Chris May - Blogging

Rotating Ad Sense Ads on AJAX Calls?

Chris May — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 15:44:15 GMT

Here is a link to an article discussing the ways you can reload google adsense ads when the user is doing something AJAXey, or really, whenever.

I wonder though if google allows this type of thing in their terms. You couldn't refresh the ad every 2 seconds, so why would they let you refresh the ad ever? How could you define when you could and couldn't refresh an ad?

Jott

Chris May — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 18:20:41 GMT

Jott is an interesting site that allows you to send emails from your phone.

You call a number, say the name of the person you want to send a message to, and it will do speech to text conversion and send the email.

As I understand it, they employ 2 different speech recognition engines, and if the 2 don't agree on what you said, they offload it to a person to do the typing. Pretty interesting!

You can also set reminders and it will email ou 15 minutes before the reminder time.

Not sure that I will ever really get into using it heavily, but I thought I would give it a shot.

They also have an API so I could write up some code for my site and "phone in" my blog posts and they would show up here. Pretty interesting indeed!

Here is the API: http://jott.com/jott/developers.html

Remove pingback spam from dasBlog

Chris May — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 15:16:00 GMT

One one of my dasBlog sites that was built before Akismet was supported, I accientally allowed for pingbacks to be tracked.

Ping backs are supposed to happen between blogs whenver you link to another blog article.

It's really a great idea! If you are reading a blog post, you might see a list of 4 ping backs at the end. These URLs are the locations of other blog articles that reference the article you are reading, so you might want to check some of those out to get those authors poing of view on whatever topic is being discussed.

But, of course, spammers ruin it for everyone.

Yesterday I got 18,000 pingbacks from sites selling prescription drugs in a matter of a hour or 2.

So I turned off ping backs, but that left me with a ton of spam to clean up.

Lucky for me, someone else has already run into this, and built a tool for stripping it out!

Really nice! The only problem I found was that it didn't report issues with my config file (I had a bad character in there). Actually, it WOULD report them, but would immediately begin processing the files (with no patterns to match against) so you couldn't tell that it was reporting it.

So if you run into a problem with this tool, try putting in a bad content path. This was throw an exception and you will have time to read any debug info in the command terminal indicating if there was a problem with your config file earlier in the process.

After I fixed this issue, it worked great!

Thanks!

Site Statistics

Chris May — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 19:23:10 GMT

Here are some site statistics for the last 12 months. Over a quater million visitors and almost 750,000 page views. Not bad.

Hits
Total Hits	1,607,524
Average Hits per Day	4,380
Average Hits per Visitor	5.87
Cached Requests	132,924
Failed Requests	157,190
Page Views
Total Page Views	737,197
Average Page Views per Day	2,008
Average Page Views per Visitor	2.69
Visitors
Total Visitors	273,988
Average Visitors per Day	746
Total Unique IPs	49,647

Google Drops My PageRank

Chris May — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 17:41:33 GMT

It looks like my previous pagerank of 4 has been dropped to 3.

This kinda stinks. I would rather be going up than down, but it isn't that big of a deal.

Ironically, one of my other websites that was getting a lot less traffic than this one just jumped from a 3 up to a 4. Go figure.

Google frequently tinkers with their settings, so I'm sure these numbers will not be static.

Paging in DasBlog

Chris May — Thu, 19 Jul 2007 16:08:29 GMT

Scott Hanselman has a little post about how to setup paging in DasBlog.

This is something I will implement when I upgrade to DasBlog 2.0, but I won't be doing that until they get off of asp.net 1.1 and onto 2.0.

They were supposed to be releasing a 2.0 version a few weeks ago, but hopefully it will be out soon.

New Version of DasBlog

Chris May — Tue, 26 Jun 2007 22:36:24 GMT

Scott Hanselman has released the final .net 1.1 version of DasBlog, to be quickly followed by the first .net 2.0 version (thank god)!

I will have to upgrade things here when that happens.

Submit your link to 60 social networking sites.

Chris May — Sun, 25 Feb 2007 19:17:25 GMT

Here is the article that talks about how to do it.

They suggest you use these 3 submissions pages:

http://www.onlywire.com/

http://www.scratchlist.com/

http://www.mohamadlatiff.com/social-power/bookmarks.php

CoComment

Chris May — Thu, 18 Jan 2007 20:29:42 GMT

CoComment allows you to track your comments, and those that come after you, in the various blogs around the internet.

http://www.techcrunch.com/tag/CoComment/

I might see if I can implement this for fun.

dasBlog Macros and Custom Macros

Chris May — Wed, 17 Jan 2007 16:40:04 GMT

Here is a list of all the Macros built into das Blog.

Vasanth Dharmaraj has an article here showing how to create your own macros, as well as his out creation dasBlog Extra Macros.

Marketing A Blog

Chris May — Fri, 12 Jan 2007 16:49:11 GMT

Here is a good article on ways to get your blog noticed by more people.

Some of the more interesting sites mentioned include:

http://www.dmoz.org/

http://megite.com/blog/?page_id=30

MyBlogLog

http://blogcarnival.com/

Changes to "Insert Code" in dasBlog

Chris May — Sun, 26 Nov 2006 22:29:30 GMT

I am proposing some updates to dasBlog. I made some changes that fix some problems with the Insert Code feature, as well as adding a few features ("Left Justify of the code") and the addition of JScript support (I had nothing to do with the XML file changes... those are from the original author.

Here are my changes.

Solution to dasBlog "Remember My Login" Not Working

Chris May — Fri, 29 Sep 2006 22:00:30 GMT

A while ago, maybe 3 months, my blog stopped remembering my login. When I login I can click to have it remember my login, and thus when I return to the site I don't have to login every time.

Well I finally arrived at the problem.

In IIS settings for the website, under the ASP.NET tab, if you click the "Edit Configuration" button, and then the authentication tab, you have the option to set the expiration length for the cookie, which was set to 1 hour.

I changed it to a larger value, restarted the IIS processes, and it appears to be working great now!

Generating Web Traffic

Chris May — Thu, 21 Sep 2006 16:10:33 GMT

Here is a pretty good list of articles that discuss ways to generate web traffic for your site:

http://www.copyblogger.com/increase-web-traffic/

Fixing Left Column Problem With dasBlog Essence Theme

Chris May — Sat, 22 Apr 2006 21:28:59 GMT

I got a response back from Jelle Druyts regarding the problem where the left column falls off the page if you narrow the window enough.

He was kind enough to respond with his CSS changes:

/*----- Content Styles -----*/

#content {
        margin-top: 10px;
        position: relative;
        top: 0px;
}

#bodyContainer {
        margin-left: 220px;
}

/* Exceptions for Print */
@media print {
        #bodyContainer {
                width: 100%;
                margin-left: 0px;
        }
}

(...A little later...)

pre {
        overflow-x: scroll;
}

(...A little later...)

#metaContainer {
        border: 1px dashed #d0d0d0;
        background-color: #f0f0f0;
        color: #505050;
        font-size: smaller;
        width: 210px;
        position: absolute;
        top: 0px;
}

Once you apply these to the dasBlog.css file in the Essence theme package, the left column will remain in place! Excellent!

dasBlog Category Rename

Chris May — Sat, 15 Apr 2006 05:13:13 GMT

Here is a link to a tool that will go through a collection of blog entries and rename them. Just what I was looking for.

http://www.vasanth.in/Software.aspx?=renamer

Essence Theme

Chris May — Wed, 12 Apr 2006 14:44:59 GMT

The current theme on this site was created by Jelle Druyts. I just emailed him looking for an idea to solve the problem of the left column dropping to the bottom of the page if you narrow the window.

I was kinda suprised to see his site when I clicked on the link for the theme creator because I have been to his blog a few times before, obviously for some .net programming stuff.

I am going to take a look at his categories b/c I long ago gave up on using categories in BlogX b/c you could only search in 1 category. So if I knew I had saved some URL in my blog I would have to search in every category in order to find it.

Now that I am using dasBlog, I should be reorganizing my categories.

Testing Trackback / Image / File / Google filters.

Chris May — Sun, 09 Apr 2006 21:23:54 GMT

With this post I am testing out some features of dasBlog.

I am linking to a Trackback faq page by Shai Coggins seen below thanks to the upload image feature (not bad eh?).

It looks like dasBlog just throws these uploaded images into a single folder, which I guess means I could overwrite a file if 2 were uploaded with the same name. Lemme try...

Yep, it overwrote it. I guess I will have to be careful about that possible occurance.

On to the file upload option:

Sequencediagram_1.png (1.84 KB)

Interesting, thats pretty cool.

The last thing to test is the content filter ability.

This seems a bit much, you type in a bunch of code and it will output some standard string. For example, this should produce a google search: $g(chrismay) and this should produce an IMDB search: $imdb(The Matrix).

Here goes...

Update
Well it seems that everything worked pretty well except maybe the trackback isn't working. The URL for the trackback appears to not be saved when I save this article, but maybe that is by design. I will have to look into it. I posted a comment on the article I was trying to trackback... maybe that output is cached and it will show up later (?), doupt it. Here is the article I am dealing with.

Indents Fixed!

Chris May — Sun, 09 Apr 2006 05:51:00 GMT

Well a little tweaking of the code that does the generation of the formatted code, and it now produces what I want:

        Public Shared Function AddTOQueryString(ByVal URL As String, ByVal Key As String, ByVal Value As String) As String
            Dim RegExp As New System.Text.RegularExpressions.Regex(Key & "=.*?(&|$)")
            Dim Match As System.Text.RegularExpressions.Match = RegExp.Match(URL)
            If Match.Success Then
                Return RegExp.Replace(URL, Key & "=" & Value & Match.Groups(1).ToString)
            ElseIf URL.IndexOf("?") > 0 Then
                Return URL & "&" & Key & "=" & Value
            Else
                Return URL & "?" & Key & "=" & Value
            End If
        End Function

        /// <summary>Gets or sets the RSS version to write.</summary>
        /// <exception cref="InvalidOperationException">Can't change version number after data has been written.</exception>
        public RssVersion Version
        {
            get { return rssVersion; }
            set
            {
                if(wroteStartDocument)
                    throw new InvalidOperationException("Can't change version number after data has been written.");
                else
                    rssVersion = value;
            }
        }

I am not sure that I like what it does with literal strings. I will probably want to change that.

I am also now convinced that it will not due for formatting Javascript. J# just doesn't share enough similar attributes. This tool also doesn't support XML (or HTML), which would be a nice thing too.

This converter looks pretty sweet. You can include your regions and it will let you keep them collapsed and then expand via javascript, excellent.

I could also just wire up the implementation I already have to deal with HTML and Javascript.

We will see... for now this will do.

HttpFilters, HttpModules, and HttpWastedABunchOfTime

Chris May — Sun, 09 Apr 2006 00:54:09 GMT

I was just about to make a post talking about the switch over to dasBlog. I was going to talk about what I liked and didn't like and whatever, but mostly I was going to talk about the work I have been putting in on writing code that will filter out code and format it nicely.

I wrote and tested an HttpModule which loads a Reponse Filter that parses the Html looking for <code> tags and formats the code inside those nicely.

So I go to write my first post, and I am looking for a hyperlink button in the texteditor, but instead I see this icon that look like a C# file. "No, I did not just waste all that time" I thought.

public bool IsTimeWasted(String name){
return true;
}

Public Function IsWasted(ByVal time As TimeSpent) As Boolean
If time IsNot Nothing Then
Return True
Else
Return False
End If
End Function

var s;
s = 'asdf';
document.getElementById("asdf"); /* comment */

SELECT * FROM
ThingsToDo
WHERE
WastedTime <> 1
AND
Task = 'Writing HttpFilter'

0 rows returned

So you can see I basically wasted my time doing all that.

This tool doesn't provide an HTML code type, and I used J# in place of Javascript, but it works ok I guess.

The on thing it is really lacking is that it doesn't maintain indents!?!? I manually restored the indents above, otherwise my vb code would look like this:

Public Function IsWasted(ByVal time As TimeSpent) As Boolean
If time IsNot Nothing Then
Return True
Else
Return False
End If
End Function

Which is weird, b/c it looks fine in the preview window... I will have to look into that.

dasBlog conversion complete

Chris May — Sat, 08 Apr 2006 23:15:43 GMT

Well I have switched over to dasBlog.

Awww crap. I need to start a new post...

dasBlog and httpfilters

Chris May — Thu, 06 Apr 2006 13:41:25 GMT

Apparently there is a cool blogging app called dasBlog, which means "That Blog" in German :), that provides a lot of better features when compared with my old blogX, and even better it provides a direct upgrade from blogX, so I don't have to write my own scripts to do the conversion to what I was going to use (newblog on DNN).

The downside is that I had already written the necessary code to parse and replace ... well... "code"... in my blog posts into pretty formatted HTML.

It worked like this... I would type something like [code type=vb]Dim s as New System.Text.StringBuilder [/code] and it comes out looking like:

Dim s as New System.Text.StringBuilder

So that is pretty cool... but I think I can get the same result, and maybe make it even cleaner, by using an httpfilter.

HttpFilters are registered at application startup and are sent the html just before it gets passed to the browser, so you can use the filters as like a last change modification mechanism. Hopefully I can write some regexps to parse out what I want and replace it with the new stuff.

In The Beginning

Chris May — Sun, 25 May 2003 06:02:00 GMT

Chris started a weblog... Oh wait, let me try a different one.

And so it begins...

No? Oh well. Stay tuned.