But, what is the point? It says in the article that the information stored isn’t uploaded to Apple. Ok, fine. It also says that the data is only stored locally and therefore can only be accessed if you have the actual phone (in so many words). So what information are they trying to give us?

They say that there is no indication to the user that this information is being stored. Really? I figured it out using the Pictures app – it tells you where you took the various photos on your phone. How do they think it knows that? Magic?

But my big problem with it – the reason I’m on a rant is the headline “iPhone tracks users’ movements”. For a supposedly impartial organisation like the BBC why have they chosen a simple 4 word sentence that will grab the attention of every iPhone user and scare them a little? What are they doing to help people? Nothing.

The BBC is behaving no better than a tabloid newspaper. But unlike the tabloids we are forced to pay for it.

Problem was that one of the sites, Wellsy’s World was working fine but not displaying any Adsense ads. I went to check the settings and everything was fine so I went to check Google’s reports and it turned out that site hadn’t had any impressions for well over a month – something had broken before the move and I hadn’t noticed.

I tried altering the adsense settings, updating WordPress, checking the privacy settings, creating a new adsense ad and adding that to the site but nothing worked. I then tried removing the plugin and trying some others. None of them worked – half of them wouldn’t even install. At the point when I was about to give up and hard code the adsense code into the wordpress files myself I tried installing the original plugin again and for some reason (maybe is was a newer version) it didn’t just pull in the saved settings from before but asked me to set it all up from scratch again. I did so and hey-presto!

I should have originally just followed rule 1 of IT support – turn it off and turn it on again.

I went and got the latest WordPress 2.8 and uploaded the files to my server in the folder for the first blog. I ran the upgrade script and everything seemed fine. I was greated with the new styled login page and then got to the dashboard without a hickup. I then found my post in the Drafts folder, hit publish and it informed me that it had been published – nice!

However, when I went to the site to view the post, all I got was the Blank Screen of Death as it’s known. I bit of tinkering showed me that the PHP files were working fine – it just didn’t want to output anything. After a bit of playing around in the admin bit I finally clicked on the Themes and was presented with a message saying my theme was broken.

I loaded up the default theme and now everything works fine! Now I can just tinker with the new version and then find a theme that isn’t so boring…

[Note: I've since changed the theme so no offence to the person who designed this one]

Much Googling later seemed to suggest that people were having the same problem after an upgrade to 2.6 but we were still on 2.1. There were suggestions that the problem could be caused by a plugin incompatability so I thought I’d try disabling them to see if it helped. Since I couldn’t login all I did was FTP to my server, browse to the plugin directory and rename the entire thing to plugins2.

This let me login without a problem so I recreated the plugins folder and copied them back one at a time to see which ones weren’t working. I repeated this for them all and now everything is fine

• Something to pass the time
• Generate extra pages and hopefully PageRank for business and revenue generating websites
• Generating direct revenue from Google AdSense or similar
• Feeding the ego by getting onto page 1 of the SERPs for your name etc

Generally I use my blogs for all these reasons and as for the last one I’m doing OK, being top for “Devblog” and my nickname “Wellsy”. As for my actual name, “Andy Wells”, I’ve got a bit of competition out there as there’s a rock band and a mayor in the US both with the same name. I’m starting to make progress though and have made it up to number 4 on Google (even above Wikipedia).

Yay me!

Because I like money I’ve been setting up a few sites and blogs with ads on to try and get some extra cash. So far I’m really happy with the way Google AdSense is performing on the various blogs and other sites they are on.

I did want to create some articles on a particular site called Opportunity Club and then put some specific ads with the content. I headed over to Tradedoubler and found the various programmes I needed and applied for them.

Every single one of them came back “Denied”. Now I can see why various companies might not want to approve this site, even though it is trying to make them more money directly. The problem I’ve got with Tradedoubler and the way they do things is that it’s not just that domain I’ve had problems with.

I’ve also been refused for numerous programmes for the Medicology site which is surprising since it’s a well designed, corporate site with high PR and traffic.

I’ve also been refused for various computing and technology programmes for this site. What the hell do they want? “XYZ Computers are great!” in a H1 tag on your homepage with the banner underneath? It’s stupid.

Now I realise that some of this isn’t Tradedoublers fault, but there’s other things that annoy them about me:

• The half a dozen “newsletters” they seem to send me every day
• The absolute uselessness of their website and reporting tools
• The fact that their ads either don’t work or slow your site down so that you loose visitors
• Some of the bizarre rules and restrictions they have

Well, I’ve decided to give Commission Junction a try for a while since they seem to be approving my requests to join programmes and I’ll obviously be sticking with AdSense.

I’ll probably update this in 3 or 4 months when I get a feel of what CJ are like.

• You have a WordPress blog and know how to upload files to your webspace
• You’ve already signed up for a Google AdSense account (if not, click on the banner on the right)
• You won’t moan at me if you accidentally break something!

Ok, First go to your AdSense account and log in. Click on “AdSense Setup” and then “AdSense for Content”. Follow the guide to create your AdSense code (if you need help at any point, look at Google’s support pages). I’m going to show you how to add the adverts in the “Sidebar” (the strip on the right) so I recommend choosing either a Skyscraper or Vertical Banner.

Once you have you code leave it open in your browser and go to where you’re keeping your wordpress files on you PC. You’ll need to browse through the folders to:

wp-content\themes\default\

Open the file you’ll find in there called sidebar.php in a text editor (such as Notepad). All you have to do is paste your code in there. I recommend putting it at the bottom (just before the </div>) to put the ads below your other links.

Now just save the file and upload it to your webspace. Go have a look at your site and you should now have your ads on there!

If you can’t get it working, leave a comment and I’ll try and help when I get the chance.

Recently though, we’ve been working on projects that lend themselves quite well to being run on open source solutions. I therefore decided to give it a go and set up one of our retail sites, Erogenicity, to run off OScommerce and then see how difficult it would be to modify it to our unique requirements. As it turned out, it was a lot easier than I thought it would be so I decided to take the plunge and reduce maintenance time on some of our existing projects (such as running all our blogs on WordPress), as well as reducing development time on new stuff.

So far there haven’t been any problems so from now on I’ll be checking for any open source solutions I can utilise before sitting down to weeks of coding. I’ll also be looking for any missing features so I could possibly write an extension/contribution and give something back to the community!

 
While I was there I decided to check out the Premier Computers domain. The reason being  I occasionally get emails which are intended for someone else but all on the premier computers domain. I decided to try and track down who used to have the domain by having a gander at past versions before we had it. Turns out it was owned by a company in Peterborough in 1999 and 2000. Time to update your address books people!

I decided to redo it in the way some other blogs do with links to an archive page for each month and then displaying the posts for that month in abreviated form with a couple of paragraphs from the post and a link to it. It’s more search engine friendly (content is king!) and should help the spiders get around a bit easier.

I didn’t really need to post about this but I didn’t have anything for “November, 2005″ yet!