Tech
Tuesday, April 29, 2008
Adsense Coming to Twitter?
I was sending one of my random twits to a non-Twitter friend and I noticed how wonderfully white the page was. I was curious how much code went into creating that nice blank page so I took a look at the source.
I was a little surprised to see Google Adsense in there. It’s not showing on the page, but it’s there, right inside <div id="ad">
Twitter has ads in Japan. People were wondering what Twitter’s business model might be State-side, and this could be the start.
Before-I-could-push-submit-update: I sent my discovery to Tom, who also had no idea. He used this thing called Google and found this post from a
year ago. So it looks like the code’s been around, but many of us simply aren’t seeing the ads (yet).
Saturday, February 23, 2008
Double Hard Drive Failure
A couple of weeks ago the web server this site is on, along with a couple of other sites I have, like MMA on Tap, experienced a double hard drive failure. Not fun at all.
I didn’t have a recent external backup of the sites on it, as I was backing up locally, and obviously that was shot. The last backup I had was on the old server, which just so happened to be cracked the week before, so I wiped it out. Putting off making that new backup for a week was all the time that was needed before I was reminded why you never put something like that off. The hard drives failed and the server was down.
We tried to recover all files, but after days of swaps and attempts, everything just had to be recreated.
Luckily, data was not effected, so after setting up the site basics, the only thing that was needed was to fill in a few images here and there, and then continue on.
There are still some broken images on some of the sites. Some I’ll come across and upload, others are shot for good. Most have redesigns coming, so I’m focusing more on that anyway.
So, the lesson of the day, which has been the lesson of the day for many people, for many days: always make sure you have a recent backup of your work.
Tuesday, August 28, 2007
Twit Whiz
It’s never too early for a cheesesteak reference.
I use Twitter randomly.
A couple of months ago I was listening to the radio online (XM Lucy I think) and Beck came on. I tried twitting “get crazy with the cheez whiz” over IM. No dice. For whatever reason, Twitter did not not want to get crazy with the Cheez Whiz.
So I tried it over the web. Nothing. So I had Tom try it. Nothing.
I actually emailed support too. It was to rank up there as one of the dumber support tickets, but we were just curious as to why it didn’t go through.
Now, two months later, support gave me a response, although it still doesn’t work.
Is it the cheez? The whiz? Only the combo? Or can we just not get crazy with it?
Thursday, August 23, 2007
Sportsline Becomes CBS Sports
CBS Sportsline is now officially CBS Sports. The website had a mini-facelift to go along with the rebranding. It’s slightly more readable than before if nothing else.
CBS decided to rebrand in order to cross-brand between websites and television easier, at least that’s the explanation given on paidContent.org.
Normally it’s a smart move, and it may be here, but Sportsline is an established internet brand. It’s also been CBS Sportsline for a while. Recently, a friend of mine didn’t realize you could use “www.” and not “cbs.”. That says something about the strength of the name and the association between CBS and Sportsline.
However, CBS Sports makes it more of a big media company. Sportsline existed solely on the internet, despite being CBS Sportsline. CBS Sports is on tv. CBS Sports is the NFL, March Madness and the PGA, among other things.
What CBS Sports isn’t is its own channel. In that regard, it’s like NBC Sports on tv, but online CBS is clearly a top player, where NBC is not.
The appearance of having some form of independence was no doubt a plus. It’ll be interesting to see if the rename has any effect on the website’s reputation. paidContent.org cites SportsBusiness Daily (paid subscription required) mentioning that the company is concerned about the rebranding possibly harming fantasy sports operations.
Fox Sports is currently one of the sports website leaders, thanks in part to its contract with MSN, and also a network of local television channels. Fox also has its college stations, Fox Sports Español, Fox Soccer and the Speed Channel.
ABC Sports ceased to exist a few years ago. Instead, the network chose to brand its sports programming “ESPN on ABC”, capitalizing on the popularity of its cable channel’s brand.
The only non-television network sports website that rivals the top players in traffic is Yahoo! Sports. Yahoo! has cleaned up the site over the past year, as well as adding more original content. Yahoo!, like Sportsline, has leveraged its fantasy sports section to drive traffic to its content.
Wednesday, August 08, 2007
Connection Insurance
A few weeks ago I went a couple of nights without my cable modem (or tv) due to no-reason-given by Time Warner. While it’s not the end of the world by any means, it’s difficult to have unplanned access disruptions when you work on the web.
During the downtime I learned that all available wireless networks were secure. Over twenty of them, all locked down. Pretty impressive considering a few years ago it was easy to hop from one unsecure network to another if your connection was down (although most in the building have the same provider, so it was usually pointless anyway).
Going to an internet cafe or a local Starbucks is always an option, but I don’t find that the easiest way to get work done.
So I’m wondering, why don’t companies offer connection insurance?
More and more people depend on their internet connection for work, entertainment and their home phone connections.
Time Warner is currently the fastest connection I can have from my home right now. If Verizon DSL wants to make any money off of me, they can charge a low fee, something like $30 yearly to have their connection available. If I need to use their connection, which gets triggered by a certain amount of data within a certain amount of time, then I get charged a low per-day fee, something like $5.
This isn’t limited to cable and DSL (or FIOS, if you’re lucky). Broadband wireless could also be a “connection insurer”. They all just need to be prepared for possible network spikes if a competitor has big problems.
Between outages and upgrades, connection insurers could make a decent amount of money on volume.
Tuesday, June 12, 2007
First Impressions of Safari for Windows
Apple introduced Safari 3 beta for Windows today. Formerly Mac-only, the Safari browser is now available for XP and Vista machines.
After an initial reaction of “why?”, as it doesn’t seem likely Safari will gain market share on IE or Firefox, it is nice for Windows-only developers who want to build Safari-compatible applications. Apple is currently promoting Safari as a type of developing environment for the upcoming iPhone (Wired’s take).
If the Windows version does render webpages exactly like it’s Mac counterpart, it’s at least useful for Windows-based developers if nothing else.
After a quick install, I now have a Safari icon on my desktop right below the Opera “O”.
So, nothing too in-depth yet, but a couple of quick first impressions.
Font smoothing has looked horrible on three machines I’ve installed it on (two XP, one 2003 - and yes, Safari is not listed for 2003). Two had cleartype on to begin with, so I’m not sure why font smoothing needs to be on over that, but I’ve looked at it on other machines as well and it’s just fuzzy everywhere. CRT, LCD, cleartype or nothing. I’ve set it to “light” to keep pages as readable as possible. I’m surprised there’s no option to just turn it off. If font smoothing looks good for anyone, I’d like to know what your setup is.
Memmmmmmory. Safari inflates fast. No browser has good memory management for me. Firefox, my preference, leaks like crazy, but I do have a number of add-ons installed. Safari also wants all my memory to perform any actions. It spikes hard on actions. To test, just open up your task manager, a webpage in Safari and then mouseover some links (even just text links with hover actions). IE doesn’t exactly excel here, but if you have a lot running in the background, Safari seems to cause the biggest pause out of the three.
The status bar is so dark it’s barely readable. I can’t recall what it looks like on a Mac, but I do remember that it’s not on by default.
I wouldn’t mind the addition of a few more common shortcuts used by other browsers.
If you’ve got a solid connection, rendering speed can be noticably faster with Safari on heavy pages.
I’ve crashed it a few times on 2003. It wasn’t made for that, but I should point out I’ve had no problems with my other browsers. Still, a beta product on an OS it’s not supposed to be on, so I’ll have to overlook that.
However, I’ve also crashed it a couple of times on XP with normal browsing.
A few frivolous quirks aside, Safari is still a beta product. It can wind up being a nice browsing experience, especially for multi-OS users who aren’t addicted to Firefox already, but I’m not too sure how many of those there are and outside of developers, there’s not much of a pull to download it yet.
Thursday, March 15, 2007
Sports Sites Media Preferences
I took a visit to the NCAA site to watch some of today’s action live online.
To stream today’s games, they’re using Windows Media.
I was a bit confused as I remembered Sportsline using Real Media. I visited, and there it was.
However, I do remember there being another option, perhaps flash. So I checked Sportsline out on a computer without Real installed and there was nothing but a blank space.
Then I checked in Internet Explorer (I was using Firefox in both of my previous visits). There was the same video, this time in Windows Media format. Interesting.
Sportsline’s video help page has links to both players.
Perhaps a deal was cut with both Real and Microsoft, or perhaps they were using one format and have a limited deal with another.
ESPN uses Flash.
Fox Sports’ current partnership with Microsoft points me to something interesting. On the front of foxsports.com, they use Flash to deliver video. If you click “video home” below it you’ll see Fox Sports video player is “powered by MSN Video”. In Firefox MSN Video uses Flash and is labeled “beta” (oooh, must be 2.0), but is skinned to look like a common Windows Media Player skin. In IE there’s a Flash intro, but the player itself loses the “beta” label and uses Windows Media.
Thursday, February 08, 2007
ESPN Gets a Mini-Facelift
ESPN.com has restyled the top portion of the home page. I figured I’d give my initial (disclaimer: late-night) thoughts.
There’s a new double menu, with some 2.0-y offerings on top, and the standard leagues/sports menu on the bottom.
The area up top: logo, ad, search box, tv schedule have also been redone.
The gradient behind the top looks more subtle (even if it’s not, this is just my impression of it), and both menus are text on flat colors.
The old-style menus, which you can still see on the inner-pages, had the leagues/sports on a gradient and the submenus on a flat color with a bevel/border highlight on rollover.
The new yellow background for the submenus is a drastic change, but easy to read and the rollover has a nicer look than before.
The top is nice and neat. I have to admit I laughed a bit when I’m shown these are the “hottest searches”: Bracketology | Sports Guy | NFL Draft | TMQ | NBA rankings | NHL rankings
An interesting thing to note is the change in order for the leagues/sports.
Old: NFL, MLB, NBA, NASCAR, Autos, NHL, College, Golf, Soccer, Tennis
New: NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL, ESPNU, College FB, Men’s BB, Women’s BB, NASCAR, Autos, Golf, Soccer, Tennis, Boxing, Olympics
Fantasy has made a shift from far-right to far-left, in between ESPN (home) and NFL.
Consideration: the new menu stretches across the home page, designed for a 1024x768 resolution. The old menu, that I’m comparing from the inner pages, is designed for 800x600 resolution. The inner pages do have more conent to the right of it, but the menu is cut off there, so there is room for more menu choices on this new homepage design.
Some sports sites do change menu order depending on season, but the positioning is curious as the NHL is given better position than before and NASCAR, maing its return to ESPN, is pushed towards the right. Most menus are generally left to right in order of importance (at least for English pages). Sometimes important items are broken up, to give the items in between a better chance of being seen, but it doesn’t seem like that’s what ESPN is trying to do here or the NFL and MLB would be the goalposts of this menu.
ESPNU is the only ESPN brand that gets a prime menu position (most are under the home submenu). February is probably the best time for them to push the brand with fans anticipating March Madness. Yesterday was “Signing Day” for college football, something I didn’t know before. The lines between pro and college continue to blur.
Back to the new double menu, with the 2.0-y offerings. It starts off with MyESPN, something I’ve heard little of since the first release. Is anyone using this out there? The only plus for me right now would be to not have ESPN Motion autoplay.
Insider, the ESPN.com offerings behind a paywall is the second option.
ESPN 360 wants to launch a video player. It does. Out of curiousity, I hit “Video” and I get the same player, and it starts the same content. I realize ESPN wants people to bug their ISPs to sign deals for 360 content (as that’s how you get access to it), but I’m not sure if it’s really worth two menu options that lead to the same place.
Page 2 and SportsNation have become ESPN.com standards, and then after that is Blogs. But, they’re all “Insider Blogs”. You need to subscribe to Insider to read any of them. I’m guessing that’s making ESPN some nice coin, because they’re certainly not popular to link to on any of the blogs I read, large or small. I know revenue, not traffic, is the name of the game for ESPN, but I still wonder what the numbers would be if ESPN’s top reporters would have open blogs.
Podcenter is just what you’d think it would be.
After that is Video Games, a partnership between ESPN and 1UP. There’s a good amount of reviews, but not a lot of fresh content. It seems like it’s there as more of a promotional area, which is a good lead-in for the last few options: Travel, Contests, Shop.
The last link is actually to ESPN Deportes, which I haven’t visited in quite a while. It has a look very similar to the one ESPN.com had before this slight makeover.
The change does strike me as a “clean up”, and I think it works well. I hope ESPN takes this approach soon with all their pages.
Thursday, February 01, 2007
Getting a Read on Active Users
Active Users of a feed is a very hard number to try and estimate.
A lot of sites will flaunt RSS numbers, but from casual observation, it seems people rarely unsubscribe from feeds.
Sometimes webmasters and bloggers get a clue when a feed is moved and you can see old subscription numbers vs new subscriptions.
Yesterday I read about PVRWire shutting down on Jason Calacanis’ blog. Tonight I read the farewell from AdJab.
These, and any other blogs shutting down over at Weblogs, Inc. have an opportunity to test out their active RSS base. They can keep the feed urls going and watch the subscription numbers, and how quickly they decrease. Sure, everyone doesn’t unsubscribe right away, but over the course of a few months you should be able to get a good read on things.
I know a lot of people don’t want to know these numbers as they feel it can hurt promotion, but for accuracy’s sake, I think it’d be a good experiment.
Just a thought.
Anyway, so long to AdJab, I was a loyal reader. Chris, Adam, Bob, Ryan, and Tom, did a great job over there.
Tuesday, November 21, 2006
Random Youtube Thought
Youtube, now owned by Google, only has “add to Yahoo” links on their RSS page. Was there a previous deal in place with Yahoo to have these links shown, or has Youtube just been slow to pimp their new overlords and change it to “add to Google”?