Tuesday, August 23, 2011

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.

Friday, August 05, 2011

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.