For the past couple of weeks, I had noticed that most of the Google ads appearing on the home page of my site were for credit card offers, credit repair services, credit-no-matter-how-much-your-credit-sucks offers, and so on … and I was puzzled about why ads of that type kept appearing. Since the ads are supposed to be contextual, it didn’t seem like any of my posts supported them — especially when I would look at other pages and the ads did seem to reflect my post content very accurately.

I was doing some general cleanup on the site on Friday evening, and ran the site through an RSS feed validator to see how it fared. That’s when I saw errors referencing hundreds of links that I didn’t recognize. It didn’t take me long to track the links to my WordPress header.php file, where I found this:

Click the picture to see it full-sized. It’s obvious to me now that Google was generating ads for my site based on this content. There were, in all, about 600 such links at the very end of header.php. I didn’t put them there, and I don’t know anything about the two sites you can see repeated throughout these links (nor did I try to find out). I removed the 600 lines of code from the header.php file, but on Saturday discovered that several hundred others had been added, referencing two different sites but similar content. In both cases, the blocks of code were surround by <font> tags that caused the text to be hidden.

If you want to see if this has happened to you, bring up your site and select View/Page Source if you’re using Firefox, or View/Source if you’re using Internet Explorer. In my case, the spam links always appeared at the end of the source listing, but you might want to page through the entire listing since I suppose they could appear anywhere.

After the second occurrence, I changed my WordPress admin password as well as my hosting login password. So far it hasn’t occurred again, but I can see that this is yet something I’ll have to keep an eye on. If I figure out how it actually happens, I’ll certainly share it here.

Leanne Wildermuth of Artist By Nature has written about the same thing, and it was from Leanne that I learned that the source of the problem was header.php:

Got Spam in YOUR Templates?

For now, I’ve also removed most of the ads from my site, except those for Amazon.com. I may not put them back….

Over the past week or so, I’ve been experimenting with the daily blog posting function provided by del.icio.us. It seems to work pretty well, automatically creating a new post on this blog containing the links I’ve tagged that day. If you have a del.icio.us account and want to try using it, go to your Settings page, then select "daily blog posting" to create a new posting job. You’ll be faced with providing the following parameters for the job:

job_name: This can be any name you want.

out_name: The name you use to log in to your blog.

out_pass: The password you use to log in to your blog.

out_url: Described as "full URL of the XML-RPC interface for your blog" which, for this Wordpress blog, is http://www.afewgoodpens.com/blog/xmlrpc.php. I’m not sure what is is for the other supported blog software, but it’s likely that someone else has tried if for yours — so check the platform’s forums or other help pages. I found the correct URL for Wordpress, for example, on the Wordpress Codex. If you try to execute the URL, and get a message along the lines of "XML-RPC server accepts POST requests only" — you’ve probably got the right one to use.

out_time: This is the time of day that you want posts to appear, in Greenwich Mean Time. For help with Greenwich Mean Time, go here. So far, it seems typical that the blog posts appear within 20-30 minutes of the specified hour (and, no, refreshing the page repeatedly won’t make them appear any faster).

out_blog_id: I’m not sure what this one’s actually for, but I entered "1" and it worked. I’m assuming that if you have more than one blog that you access with the same profile and password, this number might vary.

out_cat_id: The category you want the blog posting assigned to. Note that this is a category number, not the category itself. In Wordpress, that translates to the id number associated with the category, which you can find by selecting Manage / Categories. In my case, the id number is 27, which is associated with the posting category "Internet Clippings."

That’s it! Easy!

Here’s a sample of one of my daily blog postings.

You’ll see that the entry was correctly categorized as Internet Clippings, and that the tags I assigned to the bookmark appear as del.icio.us tags at the end of each one. Clicking the tags takes you to all the bookmarks for the same tag associated with your del.icio.us profile. I might have preferred it to take you to everyone’s posts with that tag, since there are other ways to incorporate links to del.icio.us tags on a blog. Maybe an option to do that would be nice.

Any notes that you typed when you tagged the link also appear. There’s an unfortunate limitation of 255 characters for the notes, so what I try to do is clip a key sentence or two from the article that I think gets to its essential point. I’d like to include a comment or two of my own with each one, but I can barely take a breath that uses less than 255 characters, so I’ll have to wait until the next version of del.icio.us — which I think increases this limit to 1000 characters per bookmark — to do that. With 1000 characters, bookmarking and daily blog posting would become an excellent shortcut way to read and comment on articles and web pages, and simultaneously set them up to automatically post to your blog.

This is a very busy time of year for me, so tools like this that actually do save time but help me keep things like this blog moving are extremely useful. Too many time-saving technologies take on a life of their own, sucking up energy while giving only the appearance of activity and progress while you sit back and wonder why you don’t seem to be getting anything done. An effective technological tool is one that results in actual time compression, collapsing the time required to perform a series of tasks while achieving the same, or acceptably similar, results.

I’ve made a few site updates and learned some things in the process, so it seemed like a bit of sharing was in order.

First, you’ll now see "Print this" at the top of each article. The print capability is made possible by the WP-Print WordPress plugin developed by Lester Chan. It does a really nice job of formatting posts for printing, and has three configuration options that let you choose whether or not to include comments, images, and a list of all links referenced in the article. I looked at several other options before choosing this one, and I’m very satisfied with it. I use it personally when I’m writing a new article based on some previous content, since I find it easier to work from a printed version — especially in the case of some of my longer articles. If you’re a WordPress blogger and you want to provide your readers with print options, check out Chan’s plugin page  where there are several versions you can download.

Second, I’ve changed content in the far right side for my Flickr photos, so that you can now choose to view the photographs as slideshows like you could before, or can also view the related Flickr page as a complete collection. It occurred to me that some folks might not care for the slideshows, so this was a good way to link to the photo pages by collection rather than always defaulting to slideshows.

Finally, as my friend Audee notes in her comment on my article about Zoo Atlanta, I’m now sending my site through FeedBurner and have incorporated various "feed flares" at the bottom of each article. You can also now subscribe to my feed by e-mail, and subscribe to posts and comments. I’m still experimenting with some of the flares as well as the advertising, so different elements may come and go as I check out some of the sites I’m now encouraging people to submit my articles to.

I did discover, unfortunately, that there is a known issue using FeedBurner with Yahoo! web hosting. Attempts to use my old feed URL, which was:

http://www.afewgoodpens.com/blog/feed

should automatically redirect to the new FeedBurner URL:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/afewgoodpens

but it doesn’t, and displays a "document has moved" error which points to the old feed URL (going nowhere, therefore). As you can see from the description of the problem on the FeedBurner forum, there is no solution available yet. I found that this meant two things for my site.

First, if anyone was subscribing to my feed with the original URL, it would no longer work. If you’re one of my subscribers, and that happened to you … my apologies. Had I realized this was happening, I would have posted something announcing the change first.

Second, my account on services like MyBlogLog and Blogcatalog needed to be updated. MyBlogLog uses the feed URL to fetch new posts to display on its site, so I had to update my account to point to the FeedBurner URL. Easy.

Blogcatalog, however, uses RSS autodiscovery to locate a site’s feed, and that was a bit of a problem since autodiscovery tried to use the old feed URL — which should have redirected to FeedBurner but did not. I don’t really understand how all this works, but I’ve concluded that the WordPress code normally handles the redirect, yet something about Yahoo’s hosting prevents that from working normally. I ended out adapting the RSS autodiscovery tips  and modifying WordPress’s header.php file with the FeedBurner URL hardcoded. Hardcoding like this is never the best solution, but it will hold me up until a permanent fix becomes available.  In any case, it appears to have worked; my account page on Blogcatalog was reporting an error finding my feed, but has since updated to show a successful discovery and also shows the FeedBurner URL as the feed URL.

Got a headache yet? I do … this stuff never seems to just fall into place quite right, does it?

I’m a little disappointed that this is another quirk I’ve run into that’s specific to Yahoo! web hosting and their WordPress implementation. While I have to be fair and say that I’ve never had a problem with my site or its availability at Yahoo!, site performance and availability is but a minimum requirement for a web host these days. In my opinion, Yahoo! oversold their hosting service to newbie WordPress bloggers like myself by making it so easily available, by implying that they would update the WordPress installation but never doing it, and by nearly running from the room screaming if you call their  support line and even use "WordPress" in a sentence. They could have a kick-ass blog hosting service, if they’d just make an effort to actually support WordPress users — something that might even make then unique in the industry. Are you listening, Yahoo!? Call me, let’s talk about it….

Oh, well, enough about that … the weekend’s here and Atlanta weather is supposed to be sunny with temperatures in the 60s … what could be better than that?

I was planning to pick a few of my internet clippings off del.icio.us this evening and spin out an article or two about them, but then came across this piece by Jason Kaneshiro at Webomatica:

What I Do When Not Blogging or Working

Toward the end of the article, Jason writes:

I nearly burned myself out late last year with too much work, which was thankfully balanced out with a holiday vacation to another state where I spent a fair amount of time doing absolutely nothing.

The possibility that we’re collectively losing our ability to do nothing — to detach ourselves from all forms of work and recharge by reveling in the moment, whatever type of moment recharges us — is one of the topics Heather Menzies discusses in her book No Time: Stress and the Crisis of Modern Life. I started this book a couple of weeks ago, and I’m about half way through it, having decided to read it slowly and take notes on the ideas Menzies presents. Over the past year or so, I’ve been fascinated by the fact that the technology we’re becoming so immersed in begs us to ask some questions about how it’s affecting each of us and our lives — yet we barely ask those questions, or, perhaps, we don’t yet know how to ask them. We’re so linked in, always on, wired up and plugged up that even when we do try to detach, as Menzies notes, we’re seldom successful; or worse, we are successful but riddled with guilt over that success. That we might detach enough to reflect on technology’s effects is very nearly inconceivable.

Menzies was spurred to the idea of writing this book as she looked at her own life, and saw how for her — like many of her contemporaries — the connections among people that technology seemed to promise were actually creating disconnections instead. It is, I think, one of those crucial questions about technology that social scientists and historians together would do well to explore, particularly as our distance from the experience of every day reality seems to increase with the growing use of technology: to what extent are we withdrawing from human interaction as technology becomes embedded in our lives, and what is the significance of that withdrawal? My understanding is that Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community also takes on this subject, perhaps with even more to say about the relationship between technology and human interaction. Bowling Alone is the next book on my reading list.

Reading Menzies prompted me to search the web for the phrase "fragmentation of every day life" where I found that in the book Social Perspectives On Mobility, one of the authors writes about the effects of technology on family activities:

Instead of slowing down and gaining more time from new, faster technologies, the family crams more activities into everyday life. Having time on your hands becomes an important signal [about] which kind of everyday life the individual has. The traffic jam for the car driver becomes a time thief that does not comply with the signal of freedom the car driver wishes to send….

I remember that when I read  "having time on your hands" how it sounded like a completely foreign concept: it jolted me to realize that I had to stop for a second and think about what it even meant. I was equally jolted by Menzies’ discussion of dreamless sleep, how researchers are finding that more and more people are sleeping not just less but differently than they used to, reporting that they never remember enough of their dreams to know if they’re even having any, their brains never "idling" enough to enter the state where dreams take place. I’ll come back to that later; it’s one of the most interesting parts of Menzies’ book so far — personally interesting, I think, because I can’t remember the last time I had a dream or recall having a dream, and I’ve even wondered now and then why that’s been happening. Dreams, it seems, are something of an organizing activity for the mind, something that helps commit our waking or mental experiences to different segments of our memory for use later; and while I always thought that dreams served a purpose like that, until reading what Menzies has to say about them, it never occurred to me that it was significant that I could no longer remember any.

To be continued…..

From Brad Feld’s blog Feld Thoughts comes word that Newsgator is now making all of their feedreader software products available free of charge.  Feld explains Newsgator’s reasoning in this article, and provides several links to related articles by Newsgator employees as well as links you can use to download the products or get more information.

I’ve used both Newsgator Online (which has been free all along) as well as FeedDemon (which used to cost 30 bucks annually) for over a year now, having switched to the Newsgator products from Bloglines. I’ve never regretted the switch at all, and both the online and installed versions of their readers are fast, full of useful functions and navigation capabilities, and just fun to use.  And they synchronize with each other, so you can keep up with your reading from any computer anywhere, and either tool will always know how you handled your feeds with the other.

I also use Newsgator Online to build and maintain the My Blogroll and My News pages for this site. You can read more about how to do that in these two articles:

Creating a Semi-Automatic Newsgator Blogroll on Your WordPress Blog

Spreading the News

Check out Feld’s article, poke at the links a little, and give Newsgator a try. You can even subscribe to afewgoodpens just to see how things work!

Update: I just wanted to add a link to this post by Nick Bradbury, the creator of FeedDemon, highlighting some of the differences between using a desktop and a web-based feedreader. As Bradbury points out, one of the great strengths of FeedDemon is the way it functions as a full-featured browser, allowing you to switch from reading feeds to visiting web sites instantly within the same session and windows. I originally used the online version more than the desktop version, but have recently switched, preferring the speed and flexibility of the desktop version when I’m on my computer at home, and typically using the online version only when I’m on a computer where I can’t install the software locally.

From the Project for Excellence in Journalism comes a study describing differences between the kinds of news stories featured on the web sites of traditional media outlets, and those featured on user-driven sites like Reddit, del.icio.us, Digg, and Yahoo! News.  The authors of the study describe it as providing some initial answers to the question: “What would a world in which citizens set the news agenda rather than editors look like?”

The study is certainly worth examining in detail; one of the things I noticed immediately was this:

The three top categories for news stories presented by the media outlets the study examined were: foreign news stories, disasters and accidents, and U.S. foreign affairs. The three top categories among the first three user-driven sites listed above were technology and science, lifestyle, and government.

I might have liked to see technology and science separated for the purposes of the study, though I can understand the difficulties in making that separation. I would expect, however, that the technology-orientation of user-selected stories was stronger than that of science. Regardless, it’s not at all surprising to me that stories tagged on sites like Reddit, del.icio.us, and Digg are heavily weighted toward technology: I think the simple fact that the technology is still new to so many people is reflected in a sometimes restless and nearly frantic gathering around stories that help us all understand it and use it better.  I know I’m abstracting from personal experience here, possibly a little too much, but when I look at at my own stories on del.icio.us, I see a pattern that very closely mirrors the results of the study. Why? Well, because like so many people I’m trying to understand how to use the technologies, trying to find the best ways to use them, and I’m still asking myself questions like “What the hell is StumbleUpon for anyway?”

As is the case with all emerging technologies, though, this discovery phase is only temporary (good luck defining “temporary”); and if the authors conduct the study again in a few years, I would be very surprised if the categories of user-tagged stories don’t start to shift. While it may still not necessarily reflect the selections being made by traditional media, I’ll bet you’ll see a convergence between the two. The study lays some excellent groundwork for the future research; and that may even be more valuable even than it’s current conclusion:

For now, the percentage of Americans who rely exclusively on news from user-driven sites is just a fraction of what it is for mainstream news sites. And in this increasingly fragmented era, many who visit Digg, Del.icio.us, and Reddit may also be reading the online versions of The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. But whether or not we see further divergence between user-driven sites and mainstream media over the next few years will surely remain a key question for researchers, journalists and of course, citizens.