How to bait link baiters and attention whores properly

What a brilliant marketing stunt. Click here! Err... click: Brilliant. Marketing. Stunt.

Best of luck John :)

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Sphinn rocks

Thanks to Danny's crew we've got a promising search geek community site. Since I've recently started to deal with invites, here is the top secret link where you get your free Sphinn invite. Click it now and join today, as Gorbachev said 'those who are late will be punished by life itself' ;)

Previous experiments revealed that my pamphlets aren't diggworthy, despite the presence of OL/UL lists. Because I mention search and stuff like that every once in a while, I decided to submit a horror story to Sphinn to test the waters over there.

Adding Sphinn-it! widgets to my posts hopefully helps promoting Sphinn, but with Blogger that turned into kinda nightmare. To prevent you from jumping through infinite try-and-error hoops, here is how it works:

Classic templates:

Search for $BlogItemBody$ and below the </div> put

<script type='text/javascript'>submit_url='<$BlogItemPermalinkUrl$>';</script>
<script src='http://sphinn.com/evb/button.php' type='text/javascript'/></script>

(Blogger freaks out when you omit the non-standard ;</script> after the self-closing second tag, hence stick with the intentional syntax error.)

Newish templates:

Check "Expand Widget Templates"

Search for data:post.body/ and below the </p> put

<b:if cond='data:post.url'>
<p><script type='text/javascript'>submit_url='<data:post.url/>';</script>
<script src='http://sphinn.com/evb/button.php' type='text/javascript'/></p>
</b:if>

(After saving the changes Blogger replaces some single quotes with HTML entities, but it works though. Most probably one could do that in a more elegant way, but once I saw the badges pointing to the correct URL --both in the posts and on the main page-- I gave up.)

Have fun sphinning my posts!

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Letting friends know you read their stuff

With various social tools and gadgets there are tons of opportunities to publically or privately show that you follow your friends. I can digg my friends' articles, or bookmark them at delicious, I can link to their posts via sharing in Google Reader, or after reading their posts in my preferred feed reader, I can click the link too just to push my red crab image to the top of their MBL and BUMPzee widgets.

All that comes with common hassles. I want to use these social gadgets and services without jumps thru unintended hoops, that is I consider all the above mentioned methods to tell friends that I still love them diverting those services from their intended use. Also, not every friend of mine makes use of all these geeky tools, so I need to digg posts of A., to delicious articles by B., to share posts of C., and to visit the blogs of D., E. and F. just to show that I've read their stuff in my feed reader.

I can't do that, at least not in a reliable manner, especially not when I'm swamped and just try to catch up after 12 or more hours of dealing with legacy applications or other painful tasks like meetings with wannabe-geeks (unexperienced controllers or chiefs of whichever-useless-service-center) respectively anti-geeks (know-it-all but utterly-clueless and dangerous-to-the-company's-safety IT managers). Doh!

So when I'm not able to send my friends a twitter-great-job-message or IM, and don't have the time to link to their stuff, should I feel bad? Probably. Penalties are well deserved. Actually, the consequence is that nice guys like Nick Wilson @Metaversed unfriend me (among other well-meaning followers) at Twitter coz "I didn't provide useful input for a while", not knowing that I follow them with interest, read their posts and all that, but just can't contribute at the moment because their actual field of interest doesn't match my time schedule respectively my todays-hot-topic-list, nor my current centre of gravity, so to say. That does not mean I'm not interested in whatever they do and output, I just can't process it ATM but I know that'll change at some point in the future. Hey, geeks usually hop from today's hot thing to tomorrow's hot thing, and flashbacks are rather natural, so why expect continuousness?

Bugger, I wrote four paragraphs and didn't come to the point expectable from the post's title. And I bored you dear readers with lots of title bait recently. Sorry, but I did enjoy it. Ok, here's the message:

Everybody monitors referrer stats. Don't say you don't do it because that's first a lie and second a natural thing to do. That applies to ego searches too by the way. So why don't we make use of referrer spoofing to send a signal to our friends? It's that easy. Just add the referrer-spoofing widget to your PrefBar, enter your URL, and surf on. Well, technically that's referrer spamming, so if you wear a tinfoil hat use a non-indexable server like example.com. I'm currently surfing with the HTTP_REFERER "http://www.example.com/gofuckyourself" but I'm going to change that to this blog's URL. Funny folks visiting my blog provide bogus referrers like "http://spamteam.google.com/" and "http://corp.google.com:8080/webspam/watchlist.py", so why the fuck shouldn't I use my actual address? This will tell my friends that I still love them. And real geeks shouldn't expect unforged referrer stats, since many nice guys surf without spamming the server logs with a referrer.

What do you think?

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