Facebook Ads Quirk

Just a short update about a weird issue I ran into when I was creating some Facebook ads.

Facebook allows you to advertise to a number of different sources but for whatever reason they take features away from you if you're advertising to other Facebook pages. One of those annoying features is that Facebook takes over the title of your ad if you advertise for a fan page or an event.This can be annoying as the title is the only text in your ad that's presented in a big eye-catching bold font. My revelation was that you can subvert the normal title stealing behaviour by choosing to link to an "External URL" for the event/fan page but ONLY if your URL is not HTTPS.

Read more »

IRSSI Notification Mod

If anyone still uses IRC these days (and you should because it's cheap, flexible group chat with support for file transfer, private messaging and pretty much everything else) you might appreciate some of the work I've done to increase the utility of IRC in this Smartphone age.

1. I'm running IRSSI off a Linux server I have set up from home. This is pretty par for the course for IRSSI but one of the easiest and most liberating thing you can do with it is run it inside of a program called "screen" and setup SSH on the Linux server. Whenever I'm at a Terminal (in Linux or OSX) or have access to PuTTY (Windows) I can SSH into my home server and open up screen to have full access to the IRC client (among any other programs I have running on the server). You can even extend this functionality to your Smartphone in at least two different ways, one if you have an SSH App (i use iSSH on my iPhone) or if you want to set up IRSSI to run as a proxy you can use any decent IRC app to login to that proxy and go from there. The proxy tends to be faster and easier to type on as every SSH app I've ever used has some terrible lag on the keyboard or has some other annoying twitch. Even iSSH cuts some of the terminal window off if you hold the iPhone portrait style and if you hold it landscape it makes the keyboard see-through and puts it over where you're reading the text.

Read more »

Updates and Namedrops

We're getting into Doubleclick for Advertisers at work. I find it endlessly amusing that they refer to it as DFA constantly which reminds me of other things. Doubleclick is a monster but in a good way. AdWords was one thing but this seems to take all the nice conveniences of the Google Display Network and does away with them in favour of supporting everything who doesn't want to completely comply to Google's rules. I think I've got the basics down but I'm still expecting to have to figure some more things out.

I'm also working on CSS again. A new design for this site is on the way as a trial by fire for what I'm learning. I think I've got a lot of the basics down, but now I'm finding the idiosyncracies to be a far bigger issue than the concepts and methods. The CSS community seems to be pretty good at categorizing their hacks so that's been a smoother process then I was expecting. Now I just need to find the time to get the practice in.

Lots of other stuff going on but the only important thing right now is that my recent fling with programming means I'm addicted to IDM again. My good friend Heather directed me towards The Glitch Mob, Of Porcelain, and edIT. I've tangented off of that into some more ambient tracks though Machine Drum, Tim Hecker and some good old Boards of Canada.