That Web Man

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…

Don’t you just hate people who sign up for a paid listing service on a website you run - £25+VAT pa - and then when you finally get around to billing them for just one year (nearly four years later), these wankers try to claim that we never told them it was chargeable.

Now it gets worse when they are supposedly IT and computer consultants who claims to be able to - let’s say - work with your PC and Assist Online maybe and they forget there’s such a thing as the Internet Archive Wayback Machine which shows clearly that the site has always plainly stated it’s chargeable.

Never let the facts get in the way of an argument, eh?

Oh how I hate these spamming cunts!

Feel free to contact them at any of these (almost certainly bogus) fire and forget e-mail addresses:

sales@rbsh.co.uk PaulBentley@Industrymailsend.info postmaster@industrymailsend.info postmaster@formreponse.info postmaster@graphicsend.biz pamyoung1804@googlemail.com Racing & Ball Sports Corporate Hospitality Ltd PaulBentley@sporting-marketing.co.uk PaulBentley@hospitality-events.co.uk paulbentley@mycorporatedaysout.co.uk mail@mycorporatedaysout.co.uk

I love the way they send spam and use Romanian servers for their shite, but on their own web shite they try to take anti-spam measures! Pity also that Fasthosts seem content to send out all the spam for these cunts.

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…

As I mentioned before, I have a YouTube Channel which features videos from my first adult web site and drives a lot of referrals to the main site.

I started it in February 2007 and it hit a number of milestones between Friday and this morning:

• More than 1,000,000 video views
• More than 100,000 channel views
• 1,000 subscribers

It’s just a pity that neither the video views nor the subscriptions generate direct revenues…

I’d received some copy text and some photographs from a friend who’s asked me to do his business a web site. He’s a hands-on guy and marketing brochures aren’t his forté so there wasn’t a great deal to work with.

So I sorted out some crops, re-sizes and thumbnails, decided to use WordPress just because, added a few tweaks like a “lightbox”, put together a formmail page (with a “thanks” redirect) and Bob’s your uncle: one classy web site in just a few hours.

I am involved with a local school on a personal basis. Yesterday, we were asked to come in for a training session to go through our own log-in for committee notes and our school e-mail which we can access via a webmail interface from our “desktops”.

I logged in, changed the default password, changed the theme of the desktop and then sent myself an e-mail as they use quite an involved address. I set up some notifications for the committees and asked the IT head if it would be possible to have my school e-mails forwarded to my own e-mail address. It wasn’t.

When I got in, I downloaded the e-mail and looked in great detail at the message headers, worked out which server was the most likely candidate and then set up my mail client to poll the school e-mail server to get my e-mails that way. Not hacking though, I hasten to add.

One of my long-term clients was kind enough to send me a cheque this week for two small invoices, so that it arrived within the payment terms … which is nice.

I didn’t get a chance to pay it in yesterday, so I was planning to nip out to the bank today. Fortunately Mrs Web Man spotted that the cheque hadn’t been signed … doh!

The client has now agreed to pay by BACS this time and hopefully they’ll continue doing so in future to save time and effort. We’ll see.