Spam on Myspace and Facebook

March 15th, 2009 Filed under: Rants | Tags: facebook, myspace, spam, web

I recently got this message from one of my myspace contacts.

Myspace system is getting too crowded!! We need you to forward this to at least 20 people. I know this seems like a large number, but we need to find out who is really using their account. If you do not send this to at least 10 Myspace members, we will delete your account.
WARNING!
We want to find out which users are actually using their Myspace accounts. So if you are using your account, please pass this email to every Myspace user that you can. IF YOU DO NOT PASS this letter to anyone we will delete your account.

Sorry for this inconvenience.

-Tom

Then I got this one on Facebook:

Facebook is going to clear facebook accounts if ..

We all know that Facebook is an extraordinary social network where you can talk to friends, find old friends, and so much more.
The Facebook team is well aware that Facebook is getting over populated due to the fact that registrations have increased 50% since February 15 2008. At their signing in database, it shows that more than a quarter of the members of Facebook havn’t logged into their accounts in over a month.
So where is this leading to you may ask. Facebook is clearing their entire data base and deleting users who have not sent this message to their friends. If you are one of the these people, you will get your user account wiped and would have to re add all your friends. So send this message to as many of your friends as you can, I know you don’t want to start all over from scratch so send away, show your pride for members Facebook!

- Irin rayiz

Can you say spam? It seems so obvious that this is spam and yet these messages have been forwarded through hundreds of people before making it to me. Not only that, most people that forwarded this message on added a note saying “I think this is bull shit, but just in case.” It’s the scare mongering that seems to make people pass these spam messages on to their friends and family.

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Tutorial – Let Your Readers SMS You

March 8th, 2009 Filed under: Web | Tags: sms, tutorial, web

This is how I made it possible for readers of my blog to text message / SMS my phone for free from my wordpress blog. It’s a bit of a hack going through twitter and twe2, but it works. If you wanted to you could just have it so that readers can send you a message on Twitter instead.

First you’ll need two twitter accounts. One that you usually use and one for your website. We are going to be using the Twitter API to send a direct message to your normal twitter account. Twitter doesn’t allow you to send a direct message to yourself, so you will need to have a second account for your site which we will use to send the message from.

Now if you are setting this up on a wordpress site you are going to have to install the Exec-PHP plugin. This plugin just lets you post php into a normal wordpress text widget or a wordpress post/page. We will be using a bit of PHP to send the message to Twitter.

Now that that is out of the way we can get down to business. You will need to post this code where you would like the “Send me a text message” form to be displayed. I put mine one a separate wordpress page. NB. If you are putting it onto a page or post in wordpress remember to enter it into the ‘HTML’ editor not the ‘Visual’ WYSIWYG editor. If you even click on the ‘Visual’ editor tab once the code has been entered it will change the code and make it useless, causing you to start again.

Here is the code:

<?php
if (isset($_POST['submit'])) {

$twitter_status = $_POST['twitter_stat'];

if (strlen($twitter_status) > 0) {

// Set username and password etc
$username = ‘enter_site_twitter_username‘;
$password = ‘enter_site_twitter_password‘;
$sendto = ‘enter_your_twitter_username ‘;
$direct = ‘d ‘;
$message = $direct . $sendto . $twitter_status;
// The twitter API address
$url = ‘http://twitter.com/statuses/update.xml’;
// Alternative JSON version
// $url = ‘http://twitter.com/statuses/update.json’;
// Set up and execute the curl process
$curl_handle = curl_init();
curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_URL, “$url”);
curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, 2);
curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_POST, 1);
curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, “status=$message”);
curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_USERPWD, “$username:$password”);
$buffer = curl_exec($curl_handle);
curl_close($curl_handle);
// check for success or failure
if (empty($buffer)) {
echo ‘message’;
} else {
echo ‘Thanks for the message.’;
}

} else
echo “<p>Error: I won’t send blank messages!</p>”;
}
?>

<h2>Send me a message:</h2>

<p><strong>What’s so important?</strong></p>
<form action=”<?php echo $_SERVER['PHP_SELF']; ?>” method=”post”>
<input name=”twitter_stat” type=”text” id=”twitter_stat” size=”40″ maxlength=”120″ />
<input type=”submit” name=”submit” id=”submit” value=”Send”/>
</form>

I have highlighted the text that you need to change red. We will walk through those changes now. enter_site_twitter_username will need to be changed to your sites twitter username (remember you have 2, one for your site and one for you).

enter_site_twitter_password will be changed to your sites twitter password. The password is needed because the code rest of the code uses it to log on to twitter and send a message. Don’t worry no one will be able to see the password.

enter_your_twitter_username will be changed to your real twitter username. This will be added to the start of the message your readers write so that it gets sent to your twitter account. Please remember to leave the empty space after your username. eg. ‘whataboutki ‘ = good       ‘whataboutki’ = bad

<?php echo $_SERVER['PHP_SELF']; ?> this should be able to be left just the way it is if you are putting the code into a wordpress text widget. If you are putting it into a wordpress post or page then this will have to be replaced with the url of the post or page eg. http://www.whataboutki.com/text-sms

Once you have made the changes you should have a form that looks like this one your site. If you test it out it should send the message you type as a direct message to your normal twitter account from your sites twitter account. Yeah!

Now you just need to get twitter to send that message to your phone. If you are in america then twitter can do this for you. Charges might apply. if you aren’t then you can set up a twe2 account. Twe2 will text your twitter direct messages and replies to your phone (most countries) free of charge. It uses another service Wadja to do this, so every message will have ‘> FREE SMS WWW.WADJA.COM‘ at the end.

Hope this helps some people out there. I know this stuff can be tricky and trust me I don’t really know what I’m doing either. Just playing around, it’s the best way to learn. Anywho if you know of a better way to do something I use in this tutorial or need something explained a bit better just leave a comment.

Also, I understand that this opens you up to the risk of spam. I hope to add a Captcha type thing to it at some stage.

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My Old Site Intro

March 6th, 2009 Filed under: Reviews, Web | Tags: flash, web

Most of you won’t know this, but I first registered the www.whataboutki.com domain way back in 2004. I basically didn’t put anything on it back then except for a list of my DVD’s, a record of a couple of dreams I had and a flash intro.

Well I happened to come across http://web.archive.org which stores an archive of past websites, as the name suggests. Anywho, I found a link to the flash intro I made. It’s pretty funny stuff. Check it out here.

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Whataboutki.com for iPhone

March 1st, 2009 Filed under: Reviews, Web | Tags: iPhone, web, wordpress

I found this awesome WordPress plugin called WPTouch. Basically it sets up your blog with another theme that is visible on mobile devices like the iPhone and Android. The cool thing is, it does it all just by activating the plugin and your blog still looks normal when viewed on a computer. It also adds a little link to the footer of the mobile site that lets you view the blog in the normal theme if you want.

It really makes looking at your site alot easier on the iPhone without any real work on your part. Check it out if you think people will be viewing your blog on the go.

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Hopeless Customer Support

February 8th, 2009 Filed under: Rants, Reviews, Web | Tags: technology, web

Ok, just want to get this off my chest. If you run a company and offer customer support you should do it to the best of your ability or not at all. Why waste my time not to mention your time and money offering completely useless customer support. It just makes me not want to deal with you or your product/service.

I am currently trying to find an online photo service where I can upload and share photos of the days happenings at my preschool. Of course I want these photos to be private and only viewable by parents of the children. I was looking at Snapfish and read through their sharing documentation before sending this question to their customer support:

Hello,

I work at a pre-school and would like to share the photos of the days activities with the parents. Is there a way to share my entire photo library with select people without having to invite them to each album. For example, I would create a new album for every day, but I don’t want to have to send each parent an e-mail everyday to invite them to view that days album. Ideally I would like to just send one invite to each parent which would give them access to everydays album including the ones that have yet to be created.

Thanks for your time,

Ki Mansell

In all honesty I expected them to reply saying that this was not possible (because it isn’t mentioned at all in their documentation) but they would look into adding this functionality to a future update if other customers asked for the same ability. But instead I got this:

Dear Ki,

Thank you for writing to us.

Please note that while sharing the the album or photos, you can add one or more email addresses and share the photos.

Please let us know if we can be of any further assistance.

Obviously they didn’t even read my initial e-mail, so I replied with this:

Wow are you serious. Did you even read my question? I understand that you can share photos or albums with others by adding their e-mails, I make reference to that in my question! What I want to know is if their is a way to invite people to view all albums including ones I am yet to upload. Saving me and them the hassle of sending them an e-mail invite everyday, which is what I would have to do if I created a new album everyday, correct?

Not impressed,

Ki

I am yet to hear back from them…

UPDATE:

They replied today with basically what I thought they would have in the first place. It’s almost like they read my blog post…

Dear Ki,

Thank you for writing back to us.

We extremely regret the delay in replying your email.

We’re sorry, that feature is not available at this time, but we are always looking for ways to improve our service.

We review customer feedback regularly to determine what Snapfish customers most want and your comments will certainly be a part of that process.

Please let us know if we can be of any further assistance.

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Webby Chat

January 21st, 2009 Filed under: Life, Reviews, Web | Tags: technology, web

Trying out a new piece of web magic. Webby Chat is a little bit of javascript that adds a sliding chat window to any website. You can see the button on the right of the page. I can see this as being cool for busy or more social sites but probably won’t be much use for whataboutki.com. That being said I’m always a sucker for new gadgets, so I have added it anyway.

Webby Chat is slightly customizable allowing you to:

choose which side of the browser it will appear on

whether it is open by default

how wide the chat box is

where the webby chat button will appear

It still has its problems though, not letting you choose your own name is a pain, and the sliding window goes over your sites content in Firefox. It’s still in beta though so these will all be fixed in the future you would think.

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A Hankering to Learn CSS

December 21st, 2008 Filed under: Life | Tags: css, design, style switching, web

I have been playing around with this website trying to make it cooler. Yesterday I added a useless albeit funky little feature to the top right of the site. The rainbow buttons allow you the reader of whataboutki.com to change the style of the site. Granted the only real style change is logo and link colour, but it has gotten me interested in CSS and web design.

I have always used the excuse that I am a hopeless artist, to not even try and design anything, but I think it’s about time I try and design a site from scratch. No idea what that site will be yet. I’ll keep you in the know.

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