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In July 2004 I released a modem emulator (a.k.a. a throughput throttling proxy). It was created to help give designers a sense of how their sites function for people with slower connections.

I've had to take it offline a number of times due to the volume of traffic and the various ways it was being used (turns out it was a highly effective way to bypass workplace web filters).

Not only that, the code was badly out of date (code soup, not an object in sight, no real validation ... the shame) and badly needed an update.

It's been sitting there, half-working and half-not, and begging for an update for almost exactly 4 years. Ultimately, the choice was to update it or kill it permanently.

So, I spent some quality time rewriting the whole thing, pretty much from the ground up, and now with pleasure announce that it has been turned into an open source project (yes, another one) and the code is now available from Google Code under a New BSD License.

With any luck, this will allow more people to make this tool part of their workflow.

I've updated the Email Address Validation function posted in June 2004. I've converted it to a PHP5 compatible class, and released it under a New BSD License on Google Code.

In April of 2008, the people responsible for the Jack Daniel's trademark contacted me and asked me to stop using the name "ILoveJackDaniels", and URL "ilovejackdaniels.com", for my site, and to change the logo.

Own goal?

I think so. Not many companies have widely read websites named in tribute to their product. Even fewer have websites named in tribute to their product that get more traffic than their own product's website. Deciding to threaten them with legal action seems counter-productive. It offends the marketer in me.

And?

Ultimately, the big guys got their way, and ilovejackdaniels.com has had to go. I don't believe I've misused their trademark but I'm not in a financial position to argue.

I agreed to change the logo immediately (as you may have noticed if a regular visitor) as it was designed in tribute to the Jack Daniel's one and I can appreciate their concern that it was a bit too close to the original.

So the site has been rebranded and moved to a new domain, and the vast majority of the content (some of the out of date stuff has been removed along the way) is still here.

The Jack Daniel's folk have agreed to allow me to redirect the old domain to the new for a period of time (until at least June 2009), after which they intend to remove the redirection from the domain and break everyone's bookmarks and links. Always helpful.

On that note, I have been contacting major bookmarking sites asking them to update saved bookmarks once the site has been moved. I will post more about this later, once all the replies are in, and will be writing about the problems involved with moving the site as well, as I came across some interesting issues I'd not encountered before when moving smaller, less established sites.

Ultimately, I decided to try to treat the Jack Daniel's issue as an opportunity, rather than the disaster I initially thought it was. The whole thing gave me a great reason to clean up and rebrand the site, and I've had fun working on it for the last few weeks - so while this has been an unpleasant experience, it's not been entirely negative.

Added Bytes?

Added Bytes is new! It's essentially a replacement for ILoveJackDaniels.com, but (hopefully) without any trademark issues. Over time, I hope it will become as useful to the wider design, development and marketing communities as I always hoped ILoveJackDaniels.com was.

Still love Jack Daniel's?

Umm. I know it should taste the same - they've not changed the recipe after all. Yet for some reason, I find myself drawn to alternatives. After some hard work sampling several alternatives, I can so far highly recommend Bulleit and Woodford Reserve. Any suggestions for other drinks to try always gratefully accepted.

What about the cheat sheets?

No change to the cheat sheets, except that they now say "Available free from AddedBytes.com" instead of "Available free from ILoveJackDaniels.com". They're still free, and still released under a creative commons license.

Actually, thinking about it, there are a couple of changes. The entire series is being re-designed and re-released. All the originals are still available (and always will be) if you prefer them, but I think the new ones are smarter and cleaner. And more accurate.

To get the ball rolling, I have re-released the CSS, PHP, mod_rewrite (I reckon this is probably the most improved) and Regular Expressions cheat sheets. The others are all coming along nicely and I'll be re-releasing most of the rest over the next few weeks (some will be "retired" as they are out of date - they'll still be available, but won't be updated the the new format).

You can also now request new cheat sheets and vote for requests you'd like to see turned into real cheat sheets - see the right hand side of the cheat sheets section or any of the cheat sheets pages.

Was this always planned?

The idea of changing the name and domain of the site had crossed my mind before. Although I don't sell my services through this site, it still reflects on me professionally, and the old name, while highly memorable, didn't exactly conjure up the sort of image I was after.

Ultimately, while the thought had on several occasions crossed my mind to change, I had decided against it. I liked the old name - it was personal. It wasn't trying to be clever or stuff keywords where they don't belong. It was interesting and memorable, which are both rare qualities in domain names. I will especially miss giving my old email address over the phone.

In Conclusion then ...

The old domain is pointed here, and I will endeavour to keep that redirect up as long as I possibly can. The cheat sheets are all being re-released with a shiny new look, and you can request new ones. The site also has a shiny new look (which I'll write more about shortly). My new email address is dave@addedbytes.com. And I need a new nickname if I ever plan to use IRC again.

What makes a truly great developer? Some might say a positive attitude. Some might say a high-sugar, high-caffeine, high-bacon diet. Some might say an absence of sunlight and as many monitors as a desk can support. I say pessimism and laziness are high up the list.

A ReviewMe review of Internet Marketing Ninjas, a site offering a selection of videos, tutorials and tools from industry leading internet marketing gurus.

A ReviewMe review of Wordze, an online keyword research tool.

OpenID allows us to verify that the person visiting and commenting on our sites relates to, or owns, a specific URL. This is wildly useful, and I'm looking forward to seeing it more widely adopted as soon as possible (OpenID on this site is in testing still but will be up and running soon!).

I was thinking about OpenID the other day, and one other problem that we are currently experiencing. People know that commenting on other sites will increase their exposure. Lots of people know that. So popular posts on popular sites receive a huge number of comments. Partly because they are good posts, and partly because people know a comment in the right place can be a major draw for traffic.

This creates a visibility problem. It's difficult to spot the good commenters (or good comments) in among the mess at the end of most articles. It's even harder to spot comments from people that you know personally, or whose comments you enjoy reading.

A Solution?

• A site uses OpenID for commenter identities.
• A JavaScript loads a small frame from another site when you mouse-over the commenter's name.
• This frame includes a rating for that commenter, a link to a profile for that commenter, and rating buttons.
• The profile includes whatever the commenter wants to add - standard profile stuff.
• People can click the rating buttons in the frame, "Positive" or "Negative", to indicate how they feel about a specific comment.
• The combination of these clicks produces the overall commenter rating.
• People can also leave a note with their rating ("Comment is extra-smart") which is added to the commenter profile along with, ideally, a link to the original comment.
• People who leave ratings need to be validated with OpenID before they can rate another person's comments.
• People can opt out of the system.

Pros

• Easy to set this up so that the JavaScript call to the centralised system included a link back to the original comment, allowing OpenID users to track their previous comments and potentially quickly check for replies.
• A quick call to the system could grab the commenter (or comment) rating and change the display accordingly, allowing a skim-reader to quickly pick out the best comments from a thread.
• People would get feedback on their comments!
• Would be possible for individuals to set preferences within the system ("Always highlight comments from this person", "Always ignore comments from this person")
• People who leave worthless comments (quick one liners using keywords instead of names, just to boost their own search engine link-love) are easily spotted and ignored.
• Provides a path for non-A-list bloggers to become more widely read and A-list themselves.

Cons

• System is open to spamming - people can set up multiple OpenIDs to vote themselves up. Easily fixed though - IP and cookie tracking, plus a higher weighting given to commenters with certain characteristics (member more than a year, consistently highly rated comments, rate lots of other people, don't just give high ratings when they do rate, etc).
• Revenge rating (where someone leaves a negative rating and the person slighted then does the same back despite actual comment quality) could be a problem.
• "Cliques" could easily form.
• It may dissuade genuine people from leaving negative comments on popular blogs for fear of fanboy-revenge.

Thoughts?

I'm not entirely sure how much of a difference this could make. It would require a wider adoption of OpenID (definitely a good thing), and adoption on the larger blogs and blog networks. However, were such a system to exist and be used, I think its benefits would be enormous. I'd be very interested in hearing your thoughts.

A ReviewMe review of CardroomSupply.com, an online store supplying poker tables and poker chip sets to the US and Canada.

Update: I have finally managed to find the time to add a full feed option to the main feed used here (the "Everything" feed). This is now available in either full or partial, at your discretion. No advertising in either feed. Thanks for all the feedback!

A short while ago, the Freakonomics blog moved to a new home at the New York Times. The responses to post announcing the change were almost exclusively complaints about the feed having changed to a partial feed.

The anger of some of the commenters was (is) astounding. A quick example - one comment ended simply "It was fun. Goodbye.". The overwhelming sentiment appears to be that partial feeds are the work of the internet devil, to be tossed aside as quickly as possible in favour of full-text feeds.

Are full feeds really better? Personally, I like partial feeds - I keep up with a lot of sites and the title and description of a post are what I use to decide if I'll read more. As I go through each folder in Bloglines, I'll open tabs in the background with items I'm interested in and read them afterwards. I click through even if the post is full-feed, and not out of some mis-placed desire to ensure the site gets every advertising impression, but because I'm not at the consumption stage of my reading yet - I'm still just deciding what to read when I'm using my feed reader.

Other people appear to only use the feed reader, never really clicking through. Mobile users, especially, appear to much prefer full feeds.

From a purely selfish perspective, the feed on this site includes no advertising so I serve a partial feed for articles (blog is usually full feed except for large posts). Readership is more important than revenue though, so if full feeds are more likely to attract and keep readers, I'm more than happy to change.

So I have a few questions:

1. Do you prefer full or partial feeds, and to what extent? Or do you prefer feeds that include both and give you the option of viewing either?
2. Do you usually click through to a site if you're reading a post? And do you comment more, less or the same on links from partial feeds than full feeds?
3. Would you be more likely to ubsubscribe from a feed with advertising in it?
4. Are full feeds more likely to encourage plagiarism? Never mind - this is a topic for another day.
5. And finally, would you like full feeds for everything here?

I've almost finished ("almost", because I'm sure there are still a few bugs to iron out - there always are) the 6th incarnation of this site. This is mostly a visual/layout overhaul, with basic functionality remaining the same as previously (because I think that I'm finally happy with it).

Yes, the reds of version 5 and before have been put back into the closet, for now (though as ever you can access older versions of the design through the footer). They may make a reappearance in the future. The aim of this redesign was to make the actual design visually less distracting. The focus is on the content, not the denim wallpaper.

To that end, I've made a few other changes to the layout. Extra information, not as important (in my eyes) as the rest of the content, is now all in the footer. Yes, I've gone with the bigfoot approach. Comments are on the same page as the rest of the content now, and articles are all on one page rather than spread out over several as some were.

The archive page has gone missing (actually, it's still there, but it seemed nobody was using it and it was taking up valuable primary menu space, now occupied by a quick link to those infernal cheat sheets. The "About" page is also due to be changed and expanded, but for now remains the same.

Finally, the home page now inludes some useful links to the most read, more commented-on, and most recent posts on the site, as well as links to a few of those posts I feel are some of the most useful ones here.

A busy week this week at work is currently not looking like it will improve much, and primarily that is because I can't find a piece of software that can do what I want it to (and doesn't cost a fortune). Our contract with our previous PPC software supplier is about to expire and, because of their abysmal service and support, will not be renewed. So I am shortly to find myself without software to manage our PPC, and far too many keywords to do so manually.

So I need to find something to help manage our PPC campaigns at work. While I can live with simple maintenance functionality, a degree of automated bid adjustment wouldn't be a bad thing if at all possible. Can you help?

While working with our previous supplier, I have developed an internal PPC management system that allows us to set up keywords and adverts for products through our own CMS. This system regularly builds a text file with all of our PPC data in and sends it via FTP to said company. I would like to work with a company (or piece of software) where this system would not go to waste, if at all possible.

So what is your software of choice? All reccommendations very much appreciated!

It seems that for some people, the A4 one-sided format of the cheat sheets isn't quite suitable. Many prefer a pocket-sized guide they can refer to but keep out of sight (or on their person) unless needed. NoteBind.com have put together a post on compiling a pocket reference, in which they simply print and combine a variety of different cheat sheets and references into one handy, and most importantly pocket-sized, "NotePack" (PDF available from the site).