I have decided to start serving AdSense on this site in an attempt to help my hosting bills. I have gone with the wide skyscraper text only advert on the single post pages, hopefully these will provide useful related content and not just annoying adds.

This is the first time I have used AdSense and so I will be playing around with it for a while to try to find the optimal placing both in terms of aesthetics and click through rates.

I am more and more realising that really my blog should be earning me some cash and so I am going to be exploring was of doing this, what I don’t want to do though is clutter my site with ads that put people off of coming, I want anything that creates me a revenue to be useful to me readers (customers) and make them want to come back.

If the ads annoy you completely and think they should be moved to a different placing then please say so, I am happy to discuss.

Firstly as most, if not all of you will no a certain site has redesigned and re-awoken. With such a celebrity list of creators its akin to having your car created by Ferrari, Lambourgini and Lotus all at the same time. As you may have guessed I like it, far more than then previous version although surely less than the next. I especially like the fancy underlines and everything else. It fits perfectly onto a 1024 res screen and is fixed at that, only displaying 3 of its amply columns to anyone with an 800 * 600 monitor and refusing to be flexible with larger resolutions. More than anything the site seems far more usable and pleasing to use, infact I read the article on PDF accessibility even though it doesn’t interest me in the slightest.

So well done you lot on creating a lovely site, its obvious that a lot of thought has gone into the simple yet perfectly executed front end and I for one am looking forward to more from the infamous A List Apart.

In other news Mr Oxton finally realised how silly he was being and opened his heart to the world, or at least to people who had forgotteon to delete his feed from their agregator. I missed him and am glad he is back even if it is only for one post. Or one week, who knows.

Well there we go how interesting.

I thought of the name by the way and I am rather proud of it, so much so that I can’t imagine why no one else thought of it first, well I suppose someone did as joeblogs.com, joebloggs.com, joeblogs.co.uk and joebloggs.co.uk are all taken, although none of them contain anything remotely like a person called Joe who blogs.

Anyway check it out, subscribe to his RSS feed, make it your homepage; its your choice

Its basically going to be a sort of change log for this site and I will post every time I do something to the site, this will probably be more useful to me than to any of you.

So what have I changed, well in the hope of making my site more user friendly and easy to understand I have stopped heading my RSS feed links with Syndicate and instead with Subscribe, this makes far more sense and is much more self explanatory and hopefully more people will get what it means. I didn’t come up with this myself I read it somewhere a while back , although unfortunately I can’t remember where.

I was doing well, I had wp-gatekeeper installed and thus far hadn’t had any comment spam at all, in fact only one dubious comment since I started; I was happy.

Then I read the post on Bad Behaviour and I thought, wow that would be nice, no spam and less interference with my visitors trying to comment. So I installed it and disabled Wp-gatekeeper. I got spammed, not many, but enough, grr.
I am going to leave it running as it is for another couple of days however and if I continue to get spammed then I will change back to wp-gatekeeper again. Its a kind of experiment, yippee.

Not.

When plugins are so easy to implement as with wordpress, people can get a bit carried away and you end up with sites full of features that don’t really benefit its users, while this might be ok for a personal site that is used as a bit of a web playground; it can have a negative effect on sites that are should be more user focused.

Another more technical problem that arises from the use of plugins is that not all plugins produce code that validates or that follows good web standards practises, this can be very frustrating for web developers who know what they are doing as it means that their sites won’t validate if they don’t go through and sort out the plugins code. It creates a different problem for web masters who have little knowledge or interest in web standards as they can create feature rich site with ease without realising the problems.

Some of the plugins that I would like to see cleaned up are the Intouch plugin which at the moment inserts all the JavaScript and css in-line instead of separating it into a separate file. Also the Livesearch plugin which is very popular at the moment due to its ajaxyness creates non standard attributes to achieve something that can be done easily via JavaScript (a post on how to make the livesearch plugin validate has already been written).

I don’t mean to have a go at plugin developers or anything I mean I use both of the mentioned plugins on my site and they provide features that I am not capable of coding myself at the present time. I am just a bit of a stickler for clean code.

The fact that this is a sort of reply means that you should probably read the original post first, if the thought of doing so makes you cringe then don’t do it; it’s that simple.

The main point of his article is summed up here anyway, so don’t fret to much. Roger says that if Internet Explorer improves their standards support people will stop using Firefox and slink back to IE7, thus the Firefox invasion will cease and IE will be lord of the browser market once more, bringing with it all the problems that this does. I won’t go into these here as they are covered in Rogers article and the ongoing comments . I think that Roger has missed out some important points here and that when we take these extra points into consideration the argument becomes flawed.

Firstly the simple (or rather complicated) act of IE improving its standards support (and doing so as an act of priority) will bring standards into the main stream even more and can surely only help to widen the adoption of standards on the internet as a whole; this is a good thing. Firefox has still not broken into the mainstream and your average joebloggs dad is still blissfully unaware of anything browsery and thinks that the internet and the blue e are one and the same. Thus if IE starts talking standards they will have a far bigger and more respected audience among non geeky web users

If this means that people download and start using IE7 then so they should, Firefox should have more than just standards support (which isn’t perfect in itself anyway) to set it apart as an viable and interesting choice to users. Firefox is more than just IE with standards support it just needs to focus on its other qualities more. I think its an insult to Firefox and Mozilla to suggest that their browser can only stand up because IE is so crap.

While at the moment it might be true that using IE6 on windows is a dangerous thing and akin to putting up a sign directing spy ware to your computer, this will surely change as the main focus of IE7 is security and I am sure that Microsoft don’t want there Operating systems loaded with crap any more than you or I do.

Competition creates innovation and while what Microsoft are doing may not be innovative it should and hopefully will force Firefox to innovate even more and release an even better browser. Thus Microsoft releasing a better browser will hopefully be a good thing and help to squeeze just that little bit more out of alternative browser makers.

From Firefox’s point of view the release of IE7 is a bit premature however and it perhaps would have been better if they could have just acquired a few more points of market share from Microsoft to ensure a proper slice of the action.

What do you lot think eh?

Yes I know I just posted but as I already said I just got back and am suffering from withdrawal symptoms; anyway back the post.

Google , don’t you just love them, I do .

I already use Gmail, Search (slightly customized of course), Earth, Print (ish), Language; and now Picasa and they are all great and the best in their field that I have come across.

Picasa has just eased my photo organising and tweaking about 100 times over, if only it had flickr integration. The only slightly annoying thing is that as it doesn’t change the actual file the nice tweaks don’t show up on anything but Picasa.