Keiron's daily take on life, the internet and the world around us!

I haven’t posted in a while – I’ve simply been too busy, but I got one comment on my blog today that annoyed me! So I’m here for a rant!

I get a lot of comments on Skillett.com, an awful lot are filtered out without me even seeing them by WP-SpamFree:

WP-SpamFree has blocked 23,910 spam comments!

Things that get past that are still often identified as spam by WordPress and deleted… Then there’s the rest….

More often than not they fall foul of my commenting policy, I created this policy a while back for a couple of reasons – the biggest being that I’m a dofollow blog and I didn’t want my blog full of spam (who would!?).

DoFollow

DoFollow means that if a link is active for more than 24 hours on this site, then we’ll make it a DoFollow for the purposes of SEO rewarding contributors for their work. It’s that simple. Actually there’s a lot more to it, but in it’s simplest form if you contribute here it’s a little thank you!

Commenting Policy

However, the biggest reason I end up removing things is:

Comment Form Guidelines: The comment name field must be filled in with a proper or legitimate sounding name and URL. You may use a nickname or your site/blog name but any comments using keywords, spam or splog-like URLs, or suspicious information in the comment form will be edited or deleted.

And just above the comment field it says:

That’s not a request, it’s an order!

Losing your phone is one thing, it’s probably insured and you’ll either get your phone back or a replacement, great – you have a working phone, but aren’t you forgetting something?

What about the content on your phone?

Your photo’s? Your picture messages? Your diary? Your videos? They’re what make the phone yours aren’t they? It’s not just a loss that will mean you don’t have these but all manner of accidents! I’ve just spent the morning extracting data from a phone that was dropped, and the screen completely died. In the normal course of events I’d plug it in to a computer, get off what I could (photo’s by treating it as as memory card and hope that contacts and text messages would sync to the Motorola or Nokia suite as appropriate).In this case there was some bad, and some good luck!

photo credit: Glen Bowman

First the bad, the phone wasn’t set into sync mode – it just wanted to be treated as a memory card. I knew this was an option in the phone, but with no screen how was I going to turn it on? A stroke of good luck… The phone was a Nokia N85!

What’s so special about it being an N85? The N85 has two slots on top, a USB Sync/Charge and a Video-Out! 1 cable later (and some rearrangement of furniture) the TV is in the office and I’m able to use the TV as a screen for the phone!! It was quite impressive!

I successfully extracted all the data except photo messages, I had to go into each individual photo message and save the image to the memory card then copy that back to the computer.

Now what?

Well we’re not going to lug a TV around to use as a screen are we? I rang up a local phone repair shop and dropped it in just over 2 hours ago. It’s ready for collection already… New LCD and new Lens all fitted… Hurrah!

For reference Swindon Phone Fix on Commercial Road, Swindon did this!

I have a friend who’s a cameraman, his blog is always interesting but recently he posted some funny videos that really made me laugh…

First we’ve got the cameraman taking care of punters:

Then the cameraman that showed Ronaldo a thing or two!

If you want to check out some more of these video they’re on Chris’s blog here.

Twitter introduced list functionality a while back, and I’ve used it a bit here and there (mainly so I can find the real life people I know on Twitter amongst the “noise”), but I wanted to start using them a little differently so did some research.

Lists Are Great

I follow well over a thousand people, so if you’re in the midst of that and aren’t in the 25 most recent tweets when I look at my main stream, then unless you’re on a list (a column in my TweetDeck) I’m not going to see what you tweeted! Sorry, but that’s the way it is (of course message me if you think you shold be on one of my lists, I’m @Keiron).

My lists so far have been mainly to make my life easier, local people, real life, a “see-all” for people I find interesting (and I try to limit that one to 20-30 people), a tech one etc. So I can see all of these people’s tweets at once. I have a few private lists too (customers, suppliers etc).

Following a List

You can also follow a list, say for example you wanted to follow all the comedians I follow – that’s easy you just follow this list, and when I update it you get all my recommendations:
http://twitter.com/Keiron/comedians

This functionality means that you can get a moderated list by someone who is an expert in their subject, for example I’ve followed in the past, Will Carling’s list of rugby players, whenever he finds a new one – I see their tweets (without having to go hunting for them, and he mixes in the right circles to know these people!).

I’ve followed one or two lists belonging to other people in the past – but I usually tend to follow a list for a while – work out who’s interesting on the list and then follow those individuals, adding them to a similar list of my own (which other people can follow if they wish!).

Ok, so lists are great – what’s the new thing?

It’s not exactly new, but it’s new to the way I think about lists! After some discussion over the last week and a little experimentation it turns out I might be able to clean up my main twitter stream somewhat (I can hear a lot of you breathing sighs of relief about how good that would be for you!).

You can add users to a list, without following them.

Why is this good? Well, taking one example – I follow a lot of rugby people, they don’t tend to follow me back – probably because as rugby players they aren’t particularly interested in my random tweets about doing the accounts, deciding if Big Brother’s going to be any good, or the latest PHP programming project! So I’m unlikely to get a reciprocal follow from them…

You’ve probably spotted where this is going now…………If it’s somebody I want to read their tweets but are unlikely to follow me back, I’m going to add them to lists rather than follow them that way they’ll appear in a specific niche column in my TweetDeck (or Seismic on my Milestone).

I know what some of you are thinking:

“You need to follow people, follow more people, then follow more people – it’s the only way you’ll get followers yourself!!”

I used to think the same, but I’m coming away from that now, I want people to follow me because they want to, if they don’t want to – that’s fine as well! By unfollowing all those that I’m interested in who don’t follow me and adding them to a list this will clean up my main stream so that in future it is full of people that interest me most of the time (and maybe don’t fit into a niche).

I’ll see how this goes initially, and if it goes well I’ll probably take it one stage further and unfollow people that are on my lists (even if they’re following me), I suspect this may lead to a mass unfollowing of me. But hey if they’re only following me so I’ll follow them back are they actually going to bother to read any of my tweets?

I haven’t quite sussed out the finer details of this yet, but I suspect I’ll have some kind of workflow:

1. Follow a User,
2. If they interest me a lot stay following (and add to list),
   If they interest but are quite niche unfollow them (and add to a list),
   If they make no sense and I simply don’t want to see their tweets them simply unfollow.

That said I’m going to have to put in quite a bit of legwork initially to clean up my initial followers, I’ll probably use friendorfollow.com to do this. Saying that, I started to use it the other day and opened 230 tabs in Firefox (after it had used up over a GB of RAM it settled down!). So I’ll be doing a Father Chistmas:

“Making a list, Checking it Twice… Going to find out who’s naughty or nice”

How do you use twitter lists, is there a way they make your life easier? I’d be interested to hear!

I like my gadgets (as most people know) so recently ordered myself a new flash for my D-SLR, I say recently very loosely as I’m slightly annoyed!

I’ve been a customer of the company I ordered it from for several years, they’ve not always been the quickest to deliver (particularly with my EEE PC as I had one of the first into the country!), but generally I’ve been happy with them – so happy that I became an affiliate of theirs. Not so much to make some cash, but when I did refer people to a product they were selling I’d earn something from it – something I was happy to do…

Now I’m not so sure!

I ordered on: 28/04/2010 17:45 and immediately received my confirmation email:

“… expected to be delivered within 2-5 working days. Please note that in most cases, delivery is faster than stated as we want you to start enjoying your purchase as soon as possible.”

Great I thought, today is Wednesday, I could have it by Friday at their minimum, most likely Saturday though which would be really handy for the bank holiday weekend so I could play with it whilst we were visiting family, and as they say I’ll be able to enjoy my product as soon as possible!

Saturday arrived and there was still no sign of anything, so I logged into their website -

“Status: Processing”.

Processing? What’s that all about? You’ve had the order for at least two whole working days and nothing has happened with it!? We live in an “instant” world these days. Amazon are probably partly to blame they get things to you like lightning, heck I think they’d teleport them if they had the chance!

I thought I’d ring their customer services line and check on the status of the order, hmmm closed on weekends, and this is a bank holiday weekend! Right then that will be a job for Tuesday, but it will probably turn up on Tuesday and although I haven’t had it over the weekend at least it will be here for the wedding the following weekend!

I submitted an email support enquiry anyway, and was surprised to find them working on bank holiday Monday:

“I can confirm your order has been received and is progressing through our system as normal. The stock allocation process will begin shortly, if not already.”

I replied, telling them I really needed it for Friday – it was of the utmost importance.

Tuesday arrived and I got a response,

“There has been a slight delay with the order however all appears to be on track.

Under the present conditions, your order is expected to be dispatched within the next two days. A dispatch confirmation email will be forthcoming as well with the tracking information once the order has been shipped.”

Hmmm… I couldn’t really complain could I? Much as they say they’ll get it to you quicker than their quoted delivery time, Thursday would still put them inside their 2-5 working days (even excluding the bank holiday where they appeared to be working!).

Wednesday arrived, status? You guessed it “Processing”. I emailed and rang! They assured me they were looking at my order right now and it would either go out that day or the following,  Thursday… Hang on I’m supposed to have it by Thursday! At least if they dispatch it with Royal Mail it will be next day before 12 so I’ll have it Friday lunchtime – before I head off to this wedding mid-afternoon.

It’s now 12:00 Friday… I’m packing up the car, and I have a notice from their couriers… Not the couriers fault I know, but they’re coming from Gloucester…

“Your order is out for delivery today and is due to be delivered between 16:39-17:39.”

Argggh! That’s it then – it will be next week!

Like I say, maybe our expectations of mail order have been raised in recent years with companies raising the bar quite regularly.

I was listening to an interesting podcast this week on SmallBizPod, it was an interview with Brad Burton of 4 Networking – and he quite rightly says:

“People buy from people before they buy products or services.”

He’s right, maybe next time I’ll pay a little more for the product and order it from Amazon (or even, perish the thought… go somewhere to buy it in person!), as I know what kind of service I’ll get from them! Maybe I just expect too much!

I was “slightly annoyed” when I started this rant, I’ve got to the end of it and realised exactly how annoyed I am!!! Hmmm I think I ought to chill out a little before getting the car!

I outsource some work overseas, but I’ve moved away from single contracts and now have someone on a regular long term contract to work with me, but this post isn’t about that, it’s about some of the spam I’ve been getting on this blog recently!

I use both Akismet and WP-SpamFree to keep this blog reasonably clean of spam, but more has been getting through recently (well through to the point where it’s held for moderation). I wanted to tell you about the two most recent (and persistent offenders)

Battery Man

The most recent items are all about batteries and hard drives on my posts about MyXerver and my PINES USB Battery Pack. The spammer merrily went through several posts telling me his iPod Touch was dead and would I help, until he got to my post about spam comments, when his spam comment with links to a battery site simply said:

i konw this is a spam comment..

I almost let that one through it was so funny! But really, if you used a real name (instead of having me believe your name is battery) I’d let you link to your site!

Outsourced Link Building

The second one was quite strange and I’m not entirely sure how much information to give out about it! Let me explain…

The poster systematically went through a lot of posts, using a real name and linking to a UK company (I’m not sure whether to release the name of the company as they were probably unaware of the problem!). To be fair I would have let the comments through if it hadn’t been:
a) so obviously systematic .
b) so many pointless comments like “great post”.

What I found annoying about it was the IP address was in Bangladesh, no problem there we all outsource, but the email address being used was for a UK SEO company – yes, yes I know they’re entitled to outsource as much as the rest of us. But I wonder if their customer knew that spammy comments would be used in their SEO campaign? I somewhat doubt it?

I debated revealing the UK SEO company (and I know a few people on Twitter have asked me to do so at the time I was watching the spammer do this), but I’m not going to for now.. I’ll probably drop them a link to this post and ask for their feedback?

Interestingly, I did a search for links to their client’s site in Google and only two blogs allowed comments through – nothing else. So it can’t be that effective surely? Do you have any experience of this on your blog?

Apple’s stock is at an all time high at the minute, can this continue? If it can, you might be well advised to follow Kyle Conroy’s advice!

Kyle’s post suggests that if rather than buying that shiny new Apple MacBook G3 250 back in 1997 for $5700 (ouch!!), you’d bought $5700 worth of Apple shares then today you would $330,000 better off!

It’s not really surprising given where Apple are today I guess, but does beg the question – could you do the same today with Apple? The fact that an iPod Touch (3G / Late 2009) was $199 in 2009 and would now have shares worth $315 suggests you might (particularly as that’s only a few months ago!).

Or, on the other hand should you be looking for more companies that will replicate what Apple have done?