everyday

In my work as a Network Administrator for a school district, I run into problems with email click-through marketing techniques rather frequently. The specific problem is with click-through tracking of email advertising campaigns. Since we are a school district that provides internet access to minors, we tend to filter our internet traffic rather heavily. This filtering wreaks havoc with most click-through advertising emails.

For instance, an email is received inside of our network with a link to:

<a href="http://www.rs6.net/?kna76dv978y34qtib33t897jk1bt4hq3fr897&site=www.theactuallink.com">www.theactuallink.com</a>

The user thinks that when they click on theactuallink.com that they will be taken to theactuallink.com, they are instead taken to rs6.net and then bounced through to theactuallink.com. This causes a great deal of frustration with our users. We constantly receive phone calls that our internet filter is blocking theactuallink.com, when it is in fact blocking rs6.net, and rightfully so.

I imagine that this problem will only increase as more and more companies increase the amount of internet filtering they do to comply with various laws and regulations. So, what is the solution?

I would highly recommend never, ever rely on a 3rd party to bounce your links through. If you need to track the effectiveness of an email advertising campaign, then invest the time and resources to roll your own tracking. That or use a tool like Google Analytics that will not break the link even if the tracking itself gets blocked. I know that a large number of the emails are generated by non-profit organizations or businesses with limited budgets that are running their email advertising campaigns through a 3rd party, but I think the time has come to abandon the 3rd party and either hire the talent or develop it from within to avoid losing your audience entirely. There are a large number of free, open source applications that will allow you to run email advertising campaigns so the cost for software would be negligible. Hardware costs and requirements are ever decreasing as well, so the excuses not to are few.

via: Simple Bits

Some exciting news from the developers of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 8! Basically they have reversed course on their previous decision to hamstring standards based web design by forcing IE8 to render all web pages in an identical fashion as IE7, unless explicitly told to do otherwise. Microsoft was planning on forcing web developers tell IE8 to render a web page according to web standards or else IE8 would render the page identically to IE7 (which has some shortcomings when it comes to standards).

This is definitely good news and I for one am glad to see Microsoft making a decision that makes sense for the web community at large.

Google Maps has added a new feature called “Terrain”. It overlays a street map on top of a terrain map. While this feature isn’t particularly useful for your everyday mapping needs, it could prove useful in a number of scenarios. What’s more, it is just another example of Google continually improving it’s products.

I have seen a few of the comics from xkcd and have found them to be rather funny (although I don’t know what that says about me…). Anyways, check it out!

Via: Ruby on Rails Weblog

Ruby on Rails turns 2.0 (but doesn’t want to celebrate yet). The wonderfully powerful and yet simple to use web framework has reached the 2.0 “preview-release” milestone. According to the venerable DHH, the actual release date for a finalized 2.0 will be some time in the future, after a number of (potential) release candidates. While I don’t understand most of what they have changed, I am happy to see Ruby on Rails moving forward while continuing to gather followers.

Ruby Quiz is a weekly quiz on Ruby that is used to flex your Ruby muscles, or in my case prove how completely ignorant I am on the subject entirely

The FizzBuzz quiz was one that I was actually able to accomplish in a relatively short amount of time. Unfortunately, my original solution was not very elegant at all. (more…)

via: SimpleBits

I just watched a fascinating video from Blaise Aguera y Arcas (via ted.com) on some new technology from Microsoft Labs. This new technology is called “Photosynth” and it aggregates the collective memory into a model of reality. If that doesn’t make any sense, check out the demo: http://labs.live.com/photosynth/default.html. This software takes a collection of images from a social networking site (Flickr in this case) with common metadata (tags). It then puts all of these images together into a model of that metadata, amazing!

Consider that every person’s memory (photo, video or textual) is placed into a collective via the various social networking services. Consider that this collective is accessible through APIs. Consider that you can aggregate the entire collective. Consider that you can take the aggregated memory of everyone and categorize, filter, extrapolate, correlate and relate it. Consider that you can now model the world based on the aggregated memory of everyone.

Once this happens, virtual models will become real models. Instead of animating the world to model it, you will model the world based on the collective memory of the world. Every picture ever taken of a giraffe will allow for a model of a giraffe to be created from real pictures of giraffes. Every picture taken of a Nissan Skyline GT-R can be used to create an exact model of a Nissan Skyline GT-R. Amazing stuff!

via: Digg

N.Design (a site I will be frequenting from now on) has a über-cool looking OSX dock for websites. If you are a fan of the Mac, as I am, you will certainly appreciate this. If you aren’t so much a fan of the Mac, then you should at least appreciate the look and feel of this navigation bar. Web 2.0, whatever that means, is certainly producing some interesting stuff!

After much frustration, I think I finally have a working installation recipe for RubyOnRails on Debian Linux.

1. Install Debian
2. Install ssh and sudo

apt-get install ssh sudo

3. Remove “root” login from ssh config file
4. Create a “source” directory

cd /
mkdir source

5. Install tools for compiling from various sources

apt-get install gcc gcc-3.4-doc gcc-3.4 g++-3.4 make libc6-dev flex openssl curl wget zlib1g-dev libzlib-ruby

6. Download latest Ruby (1.8.5 as of this entry), unpack and install

cd /source
wget http://ftp.ruby-lang.org/pub/ruby/1.8/ruby-1.8.5-p2.tar.gz
tar xzvf ruby-1.8.5-p2.tar.gz
cd ruby-1.8.5
./configure
make
make install
cd ..

7. Download, unpack, compile and install zlib (not included in testing version of Ruby?)

wget http://www.blue.sky.or.jp/atelier/ruby/ruby-zlib-0.6.0.tar.gz
tar xzvf ruby-zlib-0.6.0.tar.gz
cd ruby-zlib-0.6.0
ruby extconf.rb
make
make install
cd ..

8. Download, unpack, compile and install Ruby Gems (0.9.2 as of this entry)

cd /source/
wget http://rubyforge.org/frs/download.php/17190/rubygems-0.9.2.tgz
tar xzvf rubygems-0.9.2.tgz
cd rubygems-0.9.2
ruby setup.rb

9. Install Rails

gem install rails --include-dependencies

10. Install Mongrel

gem install mongrel mongrel_cluster --include-dependencies

11. Create a dummy application

cd ~/
rails test
mongrel_rails start

12. Go to http://your.ip.address:3000/ to see if it works

Sources

• The Perfect Rails/debian/lighttpd Stack…
• Mongrel: Debian HOWTO
• RubyOnRails
• Setting up a Complete Ruby Server with Mongrel and Nginx on Debian 3.1 Part 3