Despite big media’s attempts at covering up Ron Paul from the eye of the public, he’s being seen by more people than any of the other candidates–at least, his website is. Here’s a graph generated by Alexa.com showing the traffic trends for some of the top potential candidates for the 2008 presidential election:

As you can see, Ron Paul is leading the race by a large margin on the web. While the web wouldn’t have been so significant in an election in 2000, the vast expansion of the Internet has gifted the majority of American’s with access to it. This means that these numbers are a lot more tell tale than the losing candidates might want to believe.

Okay so there’s plenty of hype going on about the iPhone, and it seems that just about every blog and news website out there is content on reposting the same stories over and over. Having bought an iPhone on day one, I’ve had a fair amount of time to get a good feel for it.  Here are my thoughts.

After standing in line for an hour and a half and plunking down $650 for a new phone, about the last thing I wanted to do was go home and get on the computer. Unfortunately, that’s exactly what you have to do to gain access to your phone. Without registering it, you can’t even write notes or use the calculator. This puts a big damper on the excitement level, which isn’t exactly fabulous.

So I get home and start to activate. Everything went smoothly for me (lucky I guess) but I was a bit irked at the fact that I still had to go back into the store and have the sim card replaced in order to change my phone number to my local area code…so day two I had a new sim card…I was literally the first one the store had to pop out. I know that it’s not all Apple’s fault (AT&T’s system is crap) but the registration through iTunes didn’t help out any.

Time to start playing with the phone. One of my biggest concerns was regarding the keyboard being too small. I figured I could always just turn it sideways though and have a bit more room to type. Well, my concerns were fairly correct with hitting multiple keys and the prediction not catching it that well, and I found out that the sideways mode only works for Safari. Fortunately, typing at hyperspeed seems to get the guessing engine working better so the results turn out okay, but if you try to type slower and you miss keys, you could be doing a lot of deleting.

I have a Mac that I use for all of my iTunes, email, and Address Book stuff, so everything went fairly smoothly there (aside from some weird issue with duplicate contacts with one of them being empty) for me, but it didn’t seem to akin to work with Windows. All of my contacts from my old Razr were already in my Address Book because I had synced them via iSync and bluetooth. While the iPhone supports bluetooth, you can’t transfer files or sync data through it, which is a real bummer for my car (more later).

I was a bit worried about the fact that Apple decided to only allow Safari on the iPhone. As a web developer, I really don’t like WebKit due to it’s rendering inconsistencies and quirks. As suspected, it held up againt some average plain-html websites, but anything having to do with JavaScript or flash and you’re done. The support for them are very limited and they tend to crash Safari. Not exactly “breakthrough” Apple.

Mail works fairly well. I’ve set it up with a few Gmail accounts, a .Mac, and a Yahoo without problems. If you use Google Apps or any other POP3 mail server with non-default settings, though, you’re screwed. You can’t change ports at all on the iPhone. Perhaps this will change with an update, though.

Phone? Oh right…it’s a phone. I almost forgot. Surprisingly, the reception on the phone is a notable improvement over that of my Moto Razr V3 (original black). I have only dropped a single call and I was in a fairly remote location, so it was quite understandable. I have had a few instances where I was showing No Signal and I couldn’t get one for a few minutes, but again, nothing outrageous. Voice quality is fairly good, though I haven’t spoken with anybody else that also was on an iPhone. It almost seems as though the iPhone is filtering out noise at times, since voices usually come through really clear on the built-in speaker. The speakerphone on the iPhone is nothing to be considered, though. It’s quieter than any other speakerphone I’ve heard, so you practically have to have it up to your ear anyways.

The earbuds with a built-in microphone work surprisingly well. Voice comes through them perfectly clear and I haven’t had a single person ask me to repeat myself due to them not hearing me because of noise or otherwise. You can easily continue to use the phone for browsing and email and such while you’re on a call, but you can NOT access EDGE while you are on a call, which is a bummer for me since I routinely get calls asking for help to things I have to Google.

Speaking of EDGE, the time it takes for a connection to establish to a website is subpar. The transfer rate is slow, we knew that, but it does fine for most websites. The connection time is really what kills you though. It took me over 5 minutes to get a connection to a single page on Wikipedia.org.

SMS/Text messaging is quite fun on the phone once you get used to the keyboard, and though its functionality is fantastic for seeing previous stuff in the conversation, the keyboard does get irritating if you’re not sitting still and giving the phone your full attention. While a message is sending you’re prevented from starting to write a new one, which is a bit of a bottleneck. I’ve learned to write my full message in a single text and then just let the network do whatever it needs to to get it delivered.

The visual voicemail is quite a treat, though I really don’t get much voicemail. The quality of voicemails is crap, though, and to get them to playback through the speaker was like a treasure hunt for me at first since the “Audio Source” button wasn’t displaying like it was during calls.

The screen is tough and durable. I haven’t had a single scratch on it yet, even when carrying it in my pocket unprotected. Apple’s choice to go with an anodized-like backing instead of the polished look of the Video iPods has really been a bonus for preventing scratches. While the phone is fairly well put together for the most part, I have been getting some hairs stuck in between the screen and the trim…which is pretty irritating when you go to hang up (you get another hair pulled out). The touch-registration has worked fantastically and I have no real complaints with it.

Battery life hasn’t been fantastic for me. The first full day with my iPhone I did a lot of playing around and showing off. I wound up with a dead iPhone within about 6 hours (not straight use). I’ve since taken care to keep the phone plugged in wherever I have a charger when I’m near it and I haven’t experienced any problems.

The bluetooth hands-free works great in my car, except for the fact that I can’t transfer my address book to the car from my phone like I could before. As many people have said before, it would be nice if the phone supported bluetooth GPS receivers, since then I could get directions using my vehicle’s GPS and my iPhone (much more user-friendly than the built in GPS).

All in all, I think it was a pretty good buy. If Apple plans a version two, some of the most important things they focus on would be longer battery life, a user replaceable battery, support for more bluetooth devices, more widespread Wifi usage (transferring files, etc), a smudge-resistant screen (like the anti-glare one used in the MacBook Pros), and 3rd party developer support.

Sorry for the incoherent order of this post.

I’ve been working on increasing traffic on my website for the last couple of months. The following are some stats pulled over a short period of time (not even a month) for comparison. I did nothing other than improvements to the website and some SEO related work (which hasn’t merited more than 5%) to do this. I’m posting this to show that content really is king, and if you build it, they really will come.

381,596 Visits

Previous: 171,572 (+122.41%)

3.92 Pages/Visit

Previous: 2.26 (+73.47%)

41.08% Bounce Rate

Previous: 53.64% (-23.42%)

1,497,137 Pageviews

Previous: 388,046 (+285.81%)

00:07:47 Avg. Time on Site

Previous: 00:04:23 (+77.57%)

58.54% % New Visits

Previous: 67.81% (-13.67%)

As far as the new visits goes, if you look over the rest of the statistics you can see that it’s not that there was a drop in the number of new visitors (quite the contrary), but rather there was a significant increase in the number of people coming back to the site multiple times.

19.41% Direct Traffic

Previous: 13.70% (+41.71%)

55.39% Referring Sites

Previous: 41.32% (+34.04%)

25.18% Search Engines

Previous: 44.96% (-44.00%)

As with new visits, the number of referrals from search engines did NOT drop (it increased by about 10%) but the significantly higher traffic from referrals from other websites and direct hits shows the search traffic as being a smaller portion of the traffic (a good thing in my opinion since you can’t rely on it).

If you have any questions about how I did this feel free to contact me. I really hope that this can persuade at least a few people that spamvertising and blackhat SEO techniques are NOT the way to go! This was ALL FREE TRAFFIC!

To start with, I’ve been looking at different strategies people use to secure their accounts across the web. As you probably know, many people use the same password for everything they do, and security experts have continually warned against it. People continue to do it, though, since it’s just easier to remember one password than it is to remember 15.

I’ve seen a few different things people will do to create a password. The majority of passwords that seem to follow the same pattern have a very simple little algorithm people use to create the password: take word, append “1″. This is likely due to the fact that a lot of websites now require that your password contains numbers and letters. Appending one is hardly secure, though.

I also see a lot of people using 2 dictionary words stuck together, like bluemoose, doorswim, or {insert 2 curse words}. These are people that signed up for a payed service mind you!

Some people have resorted to using the same password twice (like 123abc123abc) in order to meet websites with a minimum password length. Others just have numbers in their password (really bad idea due to brute forcing). A lot of people choose something that they see in their area, such as the name of their computer manufacturer.

What other patterns have you seen people using to come up with passwords?

After a mere four years (sarcasm) Myspace seems to be catching on to something a lot of us wished they had a long time ago: design. That’s right, they’re slowly starting to update the site to look better, and function better at the same time.They’ve started to clean up some of the links, switching to a smaller and cleaner font. They’ve also started adding information where people can get to it better, such as the new comment options at the bottom of every comment on your page and your myspace URL displaying on your home page near your photo. Even Tom mentioned that they’ve “cleaned” it up.While grossly moronic, they’ve implemented an effective, albeit reactive instead of proactive, solution to spam with their conversion of all links into an msplink. Instead, they should have built a more effective search solution allowing them to find links to a particular external website and kill them off. Hopefully the upgrades will continue. Spam seems to have subsided considerably, and I’m all about increasing usability! 

So after hearing that Jobs’ usual black-turtleneck didn’t seem to impress the world as much as it usually does, I figured I’d check out the only noteworthy thing mentioned: Safari on Windows.

Unlike many other people, I wasn’t checking it out to see “the world’s best browser” on Windows, rather, I was checking it out to see how much worse Apple managed to make the world’s second-worst mainstream browser. You see, Safari 2 doesn’t support a lot of standards, it’s slow at JavaScript, it doesn’t have many features, and it just doesn’t impress. Safari 3 is, well, the same thing only with faster JavaScript (though it seems to delay before updating the interface…) and the ability to resize textareas.

So I downloaded Safari 3 on my Mac first. After I was done with the mandatory reboot I started up Safari. Wait, was this still 2? Maybe 3 installed somewhere else. Apple > About Safari. Hmm…it’s version 3. Yeah…that’s right…I couldn’t even tell that it was a new version. Everything is the same…except that it seems a bit faster and you can drag tabs around. This is supposedly the Firefox killer?

Alright, time to try it on Windows. No reboot needed…cool. I started it up and my jaw dropped. My jaw dropped at the hideousness of it. Like usual, Apple refused to use a Windows title bar…which already kills some functionality. They also failed to make it look anything like Safari on the Mac. The text is blurry, the corners and edges of the window are choppy and pixelated…I honestly feel like I’m looking at a low quality screenshot of a web page in Safari.

Did I mention that it fails to run a lot of DOM manipulating JavaScript in Windows that it does properly in Mac OS X? This is going to be a development nightmare. I for one refuse to support the world’s second worst browser on Windows.

It’s really that bad.

So here I sit, waiting for the battle to ensue. The battle that stages every competent person in the computing world against those we refer to as Mac fanboys.

This is just mind boggling. Senator Hatch has lost his mind. Apparently, he wants to give people who download copyrighted materials a warning the first and second times, but on the third, he says they should have their computer remotely destroyed.

The term “destroyed” is a bit vague in this sense. Does he want them to physically explode? Does he want the operating system to corrupt itself? Does he want personal documents destroyed? I think that any of these “punishments” are out-of-line and downright moronic.

I could drone on about how every operating system developer would be required by law to implement some piece of software that allowed some draconian government to remotely send a signal to the operating system, which would then be required to self-destruct and how absolutely ridiculous that idea is, especially considering the fact that it would probably be a matter of days before black hats managed to spoof signals and destroyed the 21st century as we know it. I’m not going to though, because the problem with this suggestion is a lot closer than that.

You, by viewing this web page, downloaded copyrighted materials. In fact, every time you go online and view anything that isn’t public domain you’re downloading copyrighted materials. Watch a video on YouTube? Bye-bye computer. Check your Myspace? Bye-bye computer. Login to your company’s intranet from a work computer? Bye-bye computer. I think you get the picture here. Apparently Hatch doesn’t understand that what he’s doing would successfully destroy computing as we know it. Sure, it would stop people from sharing music, but I don’t think that the trillions of dollars lost by network providers, website operators, etc. would be worth the few million that record companies lose each year.

And I’d like to remind everyone here that downloading copyrighted material is NOT ILLEGAL. Please, review the laws yourself. There is nothing illegal about downloading something that has been copyrighted. The problem is distributing copyrighted material, hence the reason you can download websites for viewing, etc.

If you are Senator Hatch, or you have some way of getting him to read this, I have a little message for him/you: Pull your head out of your ass. We’re in an unpopular war with no end, fighting a hopeless fight against oil barons, struggling to obtain better government provided healthcare, and being invaded by illegal immigrants. Your private dissatisfaction with copyright laws are certainly not on the top of America’s list of things to address.

Myspace launched in 2003. One really has to wonder what they’ve been doing since then, though.  From a company that managed to develop (no designing here) a website with all of the crap Myspace has to offer prior to 2003, they seem to have fired all of their developers but one upon launch.  It’s 2007 now, Myspace is still just as ugly as ever, just as slow as ever, and has just as many errors. So what then, if anything, has been done behind the scenes at Myspace?

Well, secretly Myspace was building a profile editor, much like Virb, and plenty of it’s other competitors already have done. But where Myspace has failed is the interface. I didn’t realize that it was possible to make the many profile editors on the net any worse, but Myspace has done it.  Let’s wrap up all of it’s so called features:

• Internet Explorer Only. This is never a good sign…since Firefox and Opera can do just about everything IE can, and then some.
• It shows your profile while you edit…but doesn’t stop you from accidentally hitting a link on the page to drag you to a new page and losing everything.
• It’s slow.
• The images are broken (for the most part).
• Much of it doesn’t work.
• It tries to get you to make a profile advertising Die Hard.

Is it me or is that not too impressive? Seriously, coming from a multi-billion dollar company we get a piece of shitty code written by an Indian for $45…yet coming from many developers working for free with no intention of getting paid we get some of the best applications out their…Firefox, Open Office, Opera, Adium, etc.

Myspace, if you want to keep users on your website, you’re going to need to quit listening to fat old men that are generally referred to as “the asshole”. Get some real people in there (not like that fake ass Tom) to slap you for doing stupid shit, yell at you to take down the ugly ads (esp. anything with flash), tell you how ugly the site is and how you need to fix it, and explain to you that blocking photobucket and Youtube won’t make you any money.

What’s so hard to understand about that?

While I haven’t had any issues with them robbing me of nearly $60,000 (like Google did), I haven’t had a trouble-free experience. I’ll point out the good, then the bad, and you can decide for yourself.

First, Adbrite is a fairly new company, which I personally don’t see as a big negative. The first couple of years is when a company changes the most, and it’s usually good change based on input from the customers. AdBrite is definitely following this mold. I’ve been contacted a number of times over the phone and through email to share my thoughts on the service, the ads, new ideas for ads, and more. As someone that thinks outside of the box (though using cliches isn’t very out-of-the-box) I really enjoy sharing my $2 (I can never shut-up after just two pennies).

They are one of the only ad network offering interstitials, and they give quite a bit of control over who does and doesn’t advertise on your website, if you aren’t running the network ads, that is.

That’s about where things start to get muddy. I rarely visit my own website, so when I visit it for the first time in two weeks only to see interstitials that are blatant scams, it’s a big problem. This has happened quite a few times. I don’t understand why ad networks can’t seem to understand I want to earn a legitimate, morally-decent income running a website that is free to my users. I don’t care to spam them, encourage them to download Bonzi Buddy (old, but it really gets the point across huh?), or flash annoying ads in their face.

On top of questionable network ads, AdBrite is about the last website that you want to have to check on a daily basis. Over the period of a week you’re likely to only see sub-ten-second pageloads once or twice, if ever, and the funky layout of things isn’t exactly going to make you confess your undying love for the service anymore than you would for Myspace.

The last straw for me has been the sudden drop in my revenue. I was making a respectable amount, then I redesigned my website and managed to place the ads better. My clicks increased nearly twofold, but I couldn’t say the same for my earnings. Since I also did some streamlining, the number of pageloads dropped about 15%. That managed to take my earnings down about 50%. When I tried to contact AdBrite to see what had happened, they didn’t respond, and posting in an AdBrite controlled Yahoo Group only led for the post to be denied.

AdBrite has some serious growing up to do if they want to continue to prevail.

UPDATE: I’ve switched over to Google AdSense and my earnings have increased by 1000% on the same traffic, same ad spots. I think this shows clear superiority of the ability of Google to finagle the highest dollar for your ad space, at least in this case.

Apple’s marketing is really starting to get irritating. Honestly, I can’t stand some of the stupid shit they do.

Take this for example. They just released their new Mac Pros that have support for up to two quad-core Clovertown Xeons. Awesome…but my PC can do that and my server already has two dual-core xeons and it was $2500. Support for 16GB of RAM. Impressive for a 32-bit OS, but my 64-bit Windows has support for 32GB, and so does 64-bit Linux. But where Mac really falls short isn’t in the RAM capacity, it’s in it’s speed.

Right now I’m running 4GB of DDR2 1066MHz RAM in my PC. It’s a nice speed boost from the 800MHz RAM I’ve been using for the last 9 months. So why then, would the almight Mac sport 667MHz RAM? Well, because most people don’t understand it.

Lets face it, most people don’t have any clue that some RAM runs at higher frequencies than others. We still can’t convince them to look at the real-world performance of a CPU as well as the potential gigaflops/s instead of the clock speed. Apple knows this. Why should they bother implementing hardware that their users won’t understand the difference of?

It’s quite frustrating really. I like some of the stuff about Macs, but they’re really no where near the end-all be-all of computing.