Guerrilla News Network

Stumbled upon this site tonight - Guerrilla News Network - looks good. I couldn't find an 'about us' type link, but I could have missed it - I'm falling asleep at the keyboard. However I noticed that Greg Palast seems to be involved. Having read his book "The Best Democracy Money Can Buy" I felt his involvement was enough of an endorsement for me!

Anyway, I'll definitely be returning to read more on this site, but for now let me just guide you to Eminem's new video produced by GNN. Great song, good video. Interesting mix of media, very slick.

Click to buy on Amazon I highly recommend this book - there is some really great material in it. However because it is for the most part a collection of previously published material the overall style of the book may seem a little disjointed. Provides an awful lot of food for thought regarding world politics.

The 24-Hour Comics

The 24-Hour Comics

Create a 24 page comic book in 24hours.... invented by Scott McCloud. View 24hour comics made or read the rules and make your own!

IT people could be better utilised!

Another interesting article from "How to save the world"... I work away on projects and usually get really immersed in them and think I'm doing something really useful, and then I realise what Dave Pollard points out in the following extract:

How to Save the World: "Although IT people can create wonderful software, quickly, effectively, to accomplish almost any information processing need, it's all really just a hobby. It rarely makes the world a better place. Most of the world isn't online at all, and most of the people online are still struggling with simple things like e-mail. And I don't think that's going to change in another generation: As I've said before, unless a technology is dead easy to use, it will never catch on, will never become mainstream, will never be more than a passing fad. All the social software tools, blogs, and cleverly coded programs that have been and are being developed are just a recreational drug for us, a tiny minority of the population bored with the inanity of our 9-5 jobs. It's largely a hobby destined to be no more significant in historical terms than ham radio, CBing, or scrapbooking. The best that can be hoped is that all this software will ultimately be built into very simple, ubiquitous tools that will allow people to network better, find people and communicate with them more easily, and learn faster and more easily."

The article's main point, directed at people in IT, is as follows:
"Your bright, disciplined analytical minds are desperately needed to develop practical new technologies that can solve the global problems of our world. But instead the majority of you are marginalized in IT, one of the few branches of science and technology that really can't help solve these problems. And paradoxically this is happening at precisely the time when there is more knowledge about science and technology, more power of individual and collaborative enterprise to introduce new technologies at a modest cost than ever before. "

Worth a read.

Michael Moore.com : Hunter S.Thompson

Some writing by Hunter S on the elections, I had kind of lost track recently of what Thompson is up to... glad to see he's out and about spewing his unique brand of venom about Bush and endorsing Kerry.... worth a read.

Michael Moore.com : Mike's Message : Mike's Latest News: "BULLETIN
KERRY WINS GONZO ENDORSMENT; DR. THOMPSON JOINS DEMOCRAT IN CALLING BUSH 'THE SYPHILLIS PRESIDENT'
'Four more years of George Bush will be like four more years of syphilis,' the famed author said yesterday at a hastily called press conference near his home in Woody Creek, Colorado. 'Only a fool or a sucker would vote for a dangerous loser like Bush,' Dr. Thompson warned. 'He hates everything we stand for, and he knows we will vote against him in November.'

Thompson, long known for the eerie accuracy of his political instincts, went on to denounce Ralph Nader as 'a worthless Judas Goat with no moral compass.'

'I endorsed John Kerry a long time ago,' he said, 'and I will do everything in my power, short of roaming the streets with a meat hammer, to help him be the next President of the United States.'"

How BifSniff Cartoons are made

I put up a brief run-through of how I do the visuals for BifSniff cartoons.

Come with me through the magic door....

Wired News: Inventor Rejoices as TVs Go Dark

Wired News: Inventor Rejoices as TVs Go Dark: "Altman's key-chain fob was a TV-B-Gone, a new universal remote that turns off almost any television. The device, which looks like an automobile remote, has just one button. When activated, it spends over a minute flashing out 209 different codes to turn off televisions, the most popular brands first."

Article is worth a read. I wonder if he'll make any money out of it though. Conceptually it's great. Practically how many people truly want one?

Strategies of niceness.

In the Sunday Times style section last Sunday there was an article on Innocent - the company that make those fruit juices and smoothies. At the end of the article was the following anecdote:

"We met some people from Unilever the other day," says Reed. "They were interested in how we do business. We said, 'Be natural, be nice.' They went, all earnestly, 'That sounds great. Now how do you implement that strategy of being nice?' We were like, 'Oh dude, oh man.'"

Funnily enough I had been thinking about this recently because of an email conversation I had with Google Adsense.


This particular instance pertains to Google AdSense, but it is just one of many similar conversations I have had of late with tech support for a wide range of businesses.

It started like this:

Adsense URL filter... help!

I want to get rid of an ad from BifSniff.com, the url when checked as outlined in FAQ is:


http://store.yahoo.com/url-edited-was-a-very-long-one-though.html

This is too long a url to put into the filter. I don't wish to filter
yahoo.com, but my other attempts to block this ad have failed... can you advise?

Many thanks,
Frank

So I got this response:

Hello Frank,

Thank you for your email. I understand you'd like to exclude an ad from being displayed on your site, www.bifsniff.com , and that you've made several attempts to do so.
Unfortunately, the only method of ensuring the exclusion of the ad you mention is to add one of the following to your filter list:

store.yahoo.com

or

yahoo.com

We apologize for any inconveniences this may cause. As AdSense is still a new program, new features are under consideration, and your feedback is very helpful. We welcome any suggestions you may have on improving Google AdSense for you.

Please feel free to reply to this email should this problem persist or if you have additional questions regarding this program.

Sincerely,

name removed
The Google Team

Fair enough, so given the invitation to send on further questions and the assurance that "new features are under consideration, and your feedback is very helpful" I responded as below:

Thanks Name Removed,
I am sure you can see the issue with this particular url, I don't really wish to exclude other people who have stores on yahoo. I don't understand the issue exactly however as under the url filter in AdSense includes the
instructions :
example: www.competitors-site.com or www.competitors-site.com/folder
Which is why I don't understand why store.yahoo.com/url-edited won't work.
If people are to be allowed use urls like yahoo.com or cafepress.com it would seem quite important to me to have a way of filtering these ads, other than by the root domain.
If you could let me know if/when this issue is likely to be taken into consideration I'd really appreciate it.
Thanks for all your help,
Best,
Frank

I got this response:

Hello Frank,

Thank you for your email.

We appreciate your taking the time to offer us this feedback on our filtering mechanism and encourage you to continue to let us know how we can improve Google AdSense. As AdSense is still a young program, new features are under consideration and your feedback is very helpful.

We apologize again for any inconvenience the suggested solution may cause.

Sincerely,

name removed
The Google Team

Which I can only translate as this:

Hello Frank,

Thanks you for your email.

While I may have seemed to care about your observations and value you as a customer, actually let's be honest I am just following the corporate guidelines sellotaped to my monitor and including key phrases in my emails to you so I don't get fired. If I was to explain to you that it is unlikely that anyone actually involved with the product will read your mail, that wouldn't really keep you happy would it? While you may suspect all of this from my nice but meaningless mails you'll never prove it and will be reduced to ranting on your blog about corporate strategies of niceness as opposed to genuinely caring corporations. Ha ha ha.

Sincerely,

name removed.
The Google Team.

Now I'm not saying that just because I observe an issue with certain urls that the MD should call me and thank me for my feedback, but instead of a stock answer it would be nice to hear "that feature is being considered" or "I am forwarding your mail to the suggestions box" or even "I am deleting your mail now because I have no contact with the rest of the company". Basically, anything that rang true would do.

End rant.

"Terrorism" by The Presnyakov Brothers

I went to see this play the other night and felt compelled to write a few lines on it. The few lines ran on a bit though so instead of publishing it here I gave it a page of its own:

Click here for full text on "Terrorism" by The Presnyakov Brothers

I wrote it because there isn't much about the play around as it is quite new - I felt it was a comment on the individual's responsibility for the global political climate, whereas a lot of what I read led me to believe that others feel it should be taken at face value as a comment on the terror we visit upon each other. While my view and this one are linked, I feel the production I saw limited the message by focussing only on local issues, and not global ones.

If you are interested, please read it and then comment here.

Click to buy on Amazon

Really good, if scary, book on American foreign policy. If/when you read my full text on the play mentioned above you'll get the relevance of having this book here!

Amazon.co.uk Associates - geo-sensitive?

As mentioned, I signed up with Amazon.co.uk Associates Programme. I was impressed with their interface, very easy to use and easy to implement links to products. But then I realised that all the links were hard coded to Amazon.co.uk. Now the beauty of the internet, as you probably know, is the fact that it gives ordinary Joes like me a global platform.

Amazon have stores in countries all over the world, so I wondered if maybe there was something in the links that made them geo-sensitive. But I didn't think so.

So I contacted Amazon support with the following email:

Hi,
Frank Prendergast here from 9mmfilm.com, I have recently implemented Amazon associate links on my site. I was wondering about the uk/us issue - the web being a global marketplace as it were, us visitors to my site are more likely to buy from Amazon.com while Irish/UK visitors are more likely to buy from Amazon.co.uk. Currently the links I create seem to link only to .co.uk.

So my questions are:

1. If someone in the us wanted to buy the product but not from Amazon.co.uk what could they do and would I earn commission?

2. Is there any way within the Amazon Associates program to dynamically send people to a direct link based on location?

3. If not is this a feature you might consider implementing? I believe it would increase sales through the Associates program.

Many thanks,
Frank

And I got a reply. The useful part of the reply went as follows:

At this time, the Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.de, Amazon.fr, Amazon.co.jp and Amazon.com Associate programmes are completely separate. Each needs to be applied to and joined separately, and you will have a different ID for each.

In addition, links formatted for one programme will not be able to earn you commission at the other site.

We believe, however, that it makes a lot of sense to participate in multiple programmes. You can thus have multiple 'buy' buttons next to each book, one labeled for your American visitors and the other for your British and European visitors.

The mail went on to describe how to add a direct link to product as per normal as I guess they misunderstood question no.2 and question no.3 was just ignored. I don't know about you, but geo-sensitivity would work for me. Seems like an awful lot of work to have to create two links every time to cater for European and US visitors. Surely this is something Amazon must be thinking about?

If you stumble accross this post and think a geo-sensitive Amazon Associates Programme is a good/bad idea, please comment - or, better again if you think it's a good idea email the Associates Program and tell them!

Elvis Costello

Over the last god-knows-how-many-years, lots of people have told me I would like Elvis Costello. But I couldn't get into him. Don't know why. I just didn't get it - the whole Elvis Costello thing. Every time I put him on I could just take it or leave it. In fact, he kind of annoyed me. And now I have been sitting here for several hours fecking about on the computer listening to- you guessed it - Elvis Costello. A best of compilation.

And I suddenly realised I loved it. It was on by mistake, which is really the only time I ever listened to him up till now - see he comes after the Clash on my mp3's on my hard drive, so nearly every time I listen to the Clash it runs on to Elvis Costello, and a lot of the time I'm too busy to even notice. Working away with Elvis Costello playing away in the background, and somewhere along the way he grew on me subconsciously so that tonight suddenly I find myself thinking he's really good. At six minutes forty two seconds long, I can't believe it but 'I want you' is my favourite track.

I know, I know, you told me so and all that, well you were right.

Click here to buy on AmazonThis is the cd I'm listening to right now.

Creating favicons

Tom R reminded me I would have to change my favicon (the little icon that appears next to the url) to reflect the new design... not sure I have it the way I want it yet, but it's an improvement on the old one. The improvement was made possible by PixelToolbox a free tool for creating icons. Lovely lovely lovely.
If you don't know what a favicon is or how to create on see this article.

Web standards and search engine optimisation.

I recently revamped BifSniff Cartoons. In doing do I made every effort to have the site validate to XHTML 1.0 strict using the W3C validator and I also made sure my CSS validated using their CSS validator.

Then I did some more, very basic, search engine optimisation stuff. Most of which is just part of building a valid site anyway, like adding meta tags. I used a handy tool courtesy of Michele Neylon, which I updated to include closing tags so that the code (as you can see here).

When I was finished I said to Bif that it should increase our visibility in search engines, but that due to the amount of cartoons out there it would be a struggle to get real results. Now, we probably need to think about our strategy a bit because for example we are billing ourselves as "irreverent single panel cartoons" and since the revamp we usually get in the top 5 Google results for that term. But as I said to Bif, how many people will search for that!

I had said to Bif that while I would love to get ranked for "single panel cartoons" it was highly unlikely due to the sheer volume of sites that would be vying for ranking on that term.

But then today on a random search I noticed we are in the top 100 Google rankings for "single panel cartoons". Now, we are at somewhere between 85 and 99 but even so, I think it's an achievement, considering.

By simply building a standards compliant site and trying to use best practices where-ever possible we have indeed made ourselves more visible on search engines. Not to mention all the other benefits to standard compliant sites.

Crass commercialism with Amazon.

You may have noticed links to Amazon.com books and music etc appearing in posts where the items are vaguely relevant (sometimes). Yes you guessed it; I have given in to the pressure of the capitalist market forces that weigh down upon us all like a dark spectre just waiting to empty our wallets and our hearts.

I get a small commission if you buy the item. It's set up through Amazon Associates for those of you interested in doing the same.

I will try to keep the links to items I genuinely recommend for one reason or another, though sometimes simple relevance might suffice. For example it made sense to have a link to Sarah McLachlan's album on the post about her video even though I am not a fan of her music. I will also try to always include text which explains why the link has been made if it's not obvious - for example on the post about relative font sizes I linked to a Jeffrey Zeldman book - explaining I haven't read it but would like to.

Why am I going to such lengths to justify some simple links? Well, it would be nice to make a few bucks out of this site where possible, but I am sick of being bombarded with ads myself so I am trying to be careful about my use of them. And I would like to think that I put thought into any item in my designs. Plus I already have Google ads, which are context based, but the Amazon links I can control and actually link to truly relevant items, relevant to the sense of the piece as opposed to the words - but that's only valuable if I set some ground rules for myself in using them.

So if you see a link to an item on Amazon that you think is stretching the boundaries of relevancy or good taste - rap me on the knuckles. ;)

In the meantime, if you are disgusted at my capitalist tendencies check out this link:

Click to buy on Amazon. I am halfway through reading this book. I knew nothing about Che Guevara before this book and wanted to educate myself - it's a heavy enough read but I think it's really interesting. I will definitely post more about this book when I finish it.

Font-size css issues

Well, I revamped my site and was delighted with myself. Until Tom R called me to let me know he had broken my site. By looking at it with a mac. I told him it looked fine on my monitor and he could look at it there if he wanted but he was adamant about being able to browse my site from the comfort of his own home so I had to take another look at my style sheets.

I had been using font-size keywords, and then I tried percentages and ems - none of which worked on their own.

I had a good ol' Google around the place and discovered that relative font sizing was indeed causing headaches all around.

Jeffrey Zeldman says in his faq

...pixels are still the only means of CSS text sizing that works reliably across good and bad browsers, and across all platforms.

The problem is that ie doesn't allow people to set the font size to their preference if you use pixel font-sizes. Zeldman gets around this by having a script which allows people to use alternate style sheets. However I'm not crazy about this solution. People who are browsing with ie and have text set to large or largest aren't going to want to have to figure out how to change the setting on your site specifically. They may not even be aware they can. If they are used to browsing with large text and stumble upon your site with tiny text they can't read are they going to stay long enough to figure out they can increase the font size? Maybe - if they really want your content. But for a site like mine they'll probably take it or leave it in the first couple of milliseconds.

So I looked around and tried various methods, most of which worked for me (pc, firefox & ie6) but none of which worked for Tom R's mac. The problem was with making smaller text - it became so small it was illegible on Tom's mac (often in both firefox and ie).

Anyway the method I finally found that worked was this one at thenoodleincident.com

This guy had also been tearing his hair out with this problem and so he did a fairly in-depth study with screenshots to prove it and came up with this method. On his articles recommendation I set the font-size in the body to 76% and then used ems throughout the rest of the css. The small font is 1em and my main text is currently 1.2em. We'll see how that works.

If you are viewing this site and there are problems with the text size please leave a comment with platform/browser details. Many thanks!

Click to buy on Amazon. While I didn't use Zeldman's techniques for this issue I have a lot of respect for him and so am including a link to one of his books on Amazon. I've heard good things, I haven't read it and Christmas is coming up... ;)

Sarah McLachlan Music Video

Was having a quick glance at How to Save the World and noticed a link to Sarah McGlachlan's latest music video. Why do I care you ask yourself, well because as How to Save the World puts it:

"Instead of spending a budgeted $150,000 for a video for her song World's on Fire, Canadian singer-songwriter and Lilith Fair founder Sarah McLachlan made the video on a shoestring and donated the budget to humanitarian projects that will make life better for thousands of people in 20 different countries around the world."

Pity about the song. ;)

Really though, music videos are fun and all, but if more people did this... I mean let's face it how many good music videos are there? Very few. Most of them are just mindless crap which musicians are forced to put out because it's what we expect. And lord help them if they didn't have as glossy a video as the next boy band coz then we wouldn't buy their album despite the fact the music is just as bad as the next boy band's music.

Where will it all end I ask you?

Wouldn't it be great if there was something like the 5k project for music videos? The 5k project is a competition to design a website in under 5k. 5K as in 5 kilobytes not as in 5 grand.
So maybe there could be some kind of organisation for applauding highly creative low-budget high-impact videos that donated the surplus budget to charity...?

Click to buy on Amazon. The album on which this Sarah McLachlan song features is available on Amazon.

US election draws near...

So to remind you of who the incumbent is, here are some of my favourite movies starring GW.

From 'The Daily Show' - a spoof campaign ad for Bush

Somebody remixed the State of the Nation speech to more accurately reflect the truth...

Who could forget the love affair between Blair and Bush? Here they commemorate it in a touching duet.

No outside help on this one, GW says White House never stops thinking about ways to harm U.S.

CSS Stuff - XHTML/CSS - 3 column layouts - Netscape 4 compatible

CSS Stuff - XHTML/CSS - 3 column layouts - Netscape 4 compatible

Some great css 3 column templates here...

Validating Blogger Blogs - unencoded ampersands in URLs

Recently I revamped the BifSniff site, and in doing so I realised that the site no longer validated on the W3C validator and so I set about correcting that.

For the most part it went pretty smoothly, I had added meta tags and forgotten to close the meta tags - things like that.

Finally I was down to one issue - unencoded ampersands in URLs.
Blogger has some dynamically generated links that don't encode the ampersands. I had already changed the icons for the 'email this post' icon, referring to the article aptly named How do I change the Email-This-Post icon?.
This article allows you to hard code the link for emailing posts rather than using the Blogger tag that dynamically creates it - so it was a cinch to manually change the ampersand to a properly encoded one.

Delighted with myself I validated the home page and came up trumps. Only to realise that individual post pages were still not validating. Why? Because the dynamic 'Post a comment' links contained unencoded ampersands.

I figured there must be a similar solution available so I searched and searched. I don't know why but I failed to find the also aptly named article 'How can I change the "Post a Comment" text?' - but it was supplied to me post haste when I finally resorted to contacting Blogger support.

So, away on a hack, I manually changed the ampersand and thought to myself - 'that must be it now..' and indeed I thought it was when some individual post pages validated beautifully. Until I tried to validate a page which actually had comments on it.

Once again I ran into trouble with dynamically generated links containing unencoded ampersands. This time on the delete comments links. I thought about using the same process to hard code them, but was worried about a span class with some ominous looking numbers along the lines of 'item-control admin-1234567890 pid-1234567890'.

Turns out these numbers are a dynamically created css class in order to allow the delete comment link to appear only for admins or the relevant poster. So it's a bit trickier than the other two links I had tackled which is why there is no article on this one in existence yet.

As pointed out to me by Blogger support, you could hard code them using the same technique, ensuring that you take the code that Blogger generates from an admin comment post. So in other words, log in to your own blog, leave a comment on your own blog, view the source and find the code that should look something like this:
<span class="item-control admin-XXX pid-XXX">
<a style="border: medium none ;" href="http://www.blogger.com/delete-comment.do?
blogID=XXX&postID=XXX" title="Delete Comment">
<span class="delete-comment-icon">
</span></a></span>


Where XXX is a load of numbers... now, replace the & in the url with & and then copy the whole lot and put in into your template, replacing <$BlogCommentDeleteIcon$>

This will allow the pages with comments to validate. HOWEVER - only you as admin will now have the ability to delete comments, the icon will no longer show up for individual users on their own comments.

I have asked blogger support if ampersands could be encoded in dynamic urls and I'll post here when I hear back.

UPDATE: Blogger got back to me to say they are aware of the issue and they will 'probably make this change eventually' but that it is low priority as it doesn't impact on usability or accessibility at the moment. Which I understand, but I wonder how big a job it is to fix? For me it is the last hurdle toward having BifSniff validate fully. Seems a shame to throw out a validating solution over something so small from Blogger's perspective.