That Web Man

Well Sunday was interesting, wasn’t it children?

I wanted to search YouTube to see if a particular video clip was on there - the “Jim’ll Fix It” rollercoaster cub-scouts - and found that YouTube was offline for a good couple of hours.

It now appears that the cause of the problem was Pakistan’s order to block users from visiting YouTube.

Apparently:

“A leading net professional told BBC News: ‘This was probably a simple mistake by an engineer at Pakistan Telecom. There’s nothing to suggest this was malicious.’”

I see.

So what they’re saying is that some witless fecktard in one telecom company in one country can take down a massive online entity like YouTube/Google by mistake?

Well if that’s the case, I expect it won’t be too long before fundamentalists (always with the accent on “mental”) start taking down websites all over the world, just because it appears to be so easy to do so!

One of the main annoyances in the Internet age are spammers.

They’re still obviously hitting e-mail addresses aplenty and they moved on to spamming feedback forms from websites. As if anyone with even half a braincell would buy any shite that way!

The problem with blogs is with comment and trackback spam - usually dealt with by Akismet - and also with user registration spam. I’m not entirely sure what the point is with the latter unless it’s to get over comments requiring user registration first.

Anyway, I’ve just added two plugins to my main blogs:

1. reCaptcha for comments; and
2. Recapture for user registrations.

We’ll see how these fare.

One of the things that amuses me is receiving a telephone call from companies trying to get us to advertise with them, either in print or on a directory web site.

Print

We’re an Internet design company. If we want to find goods or services, we go to Google. If we want to buy a car or something, we try eBay and as a really last ditch effort might pick up a local freesheet. I suppose people buy the odd copy of Exchange & Mart from time to time, but I don’t.

I can’t remember the last time I used a phone directory either - especially in relation to goods or services - but my wife did recently, I must admit, when she was looking for a local gardener.

So why would I waste money advertising a company whose services are largely location-independent?

Especially when it’s not even peanuts we’re talking about: a full page ad. in one edition of Yellow Pages specific to one local area would cost me £4,900 + VAT!

Internet

That’s one area where again the web design company doesn’t pay to advertise - our site and those we do for our clients manage that all by themselves.

How much would a “Local Sponsored Listing” on yell.com cost? Between £900 and £3,150 for a year, it would appear. We charge our clients around £100 for global coverage for their entire website content, publicised free of charge on a monthly basis to the major search engines.

It beggars belief sometimes…