Author: Sarah King

This is my website.

August 14, 2006 / Other Stuff

I logged into check my Adsense the other day and saw that New Zealand is on the list of countries which are eligible for electronic payments.

Setup is easy enough, just follow the steps. The only point of confusion might be in the terminology surrounding the account details.

Sort Code is used in the UK to describe the bank and branch information – in the US too I guess. But it’s alien to us kiwis…

July 28, 2006 / PHP & Web Development

My attention was drawn today to another discussion about newbies and their click-n-fraud requests made on their own sites, along side their links on other sites and in emails. Google (and hopefully the other ad networks) quickly blitz these fraudsters and they find themselves without any advertising at all.

A quick search on Google comes up with examples like this:

click fraud example
It’s been reported and don’t expect to see ads on that site too much longer.

Now that’s easy situation, but what about when the site involves revenue sharing via a joint account?

A couple of days before the launch of WDANZ I thought I’d use the opportunity to analyse how effective Google Alerts are. I wanted to test the breadth of indexing and how quickly the reactions of bloggers might be picked up.

In the table below you can see how Google indexed the sites talking about this breaking news item.

Curiously, the reports seem to be out of date – the ComputerWorld example is the best – by the time the alert comes through the story had been buried in the archives.

This doesn’t spell doom for Google’s alerts – where they can direct you to a permalink – but it does render the homepage alerts virtually worthless.

Perhaps those three were never meant to go together!

digg.com social networking site

Social Networking sites, and Digg.com in particular, aim to give users the chance to read the latest news, to vote on it and to share anything they’ve found.

They rely on group participation to provide content and to provide a reason to keep returning.

There’s a story entitled How much a digg worth? (someone is buying digg!!) where the following comment is made:

it is quite disgusting how people using digg for their own gain

And that in itself is comical. Isn’t Digg about gaining knowledge, gaining experience, gaining entertainment, gaining traffic and gaining exposure? Gain is the underlying motivation of every user who visits Digg.

Perhaps it’s just the taint of money that turned that user off?

Personally I’m unashamed that I use Digg for personal gain – it’s a great tool to keep abreast of the latest tech news – as judged by my peers – and to promote this blog. So for the rest of this entry I’ll make myself a case study.

I’m not a big user of Digg.com but you’ll find my profile at http://www.digg.com/users/sarahk/.

July 4, 2006 / Technical Discussions

I’m a moderator on a few forums, one phpBB and the rest are vBulletin. One was a surprise – I hadn’t realised until I started getting reported posts 😉

Personally I find the vBulletin forums better to moderate than phpBB but it’s a relatively close call – until you start banning people and looking for cheats. Then vBulletin comes into it’s own.

July 4, 2006 / New Zealand

Today’s the day!!! The Web Developers Association of New Zealand is officially launched.

The NZ industry has had informal networking groups such as the PHPUG and Meetup.com organised gatherings but has no national identity. Something which is sorely needed.

Dennis Smith has taken the bull by the horns and started up the WDANZ. There are three levels of membership and it’s primarily aimed as a training and marketing tool for local developers.

I spoke with Dennis last month about

July 1, 2006 / Fun and SEO Games
June 29, 2006 / Sport

In the article that follows Trevor Mallard is quoted as saying

The “politically correct” habit of not keeping score in children’s competitions should be a thing of the past

Well it should be, but I have children at primary school and