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AdBlock Plugins are Wrong

After some debate with Nathan, Jared and I, then some twitter posts today [quotably is cool], I’d like share my point of view here: AdBlockers are wrong.

Simply, they’re built to circumvent revenue from the site owners.

Before you point out that I have ads on this site; I don’t care if you block my ads. I do not count on any of that money on a monthly basis, those few dollars are a benefit or reward of having a blog. But, if this blog was my day job and I was trying to survive off advertising from my content I would be pissed if I knew people were inhibiting me from earning money from my hard work.

There are a lot of web 2.0 startups that would not be here if it weren’t for ad services like adwords, even the ones that provide subscription models rely on ads to cusion the overhead of providing a popular free service.

There’s a viscous circular argument of hypotheticals because web advertising is not like anything else:

  • TV commercials: not a very good example because while commercial fast-forwarding isn’t illegal, commercial skipping is closely was(i.e. replaytv).
  • Jumping a turnstile at a subway: it’s clearly illegal and blocking ads isn’t illegal by written law.

And that’s were I agree to disagree. Just because it’s not written law doesn’t mean it’s right (ethically).

As I’ve mentioned before I’m not trying to persuade anyone, make your own desicion. I use TLA on my site and a lot of people disagree; some say it’s unethical for the same general reasons I think adblocking is wrong and I’ve concluded they’re different.

Background apps on the iPhone - SDK 4

“There are definitely some very interesting methods added to UIApplication’s delegate, including methods for badging the Springboard icon, and methods related to gaining and resigning “active” status - seems like background apps may be permitted somehow.” #

Interesting, I wonder how they’ll handle it (if they do allow some type of background apps, even with cron or something) because I still think they need to be careful. I’d love background apps, for a Google Reader app or a GTalk client but I don’t want my phone overbudened enough to affect the overall speed and stability of the phone.

Parsing the Querystring for dynamic content (and images)

Thanks to Nathan I was able to implement some javascript that would dynamically replace some eye-anchors through a query string in the URL on my company’s website.

We’ve been wanting to create some value propositions to our prospects on different marketing channels for a while now but until we get Omniture’s Test and Target we’ll have to settle for this little trick.

For our tests we’re going to take our normal landing pages and present different creative to our major channel, pay-per-click. Making sure we keep this test meaningful we’re keeping the old add copy and landing page but splitting the ad campaign, essentially making it a multi-variant test by splitting traffic to the same page with different query strings.

On to the technical side of things:

  • Download Adam’s JS here
  • Upload the code to your server and reference it in the header of your pages like so,
<script src=“http://dancameron.org/qs.js”></script></head>
  • Create your script and objects. Below is what I use to swap out the image.
<script>

/* Query String Script ask DanC to modify or use */

var qs = new Querystring();

var img=qs.get(’img’,'http://dancameron.org/default.jpg’);

var title=qs.get(’title’,'default tile’);

var url=qs.get(’url’,'default.url’);

var alt=qs.get(’alt’,'default.alt’);

document.write(’<a href=”‘+url+’”><img src=”‘+img+’” border=”0″  alt=”‘+alt+’” title=”‘+title+’”></a>’);

</script>
  • Then I just add the strings to the URLs like,

http://test.com?img=http://dancameron.org/mytestimage.jpg&alt=blah&title=blah&url=http://google.com

Smash Bros. Brawl

My review of the wii smash bros. game…oh forget it this guy made a video instead.

Jail breaking and hacking your iPhone

If you’re looking to jailbreak or hack your iPhone you really need to check out ZiPhone. Forget about JailBreakMe.com, it doesn’t work on the newer firmware releases but the community and Zibri are working hard on keeping this app easy for all and up-to-date.

It’s as simple as running the program, clicking on one of two options and waiting for your phone to finish updating.

I haven’t unlocked or upgraded my baseband yet but when the 3G phone comes out I’m planning to unlock this one and sell it on eBay or craigslist. I’ll probably post about it when the time comes around.

Search Everything 4.5

I just committed search everything 4.5 to wordpress extend.

There are some major fixes for wordpress 2.5; like tag and category fixes and Japanese localization support. So go and update if you’re using it.

Thanks to all the wonderful contributers out there that’s help build SE for the last year.

There are some other issues that need some attention, but I don’t even have time to write this post, so please help me out like Chris Meller and jdleung did this time around; even pointing out the obvious helps these days.