I had a couple of complaints from people that emailed me and claimed my site generated pop-up ads to them…

That was really surprising to me but I’ve now found out the source of it. And boy does this make me angry!

I’ve used a free web statistics service for a long time already - called Nedstat. Apparently Nedstat was taken over by Webstat4u at some point, and it now turns out that this company has also made some nasty, scary and shocking changes to the way they let you use their “free” service.

Here is the relevant excerpt from the current general terms and conditions:

webstats4U is a 100% FREE version for all webmasters. In order to finance the maintenance, hosting, new developments and to continue providing you with the world’s best FREE web analytics tool in the market, webstats4U will accept advertising sponsorships. These conditions are stated in our Terms of Use (http://www.webstats4u.com/terms/) and have also been communicated in on the front page of the reporting site as well as in our newsletters to all webmasters in August and September 2005.

These advertising sponsorships can appear as a pop-up or pop-under advertisement or slide-in flash format, and will at no point be implemented directly into your website as banners, buttons, links or similar.

We will keep sponsorships at a reasonable level by using frequency capping and always bear the user experience in mind by serving campaigns maintaining a code of conduct relating to the types of advertising we will accept. This means that users will not be exposed to the same ad many times and, importantly that no-one gets bombarded with ads.
Advertising is hosted and launched from webstats4U servers and will thereby not effect the performance of the individual website on which the user is surfing. It is our intention to provide the best experiences for websites, advertisers and end-users in our webstats4U network and for the web measurement service.

Scary isn’t it? Needless to say I was never updated on this small change in the terms and conditions - so I found out only recently.

I’ve dropped this service and the pop-up ads are history.

I now use my own webstat application which comes with my web hosting provider.

Webstats4u are sneaky weasels!

This is a post to see how fast I show up in search engines.

I renamed my blog from marcus weblog to marcus blog - it seemed the word weblog is not used as much as blog. Not surprising, but I’d never updated my site title because of this.

Let’s see if this site is now searchable by following terms:

blog hong kong

blog discovery bay

blog dutch hong kong

blog expat hong kong

I just uploaded the pictures of Matthijs’ 10th month. This time I used flickr.com as the engine behind the album. It’s very easy to use and straight forward to integrate the flickr.com photo albums in a posts in Wordpress.

Click on below title to go to the page with latest pictures:

Matthijs 10 Months Album

I’ve finished the picture library of Matthijs at different ages.

Click on “Matthijs” in the top row of this site and then select which part you’d like to see.

Enjoy!

These libraries are created with a Wordpress plugin:

Pop-up Image Galery Version 4.2.2

By Andy Staines of YellowSwordfish

Here’s an Itunes test.

The attached little sound fragment (a ‘ding’ sound) should show up in Itunes if you subscribe to my Podcast.

If you have Itunes installed, click on:

itpc://marcdelange.com/?feed=rss2&category_name=podcasts

Failing that, go to Itunes, select “Advanced”, then “Subscribe to Podcast” and copy and paste this url into the entry field:

http://marcdelange.com/?feed=rss2&category_name=podcasts

Upon subscription, you should see my blog’s name show up including the below sound file.

newnews.wav

For a while now I though it was time to give my weblog a face lift.

I’ve ditched the previous Metateque software for the popular Wordpress software.

The big difference between the two is that Metateque is a client-side blog tool, whereas Wordpress is a server side applications.

Metateque would basically install on your PC, maintain its posts in an Access database, and generate HTML which would then need to be uploaded to any webserver.

Wordpress on the other hand requires a server based installation. It’s a collection of Perl scripts that works in conjunction with a MySQL database. This requires a bit more from the hosting side then just FTP access, your webhosting provider would need to support Perl and MySQL for this to work.

Needless to say, this took some time to figure out and test, but the whole process was not as difficult as I thought it would be. The hardest was to migrate the old Metateque database to the Wordpress format. This took some re-engineering and the use of Excel to construct a database import for Wordpress.

Upgrades over previously is a lot more interactivity, and ease of managing the site. As you see there’s a comments option on each post, and it’s much easier to include dynamic side bar elements. On the right you see the latest 6 pictures from my Phlog site included. And I also like the Tag Cloud on top left. The larger the font size, the more posts there are for that tag (mostly uncategorized though ).

Let me know if you’ve comments, and if you’re a Metateque user who looks to migrate as well, I’m happy to share my experiences.