I have been reading some rumors ahead of today’s google announcement about the possibility of Google offering up their new phone for free to users who opt-in to targeted advertising on the device. Seems plausible to me. I wonder if just the phone would be free or if the service would also be gratis?

Again, this is just a rumor that has cropped up. Would you go for it if the phone and service were free? I think I would...

UPDATE:  This ended up being just a rumor after all.

                          

I am working on reviving a semi-dead forum of mine and decided to give it a kick start with a small Google Adwords campaign. Before starting the campaign, I wanted to be sure I could track conversions, which in this case a conversion means a new member signing up. The forum is running on the popular Vbulletin forum software. I have never seen any documentation of where to place the conversion code in Vbulletin, so after some trial and error, I got it working. Here are 3 easy steps, with screen shots, to show you how to implement it on your own vbulletin forum.

Step 1. Grab your conversion code from Adwords.

Step 2. Go into the admin area of your Vbulletin installation and select “Search in Phrases”. Then enter the search term “Your registration is now complete”.

Step 3. Next you will see the phrase search results containing the search phrase we used. This is the snippet of code that is displayed when a user successfully completes a registration in Vbulletin. Edit these and add your Adwords Conversion code after the text and save. That’s it!

                          

One of the highlights of my summer was getting to see Bleu play an intimate show for about 10 people at my friends house in Providence, Rhode Island. He played songs from his new album “A Watched Pot” as well as stuff from his previous album, Redhead.

                          

I noticed last week that monster rolled out a new updated version of their website. They added a lot of new ajax stuff on the front, which might seem cool, but obviously they didnt adequately test it. After using it for several days, I have experienced a lot of bugs.

Here is an example:

I find a job I am interested in. I click the apply button and the dialog box for me to enter in my information is off the top of the screen leaving me unable to apply for this position. This is just one of the many user interface bugs I have found. Not being able to apply for a job is a pretty big problem if you are a job site. At this point, I have to say the new monster.com sucks.

Have you had problems with the new Monster.com? Let me know in the comments.

                          

One of the worst things about being a webmaster is the constant battle we wage against spammers and scrapers. A majority of these creeps have IP addresses which originate from outside the United States in countries like China, Russia, Latvia and Nigeria.

After years of being a webmaster, I have found that a majority of these countries send only bots and other nefarious users to my sites. So I use htaccess IP banning to handle these net-scumbags most of the time.

IP banning in a htaccess file looks like this:

<Limit GET HEAD POST>
order allow,deny
deny from 202.70.112.0/20
allow from all
</LIMIT>

There are many services online that will give you IP CIDR block listings by country such as IPDeny, Block a Country and Country IP Blocks. The last two will actually generate the htaccess deny statements for you, which is a huge time saver.

If you ever find the need to block country IP’s, be sure to check out the sites above.