Last week I made some changes to this site to prevent spammers from harvesting e-mail addresses from this site and from posting spammy comments.
Unfortunately I made some mistakes, which made that visitors posting comments last week were automatically blocked from my site.
Last Thursday I fixed that problem, but also accidently introduced a new problem, so that comment posters received a 404 error.
As far as I know now, all issues have been solved, so go ahead and type your comments!
I am receiving quite some spam, which fortunately gets filtered out at my mail server. And there it sits quietly in my spam folder, waiting for the moment that I will delete it forever.
Sometimes I’ve had the feeling that I have to do something with it, but I never knew what. Alright, once in a while I report my spam to SpamCop, but that makes that I have to spend even more time on my spam. I want to do something with my spam, without having to spend a lot of time on it. Something like this Spamblog.
Brilliant! That’s it! I want that too!! I am going to create another weblog, and forward all my spam to an e-mail to Movable Type gateway. Let’s share my spam with the world!
I am not the only having the opinion that there is nothing but buying a real CD. Favourite quote from the comments:
Download is voor pubers met een budgetair probleem en een te snelle Internet-verbinding…
I also think that CD’s are way too expensive, but there are so many good CD’s missing in my collection, that I usually end up buying three old ones for the same price as a new CD.
[Update 2004.01.21]: Removed broken link
Today we turned on the heater for the first time, since the temperature dropped below 20°C.
Summer’s over…
There are some sites, whose content only consists of answers to Which XXXXX are you? contests.
To me it looks as a very cheap way to generate content, and tell something about yourself without telling anything concrete.
I never added this kind of stuff to my site, untill I found What Pixies song are you? Of course, if they mention my favourite band, I’ll have to do it:
In Heaven, everything is fine In Heaven, everything is fine In Heaven, everything is fine You got your good thing, and I've got mine In Heaven, everything is fine In Heaven, everything is fine In Heaven, everything is fine You got your good thing, and you've got mineIn Heaven
You’re mysterious, picky, and a bit aloof. Some people say you have a very cheery personality, but it’s hard to say because you mask your emotions behind dark pretenses. You enjoy watching obscure movies and going to plays, but by the end of the day you’re usually too wound-up by the ironies of your life to relax.
Mmmm… that doesn’t sound like me. Guess this will be the last post of this kind of contest results.
[Update 2004.01.21] Removed broken link
Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.
In het Nederlands:
Vlgones een oznrdeeok op een Eglnese uvinretsiet mkaat het neit uit in wlkee vloogdre de ltteers in een wrood saatn, het einge wat blegnaijrk is is dat de eretse en de ltaatse ltteer op de jiutse patals saatn. De rset van de ltteers mgoen wllikueirg gpletaast wdoren en je knut vrelvogens gwoeon lzeen wat er saatt. Dit kmot odmat we neit ekle ltteer op zcih lzeen maar het wrood als gheeel.
I guess everybody has received the message above, but it is not true.
I just love numbers, and check the access statistics of my sites almost on a daily basis. Sometimes when I visit a site, I also check the statistics of that site. What kind of people are reading that site? Where do they come from? What were they looking for? All very interesting information…
My own visitors could not have a look behind the screens of this site, since my access statistics are located on the management control panel, safely protected by a password.
The application to generate these statistics is called AWStats, which I was using already before I moved to my current hosting provider. Since I knew the structure of the application, I figured that it should be possible to install AWStats myself, and have my copy point to the data files that are generated automatically by my provider's copy of AWStats.
And that is exactly what I've done. I only needed to copy the main awstats.pl file, the lib directory and the icons directories, and could use the existing configuration file (after changing the DirCgi parameter) to have everything working.
So now everybody can check my access statistics!!!
Maybe someday I will create an About this site page, on which I will put a permanent link to my statistics. Some people put this link on their home page, but in my opinion this feature is of no use to the general visitor, and only adds bloat to the home page.
There are many ways to keep contact with the rest of the world.
By far the best way is to meet them in a bar, drinking a beer together. Unfortunately, this is not always a viable solution, so I also make use of electronics to keep contact.
Number two on my list is the good ol’ phone, which has the benefit of meta-communication (emotions, emphasis,…) over the other electronic methods.
Then I use of course the internet to communicate, I am using e-mail (more personal), Usenet newsgroups (good for technical problems) and this site.
However, it might take a while before I receive feedback to the things I express using these media. Then we have the two I’s: IRC and IM. The first I use when I have a technical problem that needs to be fixed urgently, the second for all personal communication for which using the telephone would be overkill.
Considering IM, at work I use Microsoft Messenger a lot. We have a lot of contacts abroad, and small companies are not able to hang on the phone to talk with the other side of the world for half the day.
Since we are basically a Microsoft shop, and most people have Messenger already installed on their machines, we are using this.
Personally, I am not a big fan of Messenger, mainly because you have no option of connecting without giving away your e-mail address. For business use this is no problem, but for my personal use, I prefer a solution that does not give away more than strictly necessary.
Until I moved to Spain I have been using ICQ at home, and today I started using it again to be able to solve some problems on the fimcap site.
So back to ICQ! I installed the Lite version at home, and everywhere else I can use the web version. For those people who also use ICQ: my number is 11807773. Everybody else can use my Messaging Center to send me a message when I’m on-line.
Visitors using older browsers like IE might have noticed that I recently started serving advertisements through Google.
People using more modern browsers as Mozilla or Firebird might not have noticed this, since these advertisements are not visible for them. This is not because I want to tease IE users (everybody is free to use any software to visit my site), or give compliments to Moz users (their clicks are also worth some money), but only because Google’s scripts are not working when send as application/xhtml+xml. I found the following errors in my Javascript console:
Error: w.google_ad_client has no properties
Source File: http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js
Line: 37
Error: google_ad_width is not defined
Source File: http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js
Line: 128
Of course I reported these errors to Google, but all I received was the following reply:
Hello Jeroen,The errors that you were experiencing last night were due to an AdSense system upgrade yesterday evening. This upgrade unfortunately created some technical difficulties and were temporarily unable to serve ads to sites in certain browsers. Not all browsers were effected.
However, our engineers have identified the problem, and I am happy to inform you that the issue is now resolved. Ads are now running on AdSense websites and you should not be seeing these errors anymore.
We value you as an AdSense publisher, and sincerely apologize for any inconvenience we may have caused you. If you are continuing to have problems with this or have any other questions or concerns, please let us know by replying to this email. One of our AdSense specialists would be happy to assist you. Thank you for your patience in this matter.
Sincerely,
The Google Team
Of course I answered them that the problem still exists, but until now I haven’t received an answer.
[Update 2003.09.26] Answer from Google:
Hello Jeroen,Thank you for writing us about this issue you are experiencing with your AdSense code. Unfortunately we are unable to replicate this problem. We taking your page, http://braintags.com/archives/2003/08/applicationxhtmlxml/, and running it through the W3C’s XML validator tool ( http://validator.w3.org/), we find that the entire page including our JavaScript code is currently XML complaint. (See Results: http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fjeroensangers.com%2Farchives%2F2003%2F08%2Fapplicationxhtmlxml%2F). Unfortunately we are unable to replicate this problem you are experiencing.
From previous emails it appears you state you are having this problem in Mozilla 1.4. Here is a list of browsers that supports our code https://www.google.com/adsense/faq-tech#q10. Are there other browsers on this list that you are having difficulty with? Also can you include a screenshot of the error since we are unable to replicate this problem on our end. Please include any additional information you may find may be useful in helping to resolve this issue.
Sincerely,
The Google Team
It looks like they don’t understand anything about specifying the MIME type when sending a page, so I send the following reply.
Hello,I know that my page is XML compliant, that surely is not the problem.
You have not been able to replicate the problem, because you have not used a gecko-based browser. Normally I send my pages with MIME type
text/html. This is what IE and the W3C validator get. Only to browsers which tell me in their request headers that they accept the MIME typeapplication/xhtml+xml(like Mozilla and Firebird), I use this MIME type to send my files.Note that even though the validator did not complain, I did not send it a valid page, since the specification tells that XHTML1.1 should be delivered as
application/xhtml+xml.To reproduce the error, just visit my page with Mozilla or Firebird, and you will see that the AdSense box will not appear. The only screenshot I can send you is the JavaScript console, but it only contains the two messages I have send before.
Kind regards,
Jeroen Sangers
[Update 2003.10.01] And finally Google realises that their script is not working:
Hello Jeroen,We appreciate your taking the time to offer us this feedback and encourage you to continue to let us know how we can improve Google AdSense. As AdSense is still a young program, new features are under consideration and your feedback is very helpful. This information has been passed on to our engineers and they will look into allowing our ads to be served in
xhtml+xmlpages.Sincerely, The Google Team
It took them almost a month (I reported this problem on September 4th) to realise that something is wrong. Let’s see how long it will take them to fix this problem.
How could I have missed the news! One of my favourite bands is getting together again.
Although the Pixies are not well-known by the general public, they have greatly influenced many big bands as Nirvana and the Distillers.
I was lucky enough to see them perform life in Vredenburg, Utrecht during their Doolittle tour, and later have seen spin-offs Frank Black & the Catholics and the Breeders; all very impressive concerts.
I surely hope that they will cross the Atlantic with their new tour.
