That Web Man

Well, well. As I reported here, the Number 10 website is a Wordpress site. An almighty row has now broken out because their web designers apparently started with a theme written by someone else - as is common with Wordpress themes - and despite making the site look completely different to the theme, many people have latched onto the Creative Commons licence requirements and how they should have given an attribution to the original theme designer.

I think that would definitely apply if the site now looked like the original theme, but it doesn’t so just how much of the original work remains? It’s a tricky issue.

Oh dearie, dearie me!

The developers of Firefox decided to make a bit of a splash when they release Firefox version 3 by announcing they were going to try to make it into the record books for the largest number of software downloads in 24 hours. To this end, they set up a website at http://www.spreadfirefox.com to announce “Firefox Day” as 17 June 2008.

The first thing that went wrong was that 17 June 2008 starts at different times in different timezones so for those whose 17th started when it was still 16th in San Francisco, they were left wondering where they could download the software until a helpful staffer stated that “Firefox Day” and the record attempt would start at 10.00am PDT (or 6.00pm UK BST).

Now I am not sure what exactly happened at 9.00am PDT - whether people at other browser software providers in the same timezone all started repeatedly hitting F5 on the various Firefox sites, maybe? - but since that time, all the Firefox sites have been reporting errors: too many MySQL connections at the Spread Firefox site and Http/1.1 Service Unavailable errors at the Get Firefox site.

What an unmitigated PR disaster for them!

…is that they seem to live in some sort of Utopia where spam simply doesn’t exist. Why do I suggest that?

Take a look at their latest product: Google Friend Connect. It’s an application/suite of apps. that can easily add social networking features to an otherwise static website and requires little programming or coding knowledge by the website owner. There’s a video that explains how it works.

All your friends and other members of the public need is a Google Account to be able to interact with your website. And therein lies the problem.

I run a number of message boards and blogs and have noticed more and more of the spam signups/user registrations are coming from confirmed Gmail addresses, i.e. spammers with fire and forget Google accounts. So imagine your spangly new website features. How long before they would be full of comment spams linking to online casinos and drugstores? About as long as it would take for Google to find your site and include it in Google searches, I’d bet.

Such a pity because if that Utopia were to exist, it’d be a fabulous thing.

I’ve mentioned before that I run a YouTube Channel to support my adult website. The stats. for the channel are impressive (to me anyway) with 1.4 million video views, but have you ever wondered where those viewers are coming from and how popular your videos are in relation to specific geographic regions?

Well that’s the sort of information you can now get from YouTube Insight. It’s all explained here in the Official Google Blog entry.

Now all we need are traffic sources and we’ll be there…

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!