Ryan Jones Blog – dotCULT.com Ryan Jones Blogs About Internet Culture, Marketing, SEO, & Social Media

can you buy prednisone over the counter in canada As you can see from the dotCULT sidebar, I’ve been using MyBlogLog for a few months now. If you haven’t tried it out, you probably should. It’s neat to be able to put a face with your readers.

Some of the things I love about it are the ability to accurately track both adsense and YPN clicks. I like that feature so much that I’ve installed it on a couple of other sites just for the stats.

With that said, there’s a few places I’d like to see some improvements on the stats.

For starters, it’s impossible to share your stats with others. Why is that? I’m in talks to sell one of my sites, and there’s no way for me to share stats. An export feature here would be great. Failing that, sizing it so that I can fit the whole report on a screenshot would be ever better.

I like the dashboard for each day. It’s great to see the top 10 referers, pages, and things people clicked. But if you try to run this for a date range it limits you to one category at a time. Why? I’d love to be able to see that same “yesterday” report but for a whole week or month instead. After all, I’m not as concerned with daily numbers as I am with monthly numbers.

I’d also like to see some further integration with other Yahoo properties. (If you hadn’t heard, Yahoo recently bought MyBlogLog.) It’s doing a great job of tracking my YPN clicks, but how much cooler would it be if I could have it show my revenue too? What about ad spending on overture? Can you tie those together and show me a net profit/loss for the site?

I’m not sure exactly what the pro service offers, but these would be some killer features!

What changes would you like to see with MyBlogLog? What do you think of the service? What features would you add?

Last weekend some friends and I were having a debate about corporate spyware. The question we asked is “what would you do if you found out your company monitors everything you do on your computer? Every website you visit, every key you press, and even look at your screen remotely from time to time.”

So where did this come from? Well on Friday I noticed my computer running slow, so like all geeks I did a ctrl alt del to see what was using so much memory. It turns out the problem was FireFox, but even more interesting I found a program called “swsys.exe” running. Since I’ve never heard of it, I Googled to see what it was.

Turns out, swsys.exe is part of an application called “Activity Tracker” that allows employers to log all websites, emails, and even keystrokes! It also lets them look at any employee’s screen in real time.

A quick “netstat” command showed my computer currently connected to my Boss’s. A couple setting tweaks, and that was no longer the case 🙂 That’s where the problem lies.

Over the weekend I talked to some fellow programmers at different companies, and even my old boss. All of them said “screw that, I’d walk out if I found out they were doing that.. that’s shady.”

Unfortunately, I didn’t get the chance to walk out. When I got home Friday I tried logging in to check my work email. (like I do every weekend – to check for any critical alerts or outages.) When my password wasn’t accepted, I knew what was coming.

I was fired this morning for “performance issues.”

I’m not going to bad talk a previous employer – it’s not something I do. I met some great people at Auto Credit Express and had some great opportunities. Altogether working at ACE helped me grow into a much better programmer than I was when I started almost 2 years ago.

On the flip side, I am glad to no longer be working for a company that engages in these practices. It’s one thing to protect your assets, it’s a totally different issue to not have trust in them to begin with.

Has anybody else experienced software like this at your job? Would you work for such a company? What would you do if you did?

Last week, Jeremy posted about a little game called Desktop Tower Defense. (Warning: do NOT click that link if you want to get anything productive done today.)

Desktop Tower Defense is perhaps the most addicting flash game I’ve ever played in my life. I’m serious!! I even got my cousin addicted. I told him about it at 10pm, and then woke up to a message from him at 4:30am saying “you’re right, it is.”

Basically, it’s the reason I didn’t do anything productive at all this weekend. So you’ve been warned. Don’t click this link.

If it seems like my spelling has improved that’s because, well, it has!

Before I moved dotCULT over to the new server I decided to mod it up a bit. I installed some less common options like pspell (the php spelling module) and mod_python (haven’t played with that yet) and some newer upgrades like PHP5 and MySQL5.

One of the benefits of having PHP5 and pspell is that I get to use cool AJAX wordpress plugins like Visual Spellcheck.
If you want to use it, you’ll have to use the more basic wordpress editor instead of the richtext (but I don’t like the richtext version anyway – it creates ugly code.)

Once activated, the plugin will put a little “check spelling” link above the textbox. Clicking it highlights any misspelled words like in the screenshot below:

It’s pretty cool – and easy to use. I really wish they’d make a spellchecker addon for ScribeFire. It’s so much easier to blog from FireFox than it is to open up my blog all the time. (especially when it’s having DNS issues… but don’t worry I think I have all fixed now.)

Matt was kind enough to send me an invite to Joost today, so I figured the least I could do was check it out and write about it. (please don’t ask for invites, I don’t have any to give out)

If you aren’t familiar with Joost, it’s the new project of Niklas Zennstrøm and Janus Friis. If you think those names sound familiar it’s because they do. Niklas and Janus are the same guys who made Kazaa and Skype.

So what is Joost? Joost is like Internet TV. You download the client (it’s very small, mine used less memory than my currently open Fire Fox!) and then using a bit torrent like system you can can watch TV on your computer. It’s not live TV but it does offer some cool channels.

There’s a comedy central channel, a fight channel, and a soccer channel.

Best of all, it even has Moose and Squirrel!!

If you look at the above image, you’ll get a good idea at what the Joost interface is like. While I love the service, I feel that the interface could use some more work.

In my opinion, the interface is a little clumsy. Sure it’s neat the way it overlays, but it doesn’t respond like I’d like it too. I had to click pause about 3 times before it finally paused, and once I got stuck in full screen mode and was unable to make the controls come back up.

Another annoying feature is when the playback catches up to the download – it gets choppy. The first thing I could think of was realplayer. Of course, as more people get on Joost I expect that this should resolve itself.

The channel selection is another area that could use some work. Take a look:

It took me a while to realize that the middle element is always highlighted – not the one that I’m hovering over. Ordinarily that’s not a problem, but if I click on a non-highlighted channel it loads – without any real notifcation to me that it’s doing so.

Is it annoying enough to get me to stop using it? No! I’d just prefer a more windows media player feel to the application.

It’s definitely a neat concept though, and I’m going to waste lots of time exploring it over the coming weeks.

Some of you who regularly play the market may remember an allegedy shady character named Mario Pino and his company Mellon Research that traded under the symbol MLON.

Well about a year ago MLON changed it’s name to Paychest, and those of us who had the MLON penny stock recieved a ton of shares of PYCT and XMET instead.

Paychest is a company vying to compete with Paypal (their whole business strategy of “be as good as our competitor” is a topic for another post), and XMET is xxstream entertainment – an adult themed club. I’m actually sort of afraid to visit their website.

Anyway, the shares were worthless. Myself, I had 6500 shares of XMET valued at $0.0001

So imagine my shock today when I opened up my AIM stock ticker to see this:

6500 shares at almost $6 is almost $40,000 !!!

As soon as my heart started again, I headed over to Ameritrade and placed a sell order with a limit of $3 (part of me was skeptical and thought this could be some sort of error.)

I’m not sure what happened, the Ameritrade quotes kept saying $5.95 but my $3 sell order wasn’t executing. 10 minutes later the price was the same, the stock’s volume had jumped from 10,000 to 10 million, and my order was still sitting there.

10 minutes after that, the price was back down to $0.0001 (ok, so I didn’t really LOSE $40,000…. but that’s not the point)

I have no idea what’s going on, but I don’t think my heart can take something like that again.

I’m really glad that April Fools Day is overwith. As far as the web is concerned, it’s one of my least favorite holidays. Sure it’s fun to read about TiSP and Other April Fools jokes, but if you’re trying to look something up or get some work done it can be annoying.

Anyway, the end of April Fools Day brings about one of my favorite holidays: Opening Day! Yes, it’s officially baseball season!

Opening day in Detroit was a big deal this year – what with us having made it to the world series. Downtown Detroit was full of life and energy today and it felt great! There were booths everywhere, all kinds of things to do, and just a general awesome mood in the city.

Best of all, Asif and I managed to get out of work at noon and head down to Comerica Park just in time to see the Tigers bat in the bottom of the first inning.

It’s a shame we missed the banner raising and the flyover during the national anthem, (although the jets did fly over our heads walking down woodward) but it was great to be part of the electric opening day atmosphere.

Unfortunately the tigers lost in the 10th inning, but it didn’t seem to dampen the mood of the crowd any. There’s high hopes for the Tigers this season, and I hope they can live up to their expectations. It’s got to be a lot different going from a feel good story to the team everybody is gunning for.

I wish I’d have had time to get my camera, (or at least change out of my long sleeve black shirt and put on some sunglasses or a hat – my face is burnt!) but I did manage to snap a few pictures with my cell phone.

Check out the view from our seats. Row 10 right behind 3rd base.