I´ve been ill all weekend so I didn´t set my alarm this morning (it´s Monday) to see how I felt before going in to work. As it turned out I woke up in time for the 9am bus and felt not too bad so headed in. I did want a fairly easy day though as I was only feeling about 50%.

 
I got into town and thought I´d kill some time by goign and buy myself an iPod Nano from Dixons. Found the display case with the white one in and it does look as good in real life as in the ads. I grabbed a sales assisstant and asked for one of the black ones. "We´ve got none in and we don´t know when we will have any". So much for my plan of getting one quick by getting it in town.
 
I got into work and hit the online shops. Some had them "available 1-2 weeks", some now but expensive and some not at all. I was grumpily putting more vague searches into Google and thinking that I´d have to wait a couple of weeks for my new iPod when I thought I´d hit the Apple Store sponsered link and find out how much they were "Officially".

 
As it turned out they were exactly the same as it would have been from Dixons. Not bad. I placed an order and it should be sitting on my doorstep in a week (not litterally I hope, I live in an alley).
 
I celebrated by shoving a fresh 512 meg on music onto my Shuffle before I pass it on to someone a little less geeky than me next week.

We´ve just done a mailing out to 13,000 receipients using a custom php script I wrote that goes and gets a bunch of email addresses from the database and then loops through them and calls the php mail() function. It all seemed to be working well until we started getting feedback from some of the people on the list saying that they were getting up to 11 copies of the email.

 
This seemed very strange since I´ve used this script many times without any problems so I decided to get down to the root of the problem. Luckily I had put in some error checking so I went to the database to see what was going on. Long story short, the php bit was only being run once for each email address, including the mail function. For some reason though, sendmail was pushing out more than one copy of the message.
 
I decided to hit google and see what I could find out there before I started messing around with scripts and testing different server configurations. After a bit of searching I found out that nobody really knows what might be causing it. Some reckon it´s sendmail pushing up the server load, some reckon it´s php´s mail function not receiving "true" variables from sendmail.
 
Either way, since there´s no definate answer I´m going to start running some tests and see what I can come up with myself.

Well, No. As an internet company I think Google rates as my "Most Trusted" so I doubt that there would be spam coming from a valid Gmail account.
 
There is the other point that the email that got shoved into my Outlook Junk Email folder was from me! It was a quick mail I sent myself before I left for work and if I hadn´t decided to have a quick browse of the junk while I was waiting for something to burn then I never would have got it.
 
True, the stuff in the email was "gibberish" (stuff about 302 ErrorDocument rewrites…), but it was still a valid email. Oh well.

Since I started getting the bus about four months ago I went and bought myself an iPod Shuffle to make the three hour bus journey every day a little less… BORING!!!

This was after I had vowed not to go down the iPod route as it seemed like it was giving in and trying to be like part of the cool crowd. But after checking out the specs (the built in battery and charge by USB are better than 1 x AA mp3 players and the fact it just shows up as a removable flash drive if you don´t have iTunes installed), the price and the fact that they do look shit hot, I decided that I would get a Shuffle.

I then started using iTunes as my default music player. This was after using Winamp 2.77 for nearly five years. If you shove your mp3 collection through Windows Media Player first then iTunes does a good job of sorting and consolidating massive collections. It also has a nice UI and although your stuck with iTunes Music Store only, it interfaces well and makes buying and importing songs into your collection easy.

Then it started to get even worse… I saw the advert for the iPod Nano. Technically and size wise, it´s kind of a combination between the Shuffle and Mini (which it´s actually replacing). I´ve been on the site and checked it out and then went to find out the prices on Dabs (pff, 2 weeks wait my arse) I checked my bank balance and tomorrow I´m off to Dixons to grab one. I´ll let you know what it´s like after I´ve had a play.

I´ve got thousands of sites to look after but I do have a few personal ones as well. Two of them are "blogs" (one actually is - this one, the other one is more for fun: Welly´s World), but the third one is just a basic site promoting PHP development services.

 
I use this one as my home page since it has links to the stuff I use regularly and is fast to load. Only problem is that it´s had the same design for over three years now and apart from the fact that all the code is pretty naff, I´ve got bored of looking at it a couple of hundred times a day. A redesign was in order! I like it anyway.

We decided to do a quick redesign of all of our training sites. Andrew came up with the designs in Fireworks and mailed them across to me to do the coding. I had wanted to recode one of the training sites anyway including some re-writing of URLs and re-ordering the code to try and boost the SERPs.
 
I started this and after about half a day I was only about a quarter the way through. Then we decided to apply the new design to this site as well and since it is very similar code to the other ones it only took me about two hours to apply the new design and effectively optimise the entire site. Saved a load of time anyway!

There´s a new type of spam I was reading about on Slashdot today called Splogging. I´d actually come across this before when I was doing some random Googling when I was bored. The ones I came across were obviously for porn sites since they are always after getting more traffic.
 
The way splogging works is that they automatically create a load of blogs on a free blogging service (in this case it was Blogger) filled with keyword loaded but essentially gibberish sentences and then link back to the main site.
 
This is a bit of a pain in the arse as far as contaminating the serps goes and the various services like Blogger are working on getting the problem fixed. The thing I don´t really get is why they´re doing it in the first place. It´s obviously an attempt to get a higher PageRank but the sites they are linking from all have PR0 so if the formulas in google´s algorithm are what they say they are, then it shouldn´t have much of an effect.
 

Anyway, enough talk of PageRank, I´m going to watch Lost instead

We´ve done mailings before using PHP scripts that I´ve written (not spam, just large automatic newsletters) which have been sent out overnight by our own mail server. The problem is that I have to spend an hour or so creating the code for the message.
 
Since we want to start doing more of these now, I decided to come up with a more automated system so there´s less for me to do (always a bonus). After a days programming we now have a system that does it all! The first stage is a form where we can fill in a subject line and choose the email contact list to send the email to. This generates a mailto link that creates a new message that has the address for the mailing programme filled in along with a custom subject line that identifies the group as well as the subject.
 
The programme then checks this mailbox every night and if there´s a new message it automatically sends out the message to that group. It also adds code to put an image on the page and sends a copy to another mailbox of ours. The second email account is then checked and if the copy of the message is there, that email is verified as "sent". The image is used to verify the message has been opened. The path to the image on our server has the users email address encoded into it. When the email client requests the image, a php script is run through the old 404 ErrorDocument method and updates the database that that user has read it. It then sends that actual image to the client.
 

This way the others in the office can do large automated mailings to different groups and track the progress of them without involving me at all.

Not long to go until the skips of Britain will be packed with old 14" TVs. That´s right, by 2012 the UK is planning to cease analogue TV broadcasts and go over entirely to digital.
 
By then most of us will be on digital TV of some kind anyway so it´s not too big a deal. There are a few brigth sides though. Digital is better quality than analogue and the extra bandwidth of digital means that there´s loads more stuff you can do (e.g. interactive).
 
Secondly it frees up the part of the spectrum that´s currently used by analogue for other stuff. Since it´s a pretty crowded spectrum and there´s already transmitters all over the country then this could be very useful.

 
Time to go and stick the Simpsons on BBC2 while I can.

Ever seen the ASCII art things on the net or stuff? The kind of thing where you get a picture made up of letters and characters. Well now you can convert your jpeg pictures to ascii images.

I’ve put the converter on another server since I don´t want to overload this one. Have a play. If it´s being slow that´s because it´s a bit intensive and others might be using it.

ASCII Art Creator

I’ve now moved it here: ASCII Art Creator