It seems that Google/FeedBurner have seen the light and made some of their premium features available for free. In particular MyBrand is now available to everyone meaning I can remove the hack I installed last month.
Via Techcrunch.
I just received my first PDF spam (that’s actually come through to my inbox - SpamProbe could have blocked some already). Do these spammers have nothing better to do?
Check out the iPhone guided tour.
He’s smug because he’s got an iPhone and you haven’t.
Update: I love how in the stock quotes application Apple are up and Adobe are down 
For the last two weeks I’ve been hunting down obscure bugs since upgrading PHP, Apache etc. First there was an issue with Gallery, which I solved with a very hacky fix. But the one that’s been bugging me since was with WordPress - it would display the wrong feed for some pages. Finally after many failed attempts to find anything, I noticed mod_cache had been enabled as part of the upgrade to Apache 2.2. Searching the internet is all about knowing what keywords to find - mod_cache wordpress picked out this from Julien Valroff as the top result. Hopefully that should be the problem solved!
I noticed earlier today that Google Maps seems to have improved its satellite coverage for the UK. I haven’t noticed any announcements about it but you can now see pretty cool images of all sorts of places:
It’s not complete, but it’s a lot better and more recent imagery that before, and it doesn’t have a join running right through my house!
Update: Seems they updated on 2nd June.
Apparently Russia “could aim nuclear weapons at targets in Europe“.
We’ve been here before…
The Guardian Technology blog linked to a list on Mashable.com titled “My Soul, and 10 Other Things that Google Owns“. It’s a fairly obvious list of things that Google do to rule your life. Many of them apply to me - I use Google Calendar and Google Reader all the time. Google Maps is pretty good for mapping although I wish they’d open up a UK geocoder in their API. Jack Schofield thinks the most interesting one is “My paycheck”, maybe, but not for me - but please click the adverts and prove me wrong!
For me, the interesting one is the recent announcement that Google is to buy Feedburner.
With its acquisition of Feedburner, Google now controls the leading company for managing RSS feeds. Thus, Google knows everything about my readers – how many of them there are, where they come from, and how they access my content. How might Google use this information? Targeting ads in my feeds based on context or geography sounds like a start, but using cookies the company could also theoretically collect data on my readers and better tailor ads to them throughout Google’s product line.
Feedburner is a really cool service - it allows you to track statistics on your feeds and see how many people are reading your site and in what types of RSS reader. But I’ve always had a major problem with Feedburner - the way they suggest you redirect your feed to their servers. This means that as soon as a user subscribes to your feed you lose control over how they access your site. I’m constantly amazed that people are willing to sign over their feeds to Feedburner just to get some stats or a few bucks from advertising revenue.
I am interested in better stats on my blog though, and as much as I wish there was an open source system that was able to give me good information about who’s reading the site, I can’t find one. So I set out looking for a way to use Feedburner without signing my soul away and with a bit of help from Google knocked up this bit of mod_rewrite magic:
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !^FeedBurner.*
RewriteRule ^feed/ http://feeds.feedburner.com/MichaelNolan?format=xml [P,L]
All it does is check to see if it’s the Feedburner feed fetcher requesting my feed, and if it is return the RSS feed, otherwise we proxy the content of the Feedburner feed which adds to our stats. The only downside I’ve noticed so far is that all stats appear to come from the UK, where my server is hosted. I can live with that.
Strangely, this failure could be corrected by Google. If Feedburner was brought into the Google Apps feature-set rather than just Analytics/Adsense then they could allow you to host stats under your own domain, thus protecting the security of your feed.
There’s much talk on the superinterwebs about the future of Facebook. What I hadn’t thought about before was how big they are for photo sharing. Facebook say 60 million photos are added each week which makes them bigger than Yahoo/Flickr and MySpace/Photobucket. My money’s on Google picking them up to get into the social network market properly (Orkut? Saywhat?) which should really give MySpace a much needed kicking.
On the off chance that anyone actually reads this and is looking for work in the Web Communications field, there’s a job currently being advertised at Edge Hill for Web Communications Project Manager. Deadline is 25th May so get your skates on. More details on the Web Services blog.
It’s a few years old, but I’ve never seen the video before today. Pure 80s pixel animation…