Category Archives: Internet

Loose Ends

So, before I head off to Sydney two nights from now, I figured I’d post about a few loose ends I haven’t posted much detail about.

I’m working part time at 3months.com now, and tomorrow is my last day at the DRC. I love working at 3months: the attitude of the workplace is relaxed but focused; everyone is enjoying their work. I start full time this Monday (3rd Oct). They’ve already got me working on a fun but rushed PHP project. I was working three days a week at DRC, and Wednesday and Thursday at 3months.

I’m so glad I’m not working two part time daytime jobs any more — three Mondays a week is lethal to your mind. I personally believe in sticking your focus to one a project a week at work, using the natural downtime on the fringes of the weekend: use Friday to ‘swap to disk’ for the weekend, and Monday to load the week’s project back into memory. The brain isn’t too good at swapping.

3months also issued me a laptop as my main work computer. This is awesome because I’ll be able to blog from the conference, and maybe even tap into the subconciousness of the lecture attendees, AKA the conference IRC room. Oh, and maybe do some work… 🙂

My mum is off to Brisbane to live with her new squeeze. She’s flying out of Palmerston North on the 15th, so I’ll be up there to see her off. She is saving up for my brother Stuart and I to visit her for Christmas. Sydney will my first overseas experience, so I’m looking forward to following it up quickly with a visit to Brisbane.

Speaking of holidays, I’m off to see the Guru, the wonderful Guru of Bob, erm, GuruBob down in Mosgiel (near Dunedin) for New Years: Bob has offered for me to crash at his place for a few days. I’ve never been more south than Christchurch, so seeing some of Otago with a born-and-bred Dunedinite’s point of view sounds like fun 🙂 Maybe even see Bob fly his new RC Plane…

So yeah, my next post will probably be in Sydney! I’m taking my camera, and will be trying to find buildings from The Matrix on Saturday… w00ta! (is that Australian for “w00t”…? 😉 )

Blogging Family Hardware Life New Zealand Web Design Web Essentials 05 Work 5 comments

I got a Golden Ticket!

No, not one of those banal “go see how chocolate is made” tickets, rather one that grants me access to the new beta WordPress.com! WordPress.com is to WordPress what TypePad.com is to MovableType — a hosted blogging service. But wordpress.com is invite-only, and I guess, free.

So I got my invite, signed up and ended up with glutnix.wordpress.com — yay! The app is totally based on WordPress, but it looks slightly different, and has some improvements, like a not-so-rich-text editor (over editing HTML), collapsible sections in the edit page, including an AJAX categories selector which lets you add new categories to your blog without leaving the page, even suggesting existing categories that other bloggers on wordpress.com are using, forming a type of folksonomy.

No plugins though.

Will I use it? Nah. But it’s good to see what progress is being made on the newest version of WordPress 🙂

And incidently, I have a golden ticket to give away to someone who wants it real bad. First person to ask me for it will receive it…

Blogging Internet Web Design 4 comments

Comment Spammers from Australia

Dear comment-spamming morons at foundagency.com.au, and their customers who probably didn’t know better at allrealestate.co.nz

Hi. I don’t appreciate it what you’re doing with the blogs that I manage, subverting its intended purposes so that you can make money, by creating comments on my stories for the sole purpose of having a link to a site you are “SEO-ing”.

My blogs are:

  • http://www.webfroot.co.nz

You might notice that both of these blogs use the rel="nofollow" attribute on links entered using the comments form. Google openly IGNORES any links with this attribute applied to it by not giving any of that page-rank goodness to the target site that you’re trying to achieve. More information here at the Official Google Blog and Google’s site itself.

While I appreciate your SEO company has hungry employee mouths to feed, I’d appreciate it that you’d take your scum-of-the-earth “optimisation techniques” and retire them.

What I am demanding you do:

  1. Continue to use Ethical SEO techniques, but stop using the unethical techniques, like the link spamming you’re doing right now. See Wikipedia’s entry on Search engine optimisation for more info on ethical and unethical SEO techniques.
  2. Stop mis-using other people’s blogs to pimp your wares.
  3. If you MUST spam peoples blogs, at the very least, don’t waste your time with blogs that use rel="nofollow".
  4. Remove my blogs from your un-ethical blog-abusing SEO machine.
  5. Stop selling lies to companies that you can improve their ranking on Google.

I’ve posted this communication on my blog for all to see at this URL. And you’ll note that the links to your websites have rel="nofollow" applied to them.

Screw you guys,

Brett Taylor

UPDATE: Zak from The Found Agency just contacted me on my cellphone from Sydney, and after a short friendly chat I have provided him with the comment records from my databases. He was really friendly and deadly serious about looking into it within their organisation, which is a real credit to FoundAgency. I really appreciated the call, Zak 🙂

As the email address on the comments entered was the main reason for tying the comment to The Found Agency, it’s true that they could have been framed. I checked their site, and saw they did SEO stuff, and one of their clients was a real-estate website. It could have been entered into the form by anyone — but it got past my spam filter, so it’s unlikely that it was automated.

He also saw that I was coming over to Sydney next week for WE05, and invited me to The Found Agency offices to see what they do and how they are not blog spammers, which I intend to do. If it turns out that I was wrong, I guess I’ll be buying Zak a beer 😉

HAPPY ENDING: Turns out Zak is buying the beer 😉 It turns out that a new employee got over-eager to impress at his new job, and that employee has now been put to the task of collating a list of the sites he posted to, and I’ve been told that The Found Agency will be apologising personally to the owners of those sites.

Good has been done here. A problem solved. I’m going to be dropping by The Found Agency while I’m in Sydney, and I’ll report back. I hope that I’ll be able to come away from this meeting and recommend The Found Agency in the future! They certainly took this seriously and are taking excellent steps to rectify this occurance, which is highly commendable.

Blogging Internet Rant 2 comments

American English Dialects

Your Linguistic Profile:
40% General American English
35% Yankee
20% Dixie
5% Upper Midwestern
0% Midwestern
What Kind of American English Do You Speak?

I couldn’t resist taking this test when I saw it; I like to consider myself somewhat au fait with the Queen’s English and its incongruencies. But I’m probably kidding myself… 🙂

Blogging Funny Internet Comments are closed

John C. Dvorak vs Creative Commons

I think John C. Dvorak, a prominent column writer for US PC Magazine missed the point of Creative Commons in his latest column. Did he even WATCH the flash animation? Has he read Free Culture? Screw him. He’s spreading FUD.

He would have learnt that Creative Commons is a way to grant everyone permission to use your works in certain ways without giving up your copyright, encouraging a world where you don’t have to hire a pack of rabid lawyers just to clear permissions. “Permission is already granted”.

Creative Commons is about encouraging creativity. Because creativity always builds on the past. But the past is wrapped up in red tape. So we have CC licences that allow those who would build upon your work to cut through that red tape.

It’s not hard to understand. Less Lawyers = Good Thing.

Sure, adding a CC licence to your blog might be ‘trendy’, and I can safely assume very few, people, if any, are going to take my blog posts and build something new and exciting from them. But what’s wrong with saying “I don’t mind if you do”, even if the chances of that happening are slim-to-none?

John C. Dvorak, I thought you were cool, working with Chris Pirillo on that book of yours and all. I do realise this is an opinion piece, but come on, it feels a bit premature. You really should do your damned research.

Blogging Creative Commons Internet Rant Reading Comments are closed