I just got an interesting "alert" on my eBay account.  Starting this summer, eBay is going to start a new security program which takes securing an account to the next level.  Basically what they're going to do is require you to authenticate yourself if you're using a computer on eBay that hasn't already been authenticated.

Authentication is done two different ways (in addition to a regular password).  You can answer an automated phone call, or talk to a Live support person (via web chat).

It will be interesting to see whether the authentication will be IP or cookie based.  Even though cookies would be more secure (it would be on a per computer basis, rather than internet connection), I hope it's not.  (My bank puts a cookie on an authenticated computer and as a web developer I'm constantly clearing cookies.  I always have to authenticate the hard way - annoying.)

The thing I don't understand - why eBay?  Why are they not going to this type of extreme with PayPal.  There's got to be a a lot more stolen PayPal accounts than eBay accounts.  Many people's PayPal accounts are tied directly to credit cards & bank accounts!

Is this a step backwards towards bridging highly sensitive web accounts with *real* life?  As long as I'm on the phone with eBay, I may as well place my bid over the phone too - hey, that kinda reminds me of a 1997-style product catalog.

The alert I was sent is below:

Dear David Jeffries:

We would like to tell you about a new security initiative that will help keep your account secure. Later this summer, eBay will begin checking to ensure you are signing in from a computer you have successfully used previously. If you attempt to list an item from a different computer – for example, from a PC you are borrowing in a hotel or library – we will ask you to confirm your identity.

Confirming your identity is simple. When prompted, you can choose an automated call to one of the numbers you have registered with us. If this is not possible, we will provide you with alternative methods, such as confirmation through Live Chat, or an automated call to a new number. These alternate methods will require you to provide additional information, such as the correct answer to your secret question.

Please take a minute to update your contact information.

To help quickly confirm your identity, we recommend that you have a current phone number and a secret question and answer on file with eBay. If you have a cell phone, we strongly encourage you to add this to your registration details as a secondary phone number, so that you can confirm your identity while away from your home or business.

Sincerely,
eBay Trust and Safety Department

If you haven't heard of StumbleUpon yet then go to their website, download the toolbar and check it out. This post assumes that you know what it's all about.

If you're a blogger there's a good chance you have seen the effects of being 'stumbled' which is pretty much a huge increase in traffic, comments, and RSS subscribers. If you look at the image, you will notice two distinct spikes that are the result of two posts being stumbled. These two stumbles have totaled over 10,000 unique visits in less than two days. How did I do it? Read on.

The first stumble

The first stumble was from the post, Some PHP Abilities You May Not Know About, which has so far brought in over 4,000 unique visitors.  Most StumbleUpon users are tech-savvy, so it's no surprise that this post got fairly popular quite quickly.  Lets highlight some other characteristics of this post.

• It's in a list format
• Shows real-world usage
• There is interesting information that can be reused by readers

The second stumble

The second stumble was from the post, A Stuck Pixel On My LG L226WTX, which was much more popular than the PHP post. This post hit 7,000 uniques on the day it was first on StumbleUpon.  This post was much more popular on SU than the other post because while SU users are tech-savvy, there are only so many interested in programming.  That's the thing about StumbleUpon, it matches people's likes to webpages really well.  So while there's quite a few people with "PHP" as one of their likes, there are way more with "computer," or "programming" as their likes (the two categories that most visitors had for the stuck pixel article).  Basically a category with a wider audience = higher chance of your site being viewed.  Now again, lets look at some of the things this post had.

• First hand experience
• Info that can help the reader
• Info worth saving for later reference

Reasons you will get stumbled

So by looking at the lessons learned from the two stumbles, we can determine the common factors, and find out a foolproof method to getting your website stumbled.  Here are my three tips for getting stumbled:

1. Use lists

People love lists.  They're easy to read, they convey a lot of information in a small format, and are easy to reference.  It's easier for a reader to scan to the part of the list they're interested in than to scan an article full of text digging for some piece of information.

2. Write information that is valuable enough to save

People want information that they can use.  In both cases, the PHP and the stuck pixel article, there was information that can be reused, and will be reused by readers.  If the post tells your audience how to do something they didn't know about, or how to do something better, they will like it much more as it affects them directly.

3.  Prove it

Show to the reader how the information can be useful to them.  Prove that what you're writing about actually works, and explain to the reader how they can recreate/reuse the information.  Use pictures, or examples so it at least looks like you know what you're talking about.  Try to stay away from lengthly descriptions, as large blocks of text can be hard to read and may bore your readers.  Just make your point, and move on.

It all comes down to good content

In the end, you have got to have excellent content, and you have to make the reader say to themselves, "cool, I like this!"  You need to have something that sets you apart from every other blog out there.  So use these tips, write some awesome content, and build some traffic!  Let me know your success with SU in the comments.

Well, it's April fools time again. Most of these are pretty funny, some are lame - but anyways here is my list of the main April fools jokes from around the internet:

• YouTube - All front page videos redirecting to rickrolls.
• TechCrunch - Suing Facebook for $25 Million
• CenterNetworks - Robert Scoble starts Ice Cream Library TV
• JohnChow - John gets his own soft drink. "The official blogger drink"
• Google Austrailia - Searching internet content before it is created, or "future search" (I found this one to be *too* unbelievable)
• Gmail - Gmail custom time. Send emails to the past. (Google LOVES time-based jokes)
• Google & Virgin - A collaborative effort to establish a human colony on Mars.
• The Pirate Bay - Copyright law changes force servers to be moved to the Egyptian desert
• ProBlogger - A pay-per-twitter service.
• CollegeHumor - Purchased by a MySpace teens parents, redirects to "her" profile.
• ShoeMoney - Make 1,000.00 in 1 hour
• Aviary - Photo editing time machine - magically transform photos to the past or future! (YouTube vid)

I think the TechCrunch one had me going for the longest, it was pretty well done. Aviary also gets mad props for putting so much time into a pretty funny YouTube video, plus almost every major blogging outlet wrote about it (even though they all knew it was a joke, it definitely got major free press).

If you know of anymore that aren't on this list let me know in the comments.

Experts exchange is a great resource with a couple annoying traits.

1. It always ranks high when I'm googling my latest programming problem
2. $99.95 / year subscription
3. The solutions are always blurred out, despite the fact they the real solutions are indexed by google

This pissed me off. What they are doing is called cloaking, which is against Google's rules. Cloaking is serving one page to Google, and then different content to regular users. Google removes websites from their index that do this, as Matt Cutts states in his blog.

There are 2 solutions for this problem.

The first solution takes advantage of EE's attempts to not get banned from Google. They actually show the answers on the page only really, really far down. If you find a question and all the answers are blurred out, just scroll past all the blurred out answers, and then past the big "Experts Exchange Zones" block, to see the un-blurred answers. Try it out here. Remember to keep scrolling! The only problem with this is the page usually throws a cookie onto your machine that will hide the solutions on other EE pages. This leads us to solution 2.

Solution 2 fights fire with fire. By making EE think that we are the googlebot going in and looking at the pages, all the solutions will be fully shown to us. First, we start by changing the user-agent (the thing that identifies our browser). In Firefox, type about:config in the address bar.

You wil be presented with a bunch of preferences, their status, types, and values. In this window, right click and select new -> string and enter "general.useragent.override" with no quotes

Click ok, and you will get another textbox. In this textbox enter "Googlebot/2.1 (+http://www.googlebot.com/bot.html)" and click ok.

Congrats, you are now Googlebot! One final thing to do is to either turn off cookies (tools -> options -> privacy) and uncheck "accept cookies from sites" or click exceptions and deny all cookies from "experts-exchange.com" This will not allow EE to place a cookie on your computer so you can always view the solutions. You will now have unrestricted access to Experts-Exchange and all the solutions.

There needs to be a way to do this, and I'm sure that Google is working on something right now - at least I hope so. It's really annoying not being able to add some commentary to an item that I'm sharing so that people reading it actually understand the reason I shared it.

The same thing happens when I'm reading one of my friends shared items... I always want a way to tell them how I feel about what I just read. Why not just blog about it? I just want a little blurb, like a twitter, where I can quickly say what I'm thinking after I just read it.

If I could think of a feasible way to accomplish this I would write some software to let me do it. The only way I can see just quickly thinking is having a 3rd party site that takes your shared items and adds the abilities I want... Maybe this already exists? Time to do some research.

Update: This is what happens when you don't do pre-post research. From the Google Reader blog:

In the next updates, Google Reader should let you comment on shared items or chat with your online friends about certain posts, separate your shared items with tags and recommend shared items from people that have similar interests with you.

I decided to finally pursue some other advertising mediums for some of my websites and Facebook immediately came to mind. Facebook just recently allowed anyone to place ads on their site, and target them heavily. You can literally target any interest, demographic, network, anything. I figured I may as well give it a shot, and the nice targeting features should help with the conversions.

FB Works Fast

I created a simple ad in about 2 minutes, and it started running. Within no more than 3 minutes, (I'm not exadurating), I saw the following:

10,000 impressions! I was amazed, this was 3 minutes of advertising and I already had 5 clicks. Within about 10 minutes I had 20 clicks and over 30,000 impressions. Sure, it's not the best CTR, but this was just a quick little test ad. I'm sure with some ad optimization that will get better.

Another thing that makes this even crazier - this was a targeted ad. If I just unleashed it upon all of Facebook, who knows how many impressions/clicks I would get in the first 5 minutes. Crazy.

The domain name registrar network solutions has been pulling some pretty sketchy moves lately. There were some reports that they were registering all domain names that were searched for and registering the name themselves. This, of course, will only allow people to buy the domain from them exclusively. This is a pretty big no-no in the domain name industry.

To prove that they actually were registering every domain searched I decided to do a little test. I searched for the domain davidjeffries-registeredbynetworksolutions.com. A little while later network solutions had plastered the domain location with their logo and a nice little button to buy the domain for "as low as $19.99."

This might seem ok, except now when going to another registrar, in this case GoDaddy, I got the nice "domain already taken" message. How can network solutions get away with this? Why aren't other registrars freaking out? Something needs to be done - network solutions shouldn't get away with this for much longer.

GoDaddy Domain Search

Facebook has been working with ABC for a while now working on their U.S. presidential election advertising/application. The idea is pretty good and hopefully it gets more people educated about the candidates and out voting.

Why are Canadians seeing this stuff?

Here's the deal: I'm Canadian. I really do not understand why Facebook is pushing this stuff to Non-Americans. Personally, I'm quite interested in U.S. politics, but I'm sure the majority of Canadians aren't.

So with Facebook developing all their awesome advertisement targeting software and utilizing the vast amount of information they have about me, why don't they just target it properly? page views? I guess ABC paid a pretty hefty price for so much attention.

Since every one else is doing it, I may as well too. Here are my predictions for 2008:

• Mixx will be the next Digg. Mixx is like Digg with groups - and I think it will take off pretty quickly. The only problem with a small company (Mixx) taking on a big one (Digg), is that Digg could easily develop and add the features that Mixx has, and leave them with nothing. Either way, I think Mixx will give Digg a hard time.
• Apple will launch a camera at MacWorld in January, as well as the ultra portable laptops everyone has been talking about.
• Facebook's momentum will slow down.
• I will launch something big.
• I will blog more (hopefully).
• More devices will be internet connected - WiFi will be in things that we wouldn't expect, but will still be useful.

I'm not going to get too carried away because I know that most of these will not happen.  Personally, I think that 2008 is going to be a very important and exciting year and can't wait to see what happens.

BlueFur.com is in my opinion the best web hosting company around. Their Unix hosting plans cannot be beat if you are just starting to run a couple sites. Some people opt to run their own servers in their own house - but it isn't worth it. First of all, you are going to pay more for power to run your server 24/7 than the $6.95 you pay at BlueFur. You will also not have the guaranteed uptime (redundant power and network), or network speed. In short, the small monthly fee is well worth it.

Why I Love My Webhost

Just look at that picture. Even on my "mini" account, I can run up to 10,000 different websites off one hosting package. I can have 10,000 MySql databases as well. I don't know of any other host that offers basically limitless add on domains and databases.

The freedom of having as many websites as I can works perfectly for me as I'm always building or testing something; I have to have a host that can give me the flexibility that BlueFur provides.