iScrybe.com Demos Papersync
A clever feature of online organizer … a mapping of the next 8 days of your calendar onto a piece of paper that, folded 8 ways, fits right into your pocket.
Archive for February, 2007
Virtual Ubiquity Screenshots
An impressive looking Word Processing application for the web. It uses Flash so not sure how responsive it will be compared to HTML/AJAX alternatives, although in the past Flash has been far more reliable in comparison to Java.
Computer Scientists Create Beautifier Software
A group of researchers have created a tool that takes in a headshot and tweaks it to look “more attractive”. [via kottke.org]
Links: 28th Feb 2007
- BBC’s Chris Long has a rant on the viability of Government backed projects
My concern about all this is the ignorance of the technical thinking behind these ideas; … it was John Reid [UK Home Secretary] who caught my attention when he said he was thinking of forcing paedophiles to put their online identity details on the Sex Offenders Register.
I knew what the words meant, and they almost sounded sensible. But the reality is that it is so easy to create an online identity … But Mr Reid wasn’t talking to me, he was talking to people that will nod sagely and say “bloody good idea”, because these people also don’t have a clue about getting online identities.
- Google reveals Gadget numbers
Google has released the daily rendering numbers of Google gadgets. To see the numbers for an individual gadget go to the Gadgets For Your Webpage directory.
- Are Google Apps’ Customers For Real?
There’s been a big hullabaloo about Google Apps Premier, … but let’s back up and see who’s really using it. All you have to do is look at Google’s customer list to realize that Google Apps Premier is hardly eating Microsoft’s (MSFT) lunch.
OpenID
An interesting post by Simon Willison on the possible applications of OpenID. Its well worth a read. If you don’t know what OpenID is try this primer. From the post:
OpenID lets you create accounts for people without e-mailing them a password, or even talking to them before you sign them up. There are lots of useful things you can do with this ability:
Let your trusted friends delete spam comments from your blog, or fix your typos.
Google Maps Shows Real-Time Traffic Data
Google Operating System blog reports how Google now shows traffic data for certain US cities. This would be especially useful if they could use it to generate better estimates for journeys as well as providing routes for times of day.
I’m still waiting for Google to follow Ask.com’s example and provide routes and journey times for walking distances.
Choosing Who To Show Ads To
Since the blog is run on PHP, it is easy to selectively show ads. Depending on the “http referrer” and the “user agent” I choose what ads to show. For example the following code allows me to only show the Firefox Referral to those whose browser reports them as not having a Gecko based browser.
<?php
$strGecko = strpos($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'], “Gecko”);
if ($strGecko == ”){ ?>
…….. put HTML code here …………
<?php } ?>
I’m not sure what user agents different browsers report so this is just experimental at this stage. I know that some users used to change their user agent to Internet Explorer so that websites that didn’t recognise Firefox would treat them the same, but I think that practice has now ceased due to the increased awareness of Firefox.
Another variable on which to base what ads to show is the HTTP REFERER (spelt with 3 R’s for some reason). Currently if the referrer contains Google, Yahoo, etc in the link then for a single blog post I show Google Ads. Of course it is important to make sure that the referrer does actually come from Google or Yahoo sites and not just any URL containing google in it.
To check who sent the user to you, use the following code:
<?php $referrer = $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'] ?>
Then you can manipulate the $referrer String how and when you want. Often a good strategy is to give regular readers an ad free page but show ads to other readers who perhaps come from other sites, more often than not looking for something in particular. The following criteria could be used:
- Only show ads on older articles i.e. if article is older than 10 days then show ads
- Show ads to anyone coming from a seach engine (Google,Yahoo, Technorati, etc)
- Show ads to any referral i.e. anyone who links to a single blogpost
- Show product referrals based on browser/OS/screen size/location etc
In general it is a good idea to try not to annoy regular readers but use ads as a way of helping users find what they are looking for.
Gmail Forwarding
One of the features that I like about Yahoo is the fact that when choosing to forward mail, you can choose to include even the emails that go to the Junk folder. This is especially useful since it means that I can forward all incoming email to my Gmail account without ever having to check for false positives.
When forwarding in Gmail you cannot do this directly through the settings interface. However, there is a workaround. To allow Gmail to forward ALL incoming email you need to set up a filter that includes ALL email regardless of the folder it is in.
Set up a filter with the “Has the words” field containing the following text:
In:all
This should include all email regardless whether or not it has gone to the Spam folder or not. The next set of filter options should contain an option to forward any email that meets this filter, to another email address. Put in the account you wish to forward your email to and you’re done.
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