Asymptomatic

There must be intelligent life down here

Your Tag Clouds Are a Bit Hazy
May 14, 2007

On page 74 of Web Designer magazine #130 is an article on making tag clouds in PHP. I suppose you could do it their way, but a few little things left me puzzled about their implementation, and I thought I would give it a go myself.

I’m a big, big fan of associative arrays in PHP. Most people who know arrays know that they are variables that contain a set of elements indexed by numerically, but PHP can index arrays in two ways. An associative array allows you to use a string key to identify each element of the array, rather than a number. The strings have to be unique, but for the purposes of creating a tag cloud, this is perfect because we only want to list each element once.

Troubles With Certain Domains
May 10, 2007

I’ve been advertising with Google for a while, and I’ve added a few domains to my competitive ad filters over the years. I recently got a message from the AdSense folks telling me that I shouldn’t exclude those domains because they monetize well on my site. I don’t know why. Let’s take a look:

blogger.com - Probably does well because my site is often returned as the top entry for many “blogging” search terms.
datingfly.com - The first of a handful of dating sites to plaster their fannies on my site, I wouldn’t trust getting a date to the looks of this site, nor do I like the idea of hawking “love services” from my blog. Seems kind of skeezy.
perfectmatch.com - A competitor to the eHarmony dating site. I’m not really sure what the attraction for dating sites is to my blog.
philadelphiasingles.org - This dating site is interesting because it’s directed at people in my area. More about that after the list…
rojo.com - They are a web aggregator that upset me one day when I realized that it’s basically the Entertainment Tonight of aggregators, skimming the surface of web news and going no deeper.
savethechildren.org - I was getting tired of public service ads showing up on pages that Google didn’t know what to do with.
subscriptionsforsoldiers.com - At some point at the beginning of the Iraq conflict, these ads started showing up on very inappropriate posts.
thebiotechdictionary.com - My guess is that these guys mistakenly thought that buying ads on sites that had domains with terms that were the same as in their dictionary would increase their pagerank for those terms. Even though that’s not true, I didn’t want to help them redefine where Google points “Asymptomatic”.
thegayquiz.com - Hey, your lifestyle is your lifestyle and I respect that, but my mom (and other family) reads my blog, thanks. If dating sites aren’t cool, this fluff site certainly isn’t either.
typepad.com - Really, I have no idea why I blocked this domain.

Something I re-learned recently is that it’s pretty darn easy to correlate an IP address to a metropolitan region in the US. That’s how they manage to target ads to geographic places. Google actually seems to have narrowed the metro areas into the regions that most tools use to define what the region is. Or, worded in a less convoluted way, Google seems to have defined what metro regions are on the web. That’s kind of weird.

Up In Your Grill
May 10, 2007

It’s no secret that we like to grill food and that people like to eat food that we’ve grilled. That’s why the slow and ultimate demise of our grill over the past year was a bit upsetting.

The grill didn’t survive the move very well. I think it’s also possible that something broke inside it, but every time we used it after the move it essentially caught on fire. The insides would flame long after the gas was off, and it would happen every time we cooked with it. The flames were high and uncontrollable, and we just couldn’t use it any more.

Create Thumbnail in PHP
May 08, 2007

I wanted to get some thumbnail creation code in PHP to use for a little project I was working on, and so I traipsed over to Google and asked for “php thumbnail”. I took a peek at the first search result, snagged the code, inserted it in my test app, and went merrily on my way. And that will be the last time I trust Google to find me code.

There are many problems with the code that I got. It’s not malicious, but it does many easy things wrong. And the one thing that it’s supposed to do well - the thing for which Google found it - it doesn’t do correctly.

Latent Thoughts on Old News
May 07, 2007

I had a few thoughts on the recent HD-DVD folderol that was going on at Digg and other places, and I figured I would let them stew a couple of days to see what I managed to mentally sift out of them.

There have been a few interesting points made on the subject of the release of the HD-DVD key. If you haven’t heard, or you just didn’t care, or you had been left ignorant by big media news (no surprise if that’s the case), then you should know what happened before we begin.