time the next big update happens, it will be very interesting to see what happens to my site.
If it goes away, I really don't think it will be a bad thing. Over the years it has gotten a bit bloated. Look at my site, that I won't give the URL to, so I don't get kicked before I have too, it hasn't been updated in years. There is very little relivance left to it. I do need to update it. But I am sure that my site isn't the only site in DMOZ that is like that.
It would be sad to see it go, but if it does, I am sure someone will have a bigger and better version to take it's place.Labels: Technology
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Friday, September 22, 2006
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Just downloaded Internet Explorer 7 and installed it. What a huge improvement over 6. May not be perfect, but a huge step forward. Labels: Technology
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Saturday, June 03, 2006
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So Adobe doesn’t want Microsoft to add it’s “open” PDF document encoding to the next version of Office. That is kind of strange. “Open” means anybody can use it right? Also adding the ability natavily to save documents from Word, Excel or any other program in the office set of tools is a good thing for Adobe, right? I guess that Adobe is worried about something, probably money. Other “Office” programs offer this ability and Adobe doesn’t charge them for it. Strange?
Well now Microsoft has a flavor of the PDF coming out. See if Adobe likes competition now from the largest software company in the world. They say that Adobe is going to file an Anti-Trust suit in Europe. But isn’t the fact that Adobe has the only wide spread PDF style software and picks and chooses who it charges for the rights to use it’s “open” software, is that a little bit of a monopoly? I am not a lawyer, but that seems more than a little off to me.
Microsoft has learned from the Anti-Trust cases in Europe and the US. So if you want to add the ability to make the Microsoft XPS files you at this point will be able to download the plug-in. This keeps Adobe from claiming that Microsoft is trying to push them out of the market because it comes pre-installed. Which by the way the PDF software was supposed to come pre-installed with Office 2007.
I personally this politics are playing way to big a roll in this whole thing. I think Adobe is trying to make Microsoft look bad, but in this case I think Microsoft has played their cards right, at least with the information out at the current time.
Just my two cents.Labels: Technology
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