The Real Ryan J. Parker

I don’t know how I made it this long without doing so, but I finally made a purchase over at woot.

During the “woot off” on Thursday (I’m still not sure what that means exactly or how long it lasts) I purchased a 4 GB SD memory card for $20+$5 shipping. I plan on purchasing a new digital camera that uses SD memory, so getting this kind of price now made me realize I couldn’t pass it up.

I have no idea when to expect the arrival of my purchase, but seeing as how I won’t be needing it until June I figure I’ll have it in time.

Do you woot?

Tags: woot, 4gb, sd, memory

I’ve found a weird inconsistency with my Google homepage, and it appears to be created by RSS feeds that have FeedBurner’s URL tracking features turned on.

The problem I’m having is that of web usability.

From time to time, the links that appear as visited on my Google homepage (because I’ve visited them, of course) turn back to the non-visited color sometime later. This sucks, because I know I’ve visited the pages before, but I have to make sure I have read it first.

This creates major problems for someone like me with OCD (no, I don’t perform rituals).

The only common theme with all of the feeds that show this type behavior is that they all have FeedBurner’s URL tracking turned on.

I don’t use Google Reader or any other RSS reader, so I’m wondering if it’s just Google homepage, or if all RSS readers have this problem.

Has anyone else noticed this behavior on their Google homepage or other RSS reader? If you use FeedBurner URL tracking would you please turn it off?

Tags: feedburner, url, tracking, google, homepage, link, color, ocd

Over the past two days my sports handicapping blog has received an incredible amount of blog spam.

I’m not sure what the Akismet count was before this massive amount of blog comment spam started, but as of now it’s at 29,793. I suspect this is at least 20,000 more than what it was at a few days ago.

I’ve only noticed this activity on that specific blog, but I can’t help but wonder if anyone else is being targeted by these large networks of blog spammers. I have a script that shows the last 100 access requests to the website, and a majority of the requests are to my wp-comments-post.php file from a wide array of hosts.

I first noticed the activity when I received a lot of comments being held in moderation. They were links to various ring tone and other spammy services from EDU addresses, but even after marking a lot of them as SPAM they continued to make it through Akismet. As such, I simply filtered it into my blacklist and had them all sent to the SPAM bucket.

I have no idea what the posting rules these spammers have setup, but the requests don’t look they’re going to stop anytime soon, so I updated my template to rename the wp-comments-post.php file to i-hate-spam.php.

Anyone else seeing this type of activity from spamming networks posting EDU addresses for ring tones and other such goods?

Tags: wordpress, blog, comment, spam

Is it just me, or is Google AdWords quality score really just a way for Google to demand people pay a higher price for clicks while they can hide behind a veil of “sorry, your quality score just isn’t high enough”?

Since last month I’ve been running an AdWords campaign for Which Team Wins?, and every couple of weeks I notice some keywords going inactive for search because they’re now priced higher, while quality scores go from Great to OK to (in some cases) Poor.

I’m still pretty new to the AdWords game, but based on a little Googling the only thing I can find is people having the same problem.

My pages are exactly relevant to the keywords I’m targeting, as I want to send people looking for Dallas Mavs stats to the Dallas Mavericks Stats page, but Google doesn’t think the quality is good enough (meaning it’s not relevant to the user).

This is a bit absurd, and I’m going to research more into this problem when I have the time, but for now some keywords are going to stay inactive. In my case I get a strong feeling of price gouging, and I don’t like it.

If you’ve had good or bad experiences with Google’s quality score I’d like to hear what you think, along with any ideas as to why my score for some pages keeps dropping.

Tags: google, adwords, quality score

As you might be able to tell from the light amount of posting I’ve done on my blog in recent weeks, I’ve been keeping myself fairly busy.

One thing I try to do, however, is keep up with the latest in the blogosphere using my Google homepage. During this time of increased busyness, however, every time I’d visit some of the tabs on my Google homepage I’d feel somewhat overwhelmed.

This caused me to do something I don’t do much of: unsubscribe from RSS feeds.

In the grand scheme of things this was probably a good thing, as the feeds I unsubscribed from provide no value to me (or likely anyone else, for that matter).

Coming to this realization made me feel dirty inside. Why did I subscribe in the first place? Is unsubscribing now going to keep me from missing out on something good in the future? Do these people know I’ve unsubscribed and will try to hunt down my unborn children because their FeedBurner FeedCount decreased?

I have no answers to these questions, but I’d like to hear what everyone else thinks. Do you unsubscribe from RSS feeds? When you do unsubscribe, does it make you feel dirty inside?

Tags: unsubscribe, rss feed