It’s been awhile since I poked around Google Maps. But I was doing a search the other day, and noticed a new feature called “Street View”, which is pretty impressive! You can get a street-level picture of many major streets, and you can even “drive” along (by clicking on the forward arrow in the picture, you can see the view a little further up).

Here’s a screen-shot of this cool new feature:

BOTTLEROCKET is the Namecheap coupon code for July.

For a limited time (until end of today, 7/1), NICEDEAL will give a discount for domain renewals. Can be also used to extend the domain (i.e. can be used even if the domain isn’t expiring).

If you’re a Webmaster, and haven’t signed up for AuctionAds yet, you should. Basically it is an advertising network for the eBay affiliate program: The AuctionAds advertisement shows an item listed on eBay, if one of your viewers click on the ad and end up buying that item, you get a commission.

There is one problem with AuctionAds though. And that is, unlike Google Adsense’s ability to “read” the page and present contextual and relevant ads, AuctionAds has a “simple” parameter where you must enter keywords. So if you want AuctionAds to show Cell Phone listings on eBay, you need to enter “Cell Phone” into that field. While it allows the webmaster an ability to “focus” the ad, it’s rather tedious… you can’t enter one code, and expect that the ad will always be relevant. Maybe if your website was just about Cell Phones, that’d be cool. But if, for example, you’re using on a general blog where you post about a variety of topics, there’s no “simple” way to make the ad relevant.

To that end, I’ve written some simple code to work around that deficiency…

In single.php, find:

<?php the_content(); ?>

And add this above it:

<?php
$catname = ”;
foreach((get_the_category()) as $cat) {
$catname = $catname . $cat->cat_name . ‘,’;
}
$catname = rtrim($catname,’,');
?>
<script type=”text/javascript”><!–
auctionads_ad_kw = “<?php echo $catname; ?>”;
… your auctionads parameters …
–></script>
<script type=”text/javascript” src=”http://ads.auctionads.com/pagead/show_ads.js”>
<script>

What the code does is:

• AuctionAds is to appear on each post: when you read the single blog post, you will call single.php (or whatever your theme calls it… Redoable calls it single_post.php).
• Because I file all my blog posts in various Wordpress Categories, it’s relatively simple to identify the focus of each post.
• Using PHP code, I extract the full category list for that specific post, and insert those words into the AuctionAds keyword field. Thus ensuring that AuctionAds presents auctions relevant to the topic of the blog post.

This is what I learnt today! Hopefully it’ll be of use to others

Before reading any further, check this out.

You’ve just been RickRolled!

’80s pop star Rick Astley is currently the subject of a worldwide internet prank. People are emailing friends with a link promising exciting video footage - porn, new movie trailers, breaking news stories or something similar - instead, they get the music video for Rick Astley’s 1987 hit, Never Gonna Give You Up. It uses the same modus operandi as spam and viruses (remember the Anna Kournikova virus from a few years back?), but with a funny, benign outcome. Unless you argue that being exposed to Rick Astley’s Stock Aitken and Waterman hit is as bad as getting a virus. So if you fancy pranking your friends with a bit of dodgy ’80s music, use this link (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHg5SJYRHA0) and tell them it’s something they’ll really love.

Could Rick Astley become the new Hoff?

Recently, I received a recommendation to check out Crazy Egg. I was very impressed by what this site could do. To summarize, Crazy Egg allows you to see where people are clicking on a website. But the beauty is, not only will it show you which links people click on (which you can easily get from many free tools like Google Analytics), Crazy Egg will also show you things that people click on which are not links!

Here is an example of Crazy Egg’s heatmap of TubeBattle’s “live” links:

It’s very cool to see where people click, especially when I’m presenting thumbnail pictures.

And this is an example of the heatmap of TubeBattle’s “non-live” links. That is, people are clicking on the page, where nothing happens because it’s just a graphics image and not a real link.

As you can see, there are alot of clicks going just to the left of “Featured Video”. That’s because there is a small icon there (which is just used as a bullet) which looks like the “play” icon! Anyway, the obvious solution, now that I know about this “problem”, is to make that icon click-able.

Crazy Egg has a very impressive system, which has taken alot of the guess work in web UI design! Having worked for many years at eBay, I know how hard it is to do UI testing: running hundreds and thousands of people through usability sessions to figure out what people like and don’t like. In under 12 hours, I collected data from all 5000 visitors to TubeBattle… all without me doing any work. I love it!