Google Ads

Tags: ads, google

Being slightly bored and having extra money to spare, I decided to try my hand at Google AdWords. My budget is very measly, so there aint a load of impressions, but I was quite surprised at how “fun” it actually all is.

It feels more like a game. The ads are for lolstupids.com (which I’ve been neglecting, but that’s beside the point). As you know, you choose keywords for search terms. When that term is searched, depending on your budget and relevance, your ad is shown. It is very very interesting to see what keywords provide the most impressions and what keywords actually result in clicks to my site.

At the moment, the keyword “quotes” have the most impressions, while the keyword “stupid” has the most clicks and while the keyword “stupid quotes” have the best click to impression ratio. It seems obvious.

The idea behind the ads was to actually drive traffic to lolstupids.com, not only for traffic’s sake, but to see if that traffic actually results in AdSense revenue (so far it hasn’t).

All this ads stuff makes me want to make a cheap sites and test all sorts of keyword combos and stuff.

Fun Fun!

lolstupids gets it first spam!

Tags: lolstupids, spammer

Yay! Well, this term has been very hectic, and as I said, I have kinda neglected my blogging duties.

But I return with good tidings (for me at least). lolstupids.com has received its first ever spam quotes! While I haven’t really hunted for stupid quotes or really promoted lolstupids, I was delighted to see that spammers’ bots or something found my site.

Anyway. That’s all for now.

Privacy in the 21st Century

Tags: facebook, google, privacy

Being an avid wannabe web mogul, I follow loads of web related news. During the past few years, privacy has increasingly been an issue. From Facebook’s Beacon to Google, it is all very interesting.

I just don’t understand people who complain about privacy issues. What these people don’t get is that companies like Facebook and Google provide a service, not a privilege. We aren’t naturally entitled to these services. They provide it and we must approve. When you use any service you are subject to its negative and positive aspects. One can naturally complain as a user that Bob’s Car Washery scratched your brand new car. Bob can listen to it and approve it, or just not give a damn. You as a consumer still have the decision to use the service or not. Don’t like Google keeping your searches for better quality search results? Then don’t use Google. They aren’t providing something entirely essential.

It sort of forms part of my new point. This is the 21st century. The world is more and more starting to cater for you as an individual. Ads are targeted to you, specialised products are created for you and much more. Isn’t this what we want? I sure do. I really love Gmail’s targeted ads that are taken from data in my emails. I have visited many a great website thanks to that!

In this era, in order for better service, one must be willing to relinquish some privacy. “Privacy” is being used relatively here. To me, a breach of “privacy” is when someone discovers something about me, I didn’t want that particular person to know, be it random photos, or just discovering what bands I like. In Gmail’s targeted ads system, that is not even the case. No one will be able to discover something about you through Google.

So yes, I just don’t understand why people rant about privacy issues like this. Get over it.

Google voted on lolstupids!

Tags: google, lolstupids, robots

Well, it ain’t precisely Google. It is search engines and their robots. Robots are used to trawl the web - following all the links - in order to index THE INTERNET (say that in a deep voice).

It dawned on me quote inexplicably that these robots might have been following the “vote” links! This means that the current “ratings” for the (lowly) 3 quotes on lolstupids.com have most likely been followed and thus had their ratings pushed up.

Well not to worry, I managed to fix it by adding a rel=”nofollow” tag to each of the “vote” links. This way the robots don’t follow it.

I promised that I would add stupid quotes as I ventured through the web, but the university have been keeping me busy! But don’t worry, it will happen… eventually.

Supersize McInternet!

Tags: google

Google posted a blog that the internet has trumped the 1 trillion mark of unique URLS. That is 1,000,000,000,000! One can say, “whoa! that is huge!”, but I don’t think anyone can comprehend just how incredibly massive it is.

Now of course, one website might have several URL’s, it is still ginormous!

It is also racing along at a tremendous rate (read the blog).

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What bothers me is that Google still manages to keep up with the cataloguing! It makes me wonder if somewhere down the line they won’t able to install new storage space fast enough! BOOM! Blackhole!

I can foresee secret “underground” sites cropping up that stay out of Google’s reach. Cue Mad Max, but on the internet.

Integrating with Facebook.

Tags: lolstupids, university

Today, I decided to try and integrate lolstupids.com with Facebook. It was fun! Before I started I trawled through countless apps, to see how successful they are. Needless to say, loads of really stupid things (in my eyes) are ludicrously popular. I would love to see if I can do something similar sometime in the future.

Anyway, I integrated lolstupids.com with facebook. You can’t add the app (yet). I still have to wrap up the profile side of things. I want to have a random quote of the day. At the moment it only displays the last quote on the top 10.

Normal CSS don’t also seem to work with Facebook apps. If the app looks a tad better and the profile part of the app is done, I’ll submit to the public directory! It will be interesting how many users I get from it. The app will have the same functionality as the site. You can add quotes and such. The added bonus as I said, it will display a random quote of the day on your profile page.

It is very basic stuff. I haven’t really delved into the social aspects of Facebook apps (don’t know how it works).

Anyway, the site isn’t really taking off (not that I expected it to), but I am sure, once I add more quotes, it will pick up. I am trawling the web in search of quotes as I speak.

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In other news, I am going back to university tomorrow! Whoo! It will be great to see all the people again. This will no doubt put me in a no-blog mode (see jan 2008- may 2008).

That’s all from me for now. Cheers!

No linebreaks needed.

Tags: lolstupids

I quickly did some work on lolstupids.com. Some changes:

-Added ads (If the site pays for itself, I’ll be happy!)

-When adding a quote, you don’t need to add manual <br> tags anymore. In PHP there is a nifty function called nl2br($string) that automatically inserts <br> tags into a string when it reaches a linebreak.

-Changed the front page. Instead of having news there, I decided to let it link to this blog with “lolstupids” tags. It is now a tad neater.

Yeah, that’s it.

On my some time to-do list is: editing functions for admin, emailing users when quotes are accepted and much better looking website.

lolstupids.com

Tags: lolstupids

Heya!

My site that I’ve been working on this holiday is kinda done-ish. I would like to refer to it as alpha. It is functional, but the layout is kinda sucky.

http://www.lolstupids.com

This is my new site! Through my history of browsing the net, I’ve gathered up stupid things people said. I wanted to make a blog about it, but instead decided to try my hand at making a proper database driven site. This site is primarily a pet web project: a hobby.

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With lolstupids.com you can browse many (not yet ) quotes from across the internet about stupid things people have said (YouTube is a goldmine) on the internet. You can add a quote too if you are so inclined. It is currently under a moderation system. Since it is only a hobby of mine, don’t go too crazy when your quote is not accepted immediately!

So yeah. enjoy it. Tell me what you think. I will slowly but surely add new things and a better layout over time.

I am 47.49% mainstream.

Tags: last.fm

I found this neat little app here. It determines how mainstream your music taste is! If you have a Last.fm account then just plug in your username to determine it. On the site it also shows how it is determined.

My music taste is: 47.49% mainstream.

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In other news, my new website project that I was working on is now online (its in alpha stage). I am just going through some patches here and there and fixing up security. I will then release it/tell you about it.

I just wasted my day.

Tags: CSS, IE sucks

A “day” being a relative term here. I slept to 12pm.

The whole day I was trying to iron out IE discrepancy issues regarding to stlying (ala CSS). I found out lots of new things! 1) Microsoft made a broken browser that ships with Windows XP. 2) I now know precisely what DOCTYPES are. 3) I found out stuff about the box model. 4) I found some CSS hacks to make IE6 versions of my site much better! 5) When something doesn’t work there is a really good reason for it!

1)

It sucks that IE6 shipped with XP. This means there are loads of people out there who won’t bother to update their browser and when faced my (IE broken) site, just run away like an intrepid WoW adventurer when faced a bunch of murlocs.

2)

I never quite knew what DOCTYPES were and what they were used for. IT seems that DOCTYPES are especially useful for instances like this where I can alter how the browser interprets CSS code. Thus now all my doctypes are set to strict mode so that IE6 properly interprets the box model.

3)

Box model. The box model is the way <div> blocks are shown in browsers (ie width, padding and margins). Firefox does it right according to W3C (the guys at the head of the world controlling the world wide web’s standards. okay not THAT dramatic), but IE does not.

4)

I found a wonderful CSS hack (thanks to someone. can’t remember the site) for IE6 browsers! IE6 can’t interpret the following tag “body>div #container”. In Firefox and future IE browsers, it simply overrides the previous version of #container.

5)

The greatest problem today that I faced wasn’t really any of the above. I kept fiddling everywhere in the CSS and HTML. It just didn’t want to work, until I accidentally stumbled upon the answer 3 hours later. I overwrote most of the CSS tags I was using in an old CSS file that I forgot to delete! I was furiously changing elements, but it just didn’t want to change (simple things like width). I thought it was just my amateur knowledge that was causing it to break. Blegh. So I wasted my day, by just being stupid. >_<