I just found a comment on www.steveneely.org saying something generic about “[steveneely.org] wrote an interesting post today on…” and a link back to the poster’s site. Out of curiosity I went to this site to find it is a blog full of thousands of posts that all say “X wrote an interesting post today on…” and covered in zangocash adverts.
It looks like the owner (frank the blog dot info) is automatically posting on other blogs to direct traffic to their site. This would help with SEO and have click throughs. Sneaky frank (wonder if it’s the eponymous fat frank L).
I’ve been using twitter for over a year now and am still only part sold on it. I keep having random people add me to their “following” list and I find this odd. Why would someone I don’t know want to follow my updates? I could make my updates private but I want to continue using the facebook twitter application to update my fb status from my tweets. It needs my updates to be public.
Thinking about the business model of twitter is an interesting exercise. Despite the large user base they don’t really seem to have one yet. The new Japanese version of twitter has adverts. Another idea might for them to sell user updates to businesses. Imagine tweeting about watching a movie and then being hit with netflix or blockbuster adverts.
Twitter is part way there and businesses are tracking you. You can set tracking on keywords that alerts your phone or IM when someone includes them in a tweet:
track word: starts tracking a word
untrack word: stops tracking a word
untrack all: stops tracking all words
track off: stops tracking all words
tracks or tracking: returns a list of words you’re tracking
So that is why random people keep adding me to their following list.
The Encyclopædia Britannica is offering free access to their online content to “people who publish with some regularity on the Internet, be they bloggers, Webmasters, or writers“. Registration is required.
This is too much fun. googleDrive is a flash front end on top of google maps that allows you to drive a little yellow car around the map. I went to Neubergring in Germany and tore up the track. Next stop Monaco then I may cruise round the Taj Mahal.
I hope they add a racing component (no, I’m not going to write it).
I wanted to install the Perl scripts for o2sms on my new webfaction account and ran into a problem. I’ve not got root so the cpan install was going to complain when it tried to install to the default directory /usr/bin. I needed to figure out how to install o2sms and the associated modules (Crypt:SSLeay, XML::Parser etc.) as a non-root user.
I started off downloading modules and running through a manual install with perl Makefile.PL PREFIX=/home/sneely/perl; make; make test; make install but that turned out to be too slow. So I figured out the fast way with cpan:
set PERL5LIB and PERLLIB environmental variables to point at ~/perl/lib (or where ever you’re going to put your libraries — I needed to add site_perl/lib too
run the cpan installer. The cpan executable wasn’t available so I ran perl -MCPAN -e shell
follow the instructions to configure cpan (pretty much accept all the defaults)
add ~/perl/bin to your PATH
run cpan and install Bundle::CPAN WWW::SMS::IE::iesms
That was pretty much it. I had to run cpan a couple of times to update and install things like Crypt:SSLeay but now o2sms is up and running fine.
I’m setting up a space on the web to store my research activities and general information about technology that I find interesting. It’s a kind of scratch space for me to drop things when I feel like it. This post is about how this all got here:
Taking advice from Graeme and Lorcan I registered my domain with www.joker.com and signed up with www.webfaction.com to host my site. If you can afford 5 years it’s a nice deal. Webfaction have given me shell access to a linux box and their support guys have been great to me so far — replied within 24 hours of my questions. They have an affiliate scheme so if you decide to use them because of me feel free to add “sneely” as your affiliate. It can’t hurt to ask…
For now I’m running Wordpress 2.5 with the HijauSegar 1.0 theme by L Chandler and bib2html for my publications. It’ll probably all change next time I’m bored at home.
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