“Chris, there is only one definition of spam — unsolicited email”

Nope, not really. That’s your definition. Spam is a repeated bombardment of essentially unwanted information. Go watch the python sketch that gives it it’s name. I’m sure it’s on youtube.

Eg: “We’ve got SPAM, egg and SPAM, SPAM SPAM sausage and SPAM, SPAM SPAM….” (well I’m sure you get the idea).

The folks in the restaurant in the skit actually did “opt in” by walking in the door. They agreed to some level of interaction with the business. What then happened was the proprietor took advantage of that relationship in an attempt, perhaps, to offload a surplus of SPAM by putting it in every dish.

So I’d argue your definition of spam, in the first instance.

Secondly, the “just opt out” argument. I’m happy to join your mailing list. I’ll even follow your recommendations, Ed, to “go here and sign up, hey, don’t actually buy anything, but take the free information”. Now I’m not an idiot, and I can understand you’re marketing there, but the cumulative result is 20 of you then bombarding me with crap about the latest product launch.

The point was, with the latest version of that, mass control, people are sick and tired (I imagine) of all the nonsensical hype of “hey, this is a great product. You know what, I haven’t actually bought it, but I’m getting paid to say so” messages. We know how the product launch formula works, we’ve seen it a lot (high volume) were’ familiar’ (read, resistant). Hmm, high volume of requests to do something we’re resistant to? Sure sounds like SPAM to me, and certainly abuse of the relasionship.

I know you’re big on relationship, Ed, and I get that – and you also talk about the dangers of abusing it – so please don’t complain when someone calls you out for doing just that. I unsubscribed from your list, and also no longer follow you on twitter.

I’m sure it won’t make a dent in your sales And I don’t bear you any grudges. I love your work, and I love your material. If I want to read your tweets now and keep in touch, there’s always the RSS version of your twitter feed, and that’s far, far less intrusive on my life, and I can choose to read it whenever I want.

THAT, in my opinion, is the power of twitter: Your public feed is availble by RSS for me to read, even though I *don’t* follow you, whenever I want, in a format I want (google reader).

Originally posted as a comment by Rich on The Tubbynerd using Disqus.

Do you have a domain registered, but can’t decide what to do with it?

Do you want to find the best price for hosting your website?

(Wow, this sounds like and Ad. Sorry!)

Just in case you haven’t come across this one yet – check out 000webhost.com.

I’ve been tossing up whether or not to host one of the domains I own for a while now. I’ve always been put off by the cost of doing so, considering that it’s not really the sort of domain name I really want to do anything but experiment with.

You can’t beat $0.00, right? So with that sort of overhead, I can play to my heart’s content, and you can too.

Unlike most thing that sound too good to be true, this one isn’t. There are no catches, and you don’t have to serve ads on your website.

Go check it out. It really is free, as in beer.

(Notice, This post describes the now-defunct “I want Sandy”.  Sandy was taken off line as of December 19th, 2008.  Another victim of the web 2.0 bubble.  You know, where a useful service people have come to rely on is ripped out from under you without warning.  I’m looking at you, twitter!)

If you haven’t met Sandy yet, let me introduce you. You can thank me later.

Sandy lives at iwantsandy.com. This is a short guide on how to put Sandy to work for you.

Sandy is your free personal assistant, alert service and your new best friend. Although Sandy works great over email and SMS, today we’re going to focus specifically on integrating her with twitter.

Far from being just another dull, run-of-the-mill calendar service, Sandy is a powerful, flexible life management system. Team her up with twitter, and you’ll quickly find her to be the best thing to happen to you in a long, long time.

Introduce yourself to Sandy and let’s get started.

Visit her website and click on the red “sign up” section on the webpage. I won’t insult your intelligence by walking you through the signup process.

At the end of it, Sandy will send you an email. In that message will be a link to a unique email address that you can use to add things to your calendar. Click on that link and send Sandy a message like “remember to subscribe to this blog’s RSS feed”. This will activate your account and you can move on to setting up twitter.

From the iwantsandy.com webpage, click on the “Settings” tab and find the “twitter” configuration.

From there you can see that you need to visit Sandy’s twitter page.

Assuming that you already have a twitter account, start following Sandy and make sure that you also set “notifications” to “on”. This presumes that you have already set up SMS alerts inside twitter, which is the subject of an entirely seperate post.

Once you’ve done that, Sandy will automatically start following you as well. Flip back to the iwantsandy.com page under the twitter settings and enter your twitter username in the box provided. Sandy will send you a direct message on twitter with an authentication code. Once you have that, make sure you enter it and check the box to turn “twitter reminders” on and hit “save”.

And that’s it. Sandy is now hooked up to twitter and you can not only receive her reminders over twitter directly to your phone, but you can twitter entries for Sandy to add to your schedule. Try it. From your favorite twitter client (eg: twitterific, twitbin, twitterfox, etc.) or even your cell phone, send a tweet like this:

d s remember to eat more vegetables
d s remind me to go jogging tomorrow at 6pm
d s remember 5th november gunpowder, treason and plot

You can even get fancy and tag your entries:

d s remember Rich’s birthday july 29 @birthday @yearly
d s remind me to install ubuntu linux on my laptop @todo
d s remember cute girl at bar’s phone number is 123456789

There are plenty of examples on iwantsandy.com so I won’t repeat them here. If you’re sending them via twitter, just make sure that you start with “d s” eg: send a direct message to the user called “s”. If you’re sending Sandy instructions via email, you can ignore the “d s” part.

One last thing – make sure that your timezone and date format is correct. Under “Settings” click “Dates & Times” and set them correctly for your timezone and date format.

Once you’ve met Sandy, you’ll wonder how you ever did without her.

Today our aim is to create a slideshow set to music that we can upload to youtube. Since I prefer to use linux, this guide will focus on how to do it in ubuntu.

Here’s the video I created as part of my blog about emo hair cuts:

Here’s the sequence of steps required:

1. Decide on the piece of music you’re going to use. For this example I’m going to select a random .mp3 from my collection. Work out how long it plays for. I fired up a player to work this out, there may be an easier way. My chosen .mp3 file was 3 minutes, 52 seconds in duration.Total time in seconds := 232.
2. I decided on 5 seconds per image, including transitions. You don’t need to use transitions if you don’t want to. I think it looks nicer. Since we’re talking about 232 seconds of audio, we’ll need:232 seconds ÷ 5 seconds per image = 46 images.

   If you’re planning on creating an image for the beginning and end of the video, obviously subtract 2 from that number.

3. Grab a bunch of photos from somewhere. Don’t worry about how big they are. We’re going to resize them to 640×480. Ideally the images you chose will be as big or bigger than 640×480 to start with, but it really doesn’t matter all that much.
4. For each photo in turn, run this command: convert <filename> -resize 640x480 <newfilename>'.

   ‘convert’ is part of the ImageMagick suite. If you don’t have it already, you can install that with:

   sudo apt-get install imagemagick

   This resizes each image to fit in a 640×480 frame. It does not force them all to that size, so your aspect ratio is kept.

5. If you’re planning on creating an image for the start and/or the end, fire up the gimp and create a new 640×480 image. Use the bucket tool to fill the frame with a color (black is a good choice), select a text color and use the text tool to type your text into the image. Save it as a .jpg.If you don’t have the gimp, install it with: sudo apt-get install gimp
6. At this point you have all your images ready and resized to fit in a 640×480 canvas. You also have your audio track ready. Now it’s time to create the slideshow. For that we need dvd-slideshow. sudo apt-get install dvd-slideshow
7. dvd-slideshow runs from the command line based on a ‘recipe’ or script that you create. Ours is going to look like this: audiotrack.mp3:1
   headerimage.jpg:5
   fadein:2
   image01.jpg:3
   crossfade:2
   image02.jpg:3
   crossfade:2
   ...
   ...
   ...
   lastimage.jpg:3
   fadeout:2
   footerimage.jpg:10

   Notice that firstimage.jpg runs for 3 seconds, then there is a crossfade of 2 seconds. That takes the total time for the image to the 5 seconds we wanted. If you want to display the image for a shorter or longer time, adjust as necessary. Notice also that there is a ‘fadein’ after the first image. We don’t want the first image to fade in, and we can’t use crossfade for the first image. I displayed the footer image for 10 seconds. You can display the last frame for as long or as short a space of time as you like.

8. Run dvd-slideshow as follows:
   
   dvd-slideshow <recipe file.txt>

9. Watch the magic happen. When it’s finished you’ll be left with a .vob file. If you wanted to, you could burn that directly to a dvd. I don’t know why you’d want to do that, however! VOB files are pretty large, so we’ll need to resize it before we upload it to youtube.
10. Use mplayer or (my preference) vlc media player to play the .vob file and make sure it looks like you expected it to. Once you’re happy you’ll want to turn your huge .vob into a much smaller .avi that youtube will like. You’ll need mencoder and lame for this:
    
    sudo apt-get install mencoder lame

11. You’ll probably want to save this to a script. Execute the following commands. There are 2 passes, so we run mencoder twice. Replace $FILE with your .vob file and $OUT with whatever you want to call the resulting file. The ‘crop’ commands aren’t strictly necessary, but won’t hurt. The first time I ran this I left the slideshow at 640×480 and had mencoder resize it.
    
    mencoder "$FILE" \
    -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:vbitrate=1000:vhq:keyint=250:threads=2:vpass=1 \
    -oac mp3lame -lameopts cbr:br=128 \
    -ffourcc XVID \
    -vf scale=320:-2,crop=320:240,expand=320:240 \
    -af resample=44100:0:0 \
    -o "$OUT"

    mencoder "$FILE" \
    -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:vbitrate=1000:vhq:keyint=250:threads=2:vpass=2 \
    -oac mp3lame -lameopts cbr:br=128 \
    -ffourcc XVID \
    -vf scale=320:-2,crop=320:240,expand=320:240 \
    -af resample=44100:0:0 \
    -o "$OUT"

12. Alternatively, it’s been pointed out to me that you can encode directly to .flv, (which is what youtube will turn a .avi file into) with ffmpeg (sudo apt-get install ffmpeg) as follows:

    ffmpeg -i FILE.vob -s 320x240 FILE.flv

13. Once that’s completed check out your .avi or .flv file in your player of choice. You should have a (much smaller) video at 320×240 that you can upload to youtube

That’s all!

Technorati Tags:
howto, linux, ubuntu, slideshow, mencoder, youtube

If you remember my earlier post about blogrush, you’ll recall that I was a little skeptical about just how useful it really is. Does it live up to the hype?

Well the hype seems to have died down. A lot. Did you notice? If you believe what they tell you over there, apprently blogrush has been wildly successful. Very wildly successful for spammers, too it seems. So wildly successful that according to the folks at blogrush, everybody’s stats are skewed, and the number of clickthroughs is much lower than anticipated.

Uh huh.

So they’re working hard now to fix the problem. If that’s the case then, I could conclude that now I should be getting a few more clicks than I was initially. Let’s see what google analytics thinks.

So for referrals, blogrush (after all this time, mind) ranks #6 with a whopping 18 page views. According to my blogrush dashboard, in the last 7 days alone I’ve earned over 350 credits for the blog in question.

So something is up. I think now that the hype has died down, blogrush is showing itself to be akin to google adsense: an annoying widget that pops up on people’s blogs. Something that nobody aside from other bloggers (who have themselves got the blogrush widget) will click on.

Sounds like the jury is in, to me. Go ahead and sign up for blogrush. This is a referral link which means I’ll get “traffic” (in theory) when you do. By the looks of the success thus far, I need al l the help I can get.

PS:  Did you ever notice how the blogrush dashboard refers to your ‘traffic’?  That’s people who see a link to your website, not actual traffic ON your website. Worthwhile distinction to note.

The longer I have to play with twitter tracking, the cooler it is. (I’ve already spoken about how it works here.)

Here’s a list of the top five things that I think are worthwhile tracking:

1. Your user name: All combinations thereof, including @username.
2. The city you live in. In my case, Melbourne. A half hour after I added this, I had seen twitters from no less than 5 people in Melbourne talking about traffic, public transport and local events. Gives twitter a nice hometown feel. It’s almost local news “as it happens”. Obviously this depends on who twitters what.
3. “Britney Spears”. There is so much gossip about her at the moment it’s amazing. You’d never need to buy a gossip magazine ever again. Substitute your favorite celeb for Britney. For example:
4. “laugh”. Any time someone finds something funny, you’ll know about it.  Everyone needs a little comic relief now and then.
5. Anything related to websites you own or plan on working on. I shouldn’t need to expand on this one.

As a bonus, if you haven’t worked out the phrase that twitter themselves are saying seems to be the most popular, take a look at the twitter blog. As I’ve mentioned previously, reach out and touch a huge number of people simply by incorporating that into your tweets…

Happy twittering!

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Twitter quietly introduced a neat little addition recently called “twitter tracking”.

All you need to do is enter “track <keywords>” into twitter via your mobile, from twitbin, or any of the multiple twitter tools and you’ll be instantly updated any time that anyone mentions those keywords.

Here’s why this is great:

Firstly, if you’re doing any type of marketing on the internet, you can track your marketing related keywords: “track sausage making” for example, will alert you any time someone twitters anything about making sausages. The keywords can appear anywhere in the twitter, so it won’t just track “sausage making“, but also “making sausage“, “I feel like a sausage.  All this spam is making me sick” and so on.

But the coolest thing twitter let slip recently was what the most highly tracked phrase was. In other words, what the most people want to be updated about.

Why do you want to know that? If you know what that particular phrase is all you have to do is twitter something using that particular phrase, add a link to somewhere you want people to go, and voila – instant access to a large number of people  you previously didn’t have. Of course, you’d need to use this responsibly, right?

So what’s the phrase? I’m not going to spoil the surprise for you. Go find it for yourself! You never know, you might have overheard it already when I referenced my website on how to lucid dream

If you forget any user’s password (say, your own) for your local mediawiki database like I did, you’ll probably find this helpful.

The problem:

In my case I’d forgotten the admin password for our mediawiki wiki. Although all our pages are able to be publicly edited and users could still log in and do what they needed to do, the loss of the administrator account had to be fixed pronto.

The solution:
Wiki uses password hashing based on the user ID so you need to do this:

1. Find the value for user_id for the user you want:
   
   SELECT user_id FROM user WHERE user_name=’forgotten_user’;

   Note: wiki capitalises some of my user IDs so you might like to try a variation like this:

   SELECT user_name,user_id from user;

   And match the user_id number to the username you want.

2. Create a new password using this user ID:
   
   UPDATE user SET user_password=MD5(CONCAT(‘<user id result>-’,md5(‘newpassword’))) WHERE user_id=<user id result’>;

   Don’t forget the dash after the CONCAT. For example, if your user ID is 1, as in the case of the wiki administrator account, you’d use

   …MD5(CONCAT(‘1-’,md5(‘newpassword’)…

That should do it!

Technorati Tags: mediawiki, wiki, mysql, phpmyadmin

Once in a while you’ll find something on the internet that truly stops you in your tracks.

You know – you’ll be happily surfing away, satisfying your A.D.D. and you’ll stumble across something that you just know is going to haunt you for weeks … months, even. I’m not talking about images that make you laugh so hard milk comes out your nose, or videos where people injure themselves in horrific ways.

Nope, that stuff is a dime a dozen online. There’s only one other thing I’ve seen in the years I’ve been online that haunts me continually. Stuff I can’t get out of my mind.

Check out the page I stumbled on here, think about it, then (if you’re game) follow these links to more photos:

Here and here

Let it mull all over in the back of your mind for a while. Then see how you feel for the rest of the day.

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There’s been a lot of buzz about lately from blogrush. In case you’ve been living under a rock, it’s being widely hailed as the best way to drive free traffic to your blog. Free traffic. Free, as in beer.

All you need to do is put a widget on your blog with links to other people’s blogs. You get credit for displaying links to other people’s pages which, in turn, gives you credit to display a link to your blog on other’s pages, hopefully driving some traffic your way.

Sounds great in theory, right? But hang on a moment – does it have that niggling feeling that it might just be too good to be true? And you know what that means…

Well let’s take a look. I signed up for blogrush and put a widget on my highest-traffic blog on blogger. I’m getting upwards of 220 page views per day consistently. I rank #3 in google for my target phrase. The page isn’t converting however and I’ve left it be for a week or so now to focus on a new project. Perfect candidate for a little blogrush testing.

Here’s my graph from google analytics for a day or so after I added the widget. I’ll allow you to draw your own conclusions here…

So where to from here? Explosive traffic growth depends on a few things:

1. People clicking on the blogrush links. As Ed Dale is saying, people like to click around the ‘net and stumbleupon stuff (All hail ADD!), so even if your blog title isn’t relevant to the page on which it’s displayed, people may still click. Apparently I’m getting more traffic from somewhere at the moment. Google is still telling me that 90.9% of my traffic comes from search engines.
2. People signing up to blogrush using my affiliate link. That means that I’m entitled to more traffic because I’ve referred people. Should those referrals themselves generate referrals, I get an exponential traffic growth. In theory.
3. The blogrush effect taking hold. I think it will, but what do I know. People get tired of things pretty quickly online.

There are a couple of downsides that spring to mind as well.

1. People have an exit from your page that is beyond your control. Granted, it opens in a new window, but that doesn’t mean they’ll come back to your page and re-read it. In addition the “new window” thing quickly fills a screen, or your firefox tab bar. It could be a thorn in the side of blogrush once people realise that you can’t stop it doing that.
2. Traffic from other sites that are unrelated to your blog do not mean more sales. We want targeted traffic, not random traffic. The success of blogrush from a marketing perspective will be how well it places links on other people’s pages. At the moment my page seems to be showing a lot of unrelated links based on my content. It’s early days yet of course.
3. Once the buzz dies down, will what’s left be links to quality content, or will we be overrun with spam? The more traffic your site has, the more opportunity we have to put links on other peoples pages. We all know what the highest traffic stuff online is, right?

So the jury is still out, but the initial signs look somewhat promising. Stay tuned!

(Do your own Blogrush experiment by clicking here)

Technorati Tags: blogrush, blogging, linkbuilding