Monthly Archives: October 2006

On PayPerPost

Uncategorized

So I signed up for PayPerPost is Toni’s foray into the seedy side of paid blogging. Includes some interesting comments, including an ultra-defensive thread from one of their investors. I also came across a ton of creepy videos on Youtube, a lovefest for PayPerPost and apparently those are $10 a pop. There is a firm that does something similar in real life, Buzz agents or something, but they’re actually fairly respectable simply because they require one thing: the agents to say that they’re being paid. End of story. I have no problem with bloggers making money, but that info out there and let people make up their own mind.

Another way to think about it: If PayPerPost was PayPerComment instead, and they paid people to leave comments shilling various products or services, what would you call it? What if they paid people to email their friends about something without disclosure? Would someone start an anti-PayPerPost Akismet, or a Firefox extension to detect and highlight people using them?

SlimDevices Goes To Logitech

Asides, Music,

Om says SlimDevices has been sold to Logitech. I currently have 3 of their Squeezboxes around my house and love them, I syncronize the audio so no matter what room I’m in the music is the same. Logitech is another one of my favorite companies, or at least one of the ones I give all my money to. I’m a mouse and keyboard junkie, trying new ones whenever there’s a good upgrade. I’ve been bouncing between Microsoft and Logitech, but the new Revolution series mouse with the frictionless scroll has got me hooked, laptop and desktop version. Two companies I like getting together. 🙂

Spammers Hack Blogs

Spam

Blog spammers have sunk to new lows.

Nivi Spam SourceNivi, a blog I’m subscribed to, was showing dozens and dozens of entries being updated even though there was no discernible difference. However as I started looking closer, I noticed if you view the source, for example on this post, there is are ton of spam links there. You can click the screenshot to the left.

The implications of this are disturbing. His blog was hacked (which isn’t unusual and could have been for a thousand reasons like another account on his server being hacked, and old version of phpBB or other software) but instead of doing anything obvious to disturb the content of the site they invisibly modified his posts using CSS-hidden text. He has probably had hundreds of posts modified. I can’t imagine cleaning it up will be pleasant.

The Most Frustrating Thing

Design, Google, Zeldman,

It’s Friday, so I’m going to take a few minutes to describe the most annoying concept I see espoused by 95%+ of blogs I read, people I talk to, and friends I have. The problem is until you let go, you’ll never be able to build something truly useful to a non-trivial audience.

Technology doesn’t matter. Design doesn’t matter.

There, I said it.

Continue reading The Most Frustrating Thing →

Youtube Coverage

Asides

You’re probably reaching Youtube saturation this week, but some of the best coverage I’ve seen of the whole thing has been on the Utube Blog which seems to be picking up every major news story and trimming the fluff, which usually leaves a good sentence or two. I’ve subscribed there and I’m just skipping most blog posts I see about it. 🙂

Windows Tip

Uncategorized,

Something was listening on Port 80 and preventing my local webserver from working on my Windows XP laptop. Here’s how I tracked it down: Hit Windows Key + R, which brings up the Run dialog, then type “cmd” and press enter. You’ll be on a command line.

Type netstat -a -o -n and it’ll bring up a network list, I looked for one with 0.0.0.0:80 as the local address and noted down the PID of 2600. To find out what PID 2600 was (hopefully not a trojan) I typed tasklist /FI "PID eq 2600" which means show me a tasklist, and filter (/FI) where the PID (process ID) is equal to 2600. This told me that it was Skype.exe that was running something on port 80 locally.

Finally I killed it using taskkill /PID 2600 and Skype was gone and I was able to start up my web server locally and do a little bit of offline coding. Windows actually has a pretty handy command line once you learn your way around it, it’s just the syntax is so inelegant to me after spending all day on Linux terminals. A final tip, you can type /? after most Windows commands to get the equivilent of a man page for that command.

Now for why Skype was listening or port 80 on localhost and serving blank pages… Ihave no idea.