Asymptomatic

There must be intelligent life down here

HOA Site
May 18, 2007

My Home Owner’s Association has a web site that’s pretty sparse. I thought that I would take a bit of time to create a new site for them using Drupal, and increase my Drupal skills. There’s nothing like throwing yourself into the fire to get out of the comfort of the frying pan, you know? So I was thinking about some features that I might like as a home member of the association, and how I might accomplish them with Drupal.

The first thing I’m going to want to do is get a theme that pleases by aesthetic sensibilities. It’s not that the Drupal themes are ugly per se, but they all seem to offer the content in the same way - with the admin stuff exposed for anyone to see. I think that I want the full administrative side of the site to look different than the typical member-facing side. Rather than providing all of the functionality of Drupal the way Drupal does, I would like to select specifically what features appear on the site, and display them in an appealing fashion.

Gadgety Things
May 15, 2007

Every so often I get this urge to have things, things that I really shouldn’t buy. I usually end up making a list of these things and throwing them away. This is probably a good thing. But occasionally, I list them here so you can all see how materialistic I am.

I’ve been pricing out new desktop PCs lately. I’ve been trying to stay minimal but get the most for the money, knowing very little about individual components. My interest in knowing the minutia of component performance has waned over the years. What I’ve been pricing is a Core 2 Duo 2.67mhz (it seems that when you go Core 2, you might as well get the fastest one you can find), 4GB of RAM (I have 3 now, so I can’t do with less), a super-fast system drive and a giant secondary drive, the fastest pair of DL-DVD writers I can get, and a motherboard that supports dual 16x PCI Express slots to hold matching dual-head video cards. What are my needs 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.