tempers

qwerqwer

2009-12-10T08:08:00.001-08:00

weqrqwer

dfsgsdf

2009-12-10T08:07:00.001-08:00

gdfsgfg

erwtr

2009-12-10T08:05:00.001-08:00

twertwert

tyu

2009-12-09T08:21:00.001-08:00

tutyu

mote teleportation

2009-12-09T07:19:00.001-08:00

sdf

teleport

2009-12-09T07:07:00.000-08:00

wee!

test

2009-12-07T20:32:00.001-08:00

seeing how it works

Webmaster and SEO dashboard

2009-11-30T20:39:00.000-08:00

i find myself constantly wanting to have one place as a jumping point for me to review all my website stuff and the way chrome does bookmarks makes it where clicking to this post is actually faster(at least for me). but i figure this is one place to start from then i don't have to go looking through all the bookmarks. ill add more items here as i find more tools that i find useful for SEOs and Webmasters

google testing a new layout for search

2009-11-25T22:56:00.000-08:00

Google seems like they have a new flavor of search that they are testing (im assuming they are doing some A/B test for some percentage of users) and seeing how people like the new version. to see it for yourself go to google.com and paste this javascript into the address bar and refresh...

here is what you should see...

im just speculating but Google has just finished testing the new caffeine version of search so this may go along it. here is what the search feature looks like

aside from a cleaner, revamped logo there are little icons for the different types of search... images,video and news but also the ability to only search blogs or forums.

the javascript code above saves a cookie so if you want to turn off this new version of search all you have to do is kill the PERF cookie for google.com and it will click back to normal... so thats the new layout they are testing ill be updating this article as i know more :)

Awesome Visual View of Google analytics data with Juice Analytics

2009-11-19T11:42:00.000-08:00

so i was reading the google analytics blog as i often do and they have this awesome new tool for visualizing your websites analytics data and keywords so lets get into what these way cool tools do (the tool is here but read the article cuz i spent some time on it)

first at the bottom you get a timeline so you can see the volume of traffic your site has been receiving and colorize this ribbon timeline by bounce rate. its cool to be able to see how your content starts being read more or single view articles turn it more red

this is also cool because you can view what pages drive the most traffic and how the bounce rate changes from page to page (if your colorblind thats cool too they got a button to fix the contrast for yall)

you can see a little better here in this shot how the bounce rate changes from page to page and how some pages are much more popular then others. heres the little video that they put out to demonstrate the tool.

then they have this cool keyword visualization tool that shows keywords and how they relate to each other and a few different options to color by. i like either time spent on site or bounce rate to see what words seem to keep peoples interest longer or drive them away faster

you can see how some keywords are red and threw more bounces and then my linkbait for embedding your Google profile social icons and the Google profile badge have green text showing that they had visitors staying for a much longer period (this graph is colored by time on page) and again the cool demo video the juice guys put out

here is the link to the tool i hope you find it useful and liked the article... don't forget to re-tweet about it and let others know!

Twitter's Beta Testing ReTweeting

2009-11-15T16:21:00.000-08:00

So i log into twitter the other day and i see this cool message... Im not sure how many people got the Beta of this but i thought id make a post about it and give what little info i know... here is the post twitter made on their blog. Theres been many hints that this is coming (im pretty sure it said something in the api docs) and its really needed i think it solves some of the problems with re-tweeting like usernames taking up space and such
but let me show you how it works...

you select to re-tweet to your followers and then it shows up in your stream like this...

you see this message in your stream with their username and the cool little re-tweet icon. then after you decide you dont like the message you can revert it with the click of a button

its that simple... ill add some more as i know more but i thought you would like the heads up!

edit: i found another site that has a few more screen shots here

looking into how hard it is to break a simple image CAPTCHA

2009-11-08T16:35:00.000-08:00

CAPTCHA always seemed like it was a kind of one word challenge to me. it stands for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart and its what is the industry standard to try and keep my bot from scraping your web service or posting dirty comment spam but some are very crazy... even too hard for a human to read... and how hard are they really to break? I have done allot of reading about the theory of the CAPTCHA and tried to break one before (see as far as i got below i stopped at anti-alias rotating but segmentation and cleaning the image was done so i didn't have that much more)

so for my second i wanted to choose an easy one. the CAPTCHA i choose had these features

image has changing static (easy to filter)
no letter rotation
fixed width font
pattern to solution (letter-number-letter-ect)

fixed width font is the worst offender on this list. it lets you eliminate the hardest part of breaking a test, its called segmentation and its hard, once you get it down to one letter tho OCR is normally accurate to like 97% but these bots are sending literally millions or requests so a captcha is considered broken if it can be solved even half the time. that brings me to the second problem with this test... i can validate my answers. because every phrase follows a letter number letter pattern i can check to see if my bot got the right answer without sending it. This is never good because it lets the attacker check their work but lets get into how i broke this one

(sample CAPTCHA with mouse-over effects)
the first thing that is meant to mess up a bot is the noise and theirs wasn't so good. first it didn't disrupt the letter that much AND if i requested the image again i got back the same riddle with different static. This let me make a filter to extract only the pixels that occur in both images giving me the clean letters. i have read about neural nets and used examples but never implemented my own so i decided to go with the easy way of guessing the letters. i created templates that represented the perfect symbol and them compared them byte by byte to determine which letter it was most like...

heres one of my templates for the number 5

111111101
110000001
110000101
110111001
111001101
000000111
000000111
110000111
011001101
001111001

heres what the program spits out while solving the test data...
I Guess its a Y with a 97.50 %
I Guess its a 8 with a 98.75 %
I Guess its a L with a 100.00 %
I Guess its a 2 with a 98.75 %
I Guess its a Q with a 100.00 %
I Guess its a 5 with a 100.00 %
I Guess its a G with a 98.75 %
I Guess its a 7 with a 97.50 %
I Guess its a Q with a 97.50 %
I Guess its a 6 with a 98.75 %
I Guess its a O with a 100.00 %
I Guess its a 8 with a 100.00 %
i was right! it was Y8L2Q5G7Q6O8
I Guess its a Y with a 97.50 %
I Guess its a 8 with a 98.75 %
I Guess its a L with a 100.00 %
I Guess its a 2 with a 98.75 %
I Guess its a Q with a 100.00 %
I Guess its a 5 with a 100.00 %
I Guess its a G with a 98.75 %
I Guess its a 7 with a 97.50 %
I Guess its a Q with a 97.50 %
I Guess its a 6 with a 98.75 %
I Guess its a O with a 100.00 %
I Guess its a 8 with a 100.00 %
i was right! it was Y8L2Q5G7Q6O8
(i cut out a bunch of them Google was saying that my site had relevance for the work "guess" oops :)
and at the end

i checked a total of 265 files with a success rate of 94.34 %

im very happy with its accuracy (especially because im not using neural net) below are some more screen shots from the app i made to look at the data and test my solver...

you can see above the program knows where the number 8 is because of fixed width font. this made it easy to extract just the letter to be analyzed

this is the training data input screen. the text box validates the input as valid solutions changing color when the pattern isn't followed so bad training data isn't entered by mistake

this was a very simple test to break and it had very weak security features that let even a simple attack defeat it with great accuracy. if you are interested in other poor captchas you may be interested in my post about text based math captchas and why they are so easy to bypass aswell.

i plan to be doing some more work with captcha breaking (ill probably step it up and take on one that needs a neural net) soon i wrote this code a few month ago and its been just sitting so i thought i would share what i learned and how simple it can be to break one of these. i don't like captchas because they are like locks on doors, they only keep the honest people out. bandwidth is getting cheaper and cheaper you should encourage people and companies to consume your services and learn to monetize the traffic not implement stupid little pictures that a good bot can read anyways that just waste the humans time as they are trying to figure out if its a 0 or a capitol O. id love to hear your thoughts on the subject and will respond if i can help so please take the time to write a comment if you have any questions

Awesome code syntax highlighting made easy

2009-10-29T20:08:00.000-07:00

So ive finally come across an awesome syntax highlighter that i think will work well for most any application and it works well on Blogger Hosting which is even better. It uses a flash swf to do a click to copy button and has support for a variety of languages as well as a bunch of themes

here is the code you need to drop right before your <head> tag in the HTML of your blogger template (or wherever you may find yourself in a need of a syntax highlighter). just remove any lines for languages you don't use...

<link href='http://alexgorbatchev.com/pub/sh/2.1.364/styles/shCore.css' rel='stylesheet' type='text/css'/> 

<link href='http://alexgorbatchev.com/pub/sh/2.1.364/styles/shThemeDefault.css' rel='stylesheet' type='text/css'/> 

<script src='http://alexgorbatchev.com/pub/sh/2.1.364/scripts/shCore.js' type='text/javascript'></script> 

<script src='http://alexgorbatchev.com/pub/sh/2.1.364/scripts/shBrushCpp.js' type='text/javascript'></script> 

<script src='http://alexgorbatchev.com/pub/sh/2.1.364/scripts/shBrushCSharp.js' type='text/javascript'></script> 

<script src='http://alexgorbatchev.com/pub/sh/2.1.364/scripts/shBrushCss.js' type='text/javascript'></script> 

<script src='http://alexgorbatchev.com/pub/sh/2.1.364/scripts/shBrushJava.js' type='text/javascript'></script> 

<script src='http://alexgorbatchev.com/pub/sh/2.1.364/scripts/shBrushJScript.js' type='text/javascript'></script> 

<script src='http://alexgorbatchev.com/pub/sh/2.1.364/scripts/shBrushPhp.js' type='text/javascript'></script> 

<script src='http://alexgorbatchev.com/pub/sh/2.1.364/scripts/shBrushPython.js' type='text/javascript'></script> 

<script src='http://alexgorbatchev.com/pub/sh/2.1.364/scripts/shBrushRuby.js' type='text/javascript'></script> 

<script src='http://alexgorbatchev.com/pub/sh/2.1.364/scripts/shBrushSql.js' type='text/javascript'></script> 

<script src='http://alexgorbatchev.com/pub/sh/2.1.364/scripts/shBrushVb.js' type='text/javascript'></script> 

<script src='http://alexgorbatchev.com/pub/sh/2.1.364/scripts/shBrushXml.js' type='text/javascript'></script> 

<script src='http://alexgorbatchev.com/pub/sh/2.1.364/scripts/shBrushPerl.js' type='text/javascript'></script> 

<script language='javascript'> 

SyntaxHighlighter.config.bloggerMode = true;

SyntaxHighlighter.config.clipboardSwf = 'http://alexgorbatchev.com/pub/sh/2.1.364/scripts/clipboard.swf';

SyntaxHighlighter.all();

</script>

and a little about how to use it...
you can use a special <script> tag with CDATA around it

<script type="syntaxhighlighter" class="brush: html"><![CDATA[

<html>

<head>

<title>Carter Tomorrow Fund Donations</title>

<meta name="title" content="Help Give to the Carter Tomorrow Fund" /> 

<meta name="description" content="Show your support and help out with a small gift" 

]]></script>

- or -

you can use a <Pre> tag with html escaped characters
heres a quick way to escape your html

this is my way cool theme switcher... just click the css theme below to see how it looks (you will need to change the second line that imports the style sheet to use the filename you want to use from below)

Google to join the Twitter bandwagon and Yahoo, Bing

2009-10-22T07:35:00.000-07:00

edit: ok so bing already kinda has a twitter search that it plans to improve on but like Google tweets still aren't on main results page but Yahoo (who props to them i like their new stuff) plans to change that announcing that they will be showing tweets in results soon this will hopefully help yahoo gain some ground back as they are struggling keeping their part of the search pie. Google social search experiment is the closest thing google has for social media search so far

the title says it all i was reading my daily rss and this clicked across...
Official Google Blog: RT @google: Tweets and updates and search, oh my!

so Google is going to be joining the twitter bandwagon. but wheres the link? Bing looks like they are ahead of the game already with their Bing Twitter Search it has a small tag cloud but little more im sure google will do it better with longer history but i wonder if we will see ReTweet tools built into searches with the ability to pass oAuth to Twitter and tweet from inside our searches. if it was an unobtrusive menue id think it was great. what are your thoughts?

fetch as googlebot and other webmaster tools

2009-10-13T18:13:00.000-07:00

I subscribe to the Google Webmaster Blog and i saw this click by in my reader this morning and i wanted to do a quick blurb about these new features in google webmaster tools as well as the other webmaster tools that are out there and what they can be used for so lets get into it...

Google Webmaster Tools

ok so google has some really great stuff in their tools but lets real quick talk about the features they added today. First they added the ability to Fetch as GoogleBot so you can see how your page looks to the crawler.

heres how it pulled blog.cartercole.com

This is how Googlebot fetched the page.
URL: http://blog.cartercole.com/
Date: Tue Oct 13 07:46:33 PDT 2009
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
Expires: Tue, 13 Oct 2009 09:14:43 GMT
Date: Tue, 13 Oct 2009 09:14:43 GMT
Cache-Control: public, max-age=0, must-revalidate, proxy-revalidate
Last-Modified: Tue, 13 Oct 2009 09:08:25 GMT
ETag: "02afcfab-2808-4275-8274-6da1b3584a07"
Content-Encoding: gzip
X-Content-Type-Options: nosniff
X-XSS-Protection: 0
Content-Length: 17486
Server: GFE/2.0

-cut for length -

you will also now be notified when your page has been infected which basically looks up your pages automatically with Googles safe browsing API

manual lookup: http://www.google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?site=http://blog.cartercole.com

here are some other options / tools you get...

changing GoogleBot crawl speed
the major keywords google found for your site
manage sitelinks for your site (if you get them)
a list of links to your site (not complete)
much more id defiantly check it out

and the API docs for google webmaster tools

Yahoo Site Explorer

ok generally yahoo site explorer will give you the best link list of any other free tool i know and you can get this cool badge

to display the links to your pages and thats about all it does right now
also yahoo site explorer API docs

Bing Webmaster Center

ok bings back up so ill finsih my post about them asap

~~oops looks like the Bing Webmaster Center is having some trouble...~~ They are back up now but if you care this is what they were showing for a couple days...

We are experiencing an issue processing your request at this time.
The Webmaster Center Team has been notified of the error and will work to resolve it. Try again in a few minutes.

yall should get on that this guy has already mentioned it

please leave comments with questions / comments / concerns id love to hear from you

my very own #list of twitter tools and sites

2009-10-03T17:07:00.000-07:00

theres been tons of twitter lists like this one or here but heres my list

TweetMeMe
Twitter news aggregator

TwerBose
when you want to be able to post longer tweets

TwitterFeed
Post your RSS to twitter

TweetStats
Stats about your twitter account

TwitterCounter
Tracks your followers

TwitterGrader
Grades your twitter account

TwitPic
Tweet your pics on twitter and track views

CurseBird
Real time tracking of twitter cursing

FutureTweets
Tweet into the future and reoccurring

Tweleted
Find tweets people delete

TwitterKarma
Get your carma on twitter see who you follow and who follows you

TwitterAnalyzer
Looks at your tweets by time and other stats

ReTweetRadar
Trend tracking

Twitscoop
Another twitter client [uses oAuth]

TwitSpy
Spys on public timeline of twitter

TweetingTooHard
A place ot vote on peoples craziest tweets

PorTwiture
Makes a collage of your status out of images

Mozaic of tweets
title says it all

TimeTweets
The time in tweets...

TwitterFountain
A flowing fountain of twitter tweets

TweetTree
This expands and builds your twitter feed into all its parts loading my hulu feed as well as images and other stuff

TwitterHolic
its what all the junkies do

TweetCloud
view your tweets as a tag cloud

TweetBroadCast
Allows you to broadcast your tweets across your friends

google easter eggs list... secrets of search, reader, picasca and more

2009-09-30T05:00:00.000-07:00

Edit II:
happy Halloween!
We have a new easter egg hidden in Google now for Halloween its at the bottom of the robots.txt hook here at

Bottom of Google's robots.txt (google changed it back this is a mirror) you can also see google's robots.txt change log

Disallow: /voice/media/
Disallow: /voice/shared/
Disallow: /app/updates

User-agent: Kids
Disallow: /tricks
Allow: /treats

Sitemap: http://www.gstatic.com/s2/sitemaps/profiles-sitemap.xml
Sitemap: http://www.google.com/hostednews/sitemap_index.xml
Sitemap: http://www.google.com/ventures/sitemap_ventures.xml

Edit:
there wasn't much meat to the post so i thought id add some more easter eggs i was able to round up. programmers will leave little tricks or games hidden in the code. eventually through word of mouth these secret codes get released and become part of public knowledge. Google as a bunch of hidden secrets here are just a few...

Here are a bunch of different flavors of Google search

Some neat things for the calculator to tell you

Google search for ascii art (ascii google logo)

Google search for recursion

Translating the word table from spanish to english

Google Special Searches (like the one for uncle sam)

Teddy Bears in Picasca

In Picasca: Just Press Ctrl + Shift + Y to see them appear!

Google Earth Flight Simulator:

To enter the flight simulator mode, press Ctrl + Alt + A ( + Option + A on the Mac).

here are the Google Earth Flight Simulator Shortcuts you will probably need them

so i subscribe to @mattcutts because im a nerd and i just saw his video here about how to get the google reader easter egg but its in a video so i thought id steal some thunder and make the post as text so here it is. while on reader the code is

up up down down left right left right b a

i made an animated gif if you dont get it (feel free to steal it)

it then makes this way cool changes like hearts for your like buttons and then does cool animations when you click them its kinda geeky fun. you also get the bonus of a reader ninja to watch over your rss items which will all read to contain 30 items a homage to the original contra cheat

if you unlike it breaks your heart

but if you do like it you get bunches of love :)
and a cool ninja

if anybody knows any other google easter eggs id love to add them to this list

Google wave | pleading to get one of those invites on sep 30th

2009-09-28T11:15:00.000-07:00

edit:

you may be interested in the invites i have to wave

If you havent heard of google wave then watch this http://wave.google.com/ (i know its long but it is worth the time). wave is the end all of collaboration tools and will make taking notes at meetings and at school so much easier as well as cool games and other uses we haven't even thought of yet. it has realtime translation as well as awesome bots and controls that lets you extend the hell out of the thing and link it with almost anything you can think of, it tracks history of the wave and allows for multiple users to be editing the same page at the same time. SO i definatly signed up my apps domain as well as my email address to the forms i found to try and get invites

these are the three ways you can sign up to a google wave invite

here they are for you:

google wave dev invite
google wave app invite
wave signup for single users

and the unofficial ill help and give out some of my google wave invites is
http://googlewaveinvites.com/ it gets you connected with those that do(they wont be giving away invites to new users)

so this is my intro about what wave is and the second half (the one thats starting now) is me begging google to let me be part of those 100,000 users that will get accounts 2 days from now (september 30th). but what diffrent about me than the other people scrambling for accounts? i needed something to set me apart, so i started thinking about something i could build that would leverage the technology and be something that could increase awareness and promote the service (flattery should help get me in that group right? i hope :) well heres the ideas (leave comments let me know if you have others)

1) madlibs on wave

madlibs are little stories with missing nouns, verbs, other parts of speech that make little funny stories as you fill them in. so madlibs in a wave would allow everyone to be changing editing each others words until they have created the perfect madlib then like they did in the IO video (i did watch whole thing x2) it can remove all the comments / editing parts and become a new wave that is the completed story. This uses the group collabaration ideas as well as creating finished documents.

2) commentary on hulu

this idea is a little less developed but basically embed hulu shows into a page and have the wave at the bottom. the individual or group if they start at same time (still iffy on how to keep time synced but) you can comment on the show as your watching it and then using the replay functionality replay / share your commentary on the episode with the world. kinda like a social mystery science theater

3) collaborative embeddable lists for sites / blogs

pretty self explanatory

4) somehow have an entire blog post as a wave

i use blogger so i know i can embed into posts but i dont know how an embeded wave would behave in rss. i might be able to make some bot that syncs the post text to the wave but thats kinda not clean to me so i got to keep thinking

5) note sharing website

i want to make a website to make it easy to share notes with groups of people and organize them (this is how ill make it the rest of the way through college)

please let a wave invite fly into my gmail on the 30th id be a great beta guy (like i did for aviary) help report bugs / ideas and code as a developer open source to help make it a good tool for everyone. i have already run into customers who love the gallery embeddable widgets and i really like to be able to test it while taking notes in meetings.

some screen shots of wave:

some relevant links:
wave coming soon
wave developers blog
post about invites comming

Embed your Google profile into sites with this cool badge

2009-09-27T21:29:00.000-07:00

so i love my google profile and want to be able to share it everywhere so ive added some updates to my script that drops the icons from the profile.

you can now embed a large badge on your site with one line of code (i got the idea from here but mines better :)

so to embed this: [326 x 122]

all you need is one line of code:

<script src="http://cartercole.com/gpicons.asp?user=[username]&type=2"></script>

verifying blog at technorati | ctbxyj27ev

2009-09-27T13:45:00.000-07:00

This post was originally me verifying my blog at technorati but i guess ill explain how i did it... basically i got an account went to verify blog and then made a post with the title and text the verification code below i gave them my RSS feed and Boom! i had a verified blog...

ctbxyj27ev

i found this thing to send a vote for your blog out to Technorati favorites
heres how you can get your own for your blog! [ be sure to click mine above lolz :) ]

google profile icon gadget | show off your social bookmarks

2009-09-24T14:52:00.000-07:00

so I love Google and one of the cool things i have found now is Google profiles (if you haven't made one yet get on that). i wanted to be able to put my string of social bookmarks into a page. the explanation is below but heres the code to use the script along with some examples

you may also be interested in the other widget i made to embed a google profile badge

Carter Cole

<script src="http://cartercole.com/gpicons.asp?user=[user]&width=[100]&limit=[5]"></script>

Matt Cutts <script src="http://cartercole.com/gpicons.asp?user=mattcutts"></script>

Tim O'Reilly (limit = 5) <script src="http://cartercole.com/gpicons.asp?user=timoreilly&limit=5><"/script>

Jeff Huber (width = 100) <script src="http://cartercole.com/gpicons.asp?user=jhuber&width=100"></script>

i also did css classes on each element (you may need the css !important)

image class = "google-profile-img"

anchor class = "google-profile-link"

wrapper div = "google-profile-gadget"

i think one of the best features is the links and reader uses your profile links see?

i have all my profiles linked to from there but i wanted to be able to embed them into pages(like google reader did). rather than trying to fight and get the data from google i decided to go about the problem myself. First i thought i was going to have to do parsing and checking to find the right favorite icon but then i found that google had done my work for me(thanks). you can do this...

http://www.google.com/s2/favicons?domain=[domain]

http://www.google.com/s2/favicons?domain=wellsfargo.com

http://www.google.com/s2/favicons?domain=seomoz.com

http://www.google.com/s2/favicons?domain=pipes.yahoo.com

so then i made a asp page to spit out some js to write the icons...
there are 3 optional parameters

user=username (this is the last part of the profile url)
http://www.google.com/profiles/Carter.Cole
(if you dont set a user it uses mine)
limit=number (this sets the number of icons that the script should spit out) [default is 100]
width=number (this is used to make the icons show up in a block) [its the div width that holds the icons]

please let me know if you have any questions / comments / concerns id love to hear from you

googles picasa facial recognition works perfect

2009-09-22T21:51:00.000-07:00

I just installed Picasa and I saw the post about facial recognition so i am testing it out. It works perfectly but all I want to know is how do I mash it with Facebook? Check this out

its detecting my face and is trained once I give it hints of the new angles of my face. I have always hated the repetitiveness of tagging and wanted to hook facial recognition into Facebook for awhile and ill I am asking Google is how I can do it with this code? Is it open source? Or can Google let me borrow the code so I can do it? It’s such an awesome technology and with all the data becoming open it’s so fun for me to be a developer right now. It’s obvious that the Picasa facial recognition is superior. I know dealing with the privacy of facial recognition on a social media site will be difficult but nothing worse than that town that kicked out the street view car right? Who would I even talk to at Google for that?I guess ill tweet at @mattcutts ill bet he can point me in the right direction. God I love web 2.0, social media,viral marketing,twitter world that we live in now woohoo

aviary online editing in the browser

2009-09-20T10:21:00.000-07:00

I was a beta tester for this when it came out and now ive got a pro account. im pretty excited these are some things i made. all editing is done in the browser and allows collaboration and directives by the community enterprise.egg
melingdeath.egg

I love mashups | some cool stuff i did with yahoo pipes and cameroid

2009-09-19T20:05:00.000-07:00

So i wanted to take some pictures with my built in webcam and i started to write my own in flash but then i thought to myself, self i bet theres already one that exists and you know what? i was right. check out http://cameroid.com/. heres the gallery im scraping using pipe

its got some pretty neat features like distort and other filters but it was missing one thing. a strong username / api for the system, not even a rss feed so i decided to make one. I had just found this crazy thing yahoo pipes
so i went to work to make a rss feed with my images. I made a pipe that just pulled the images for a single page. then i used a loop to have it run through the first 15 pages of the user gallery i set with the pipe. now the pipe sends out clean rss with my cameroid pictures in historical order perfect for me to plug into friend feed. awesome another social mashup under my belt

Monopoly City Streets - The online tycoon life for Carter Cole begins...

2009-09-18T18:23:00.000-07:00

EDIT II: The game ends on dec 9!

read more about the game ending here

Edit:

ive been playing awhile now and building buildings takes too long its hard to make sweeping chnges... you should check out my post on tools for monopoly city streets

This game is way cool. It lets you play monopoly with the real world! ive just started playing and i didn't realize i had to buy houses to make rent so im going to have to try and remember to login so i can get my money. Go get an account, apparently there has been some cheating but the game is rest again so get in quickly :)

A review of Google Fast Flip | why i think news is failing

2009-09-14T19:17:00.000-07:00

Today Google released its news reading tool Google Fast Flip. It's supposed to make online news faster to find and read, and get interesting articles quicker. This is the first time I have been disappointed with something Google has put out. The idea itself is good; make it easier to flip quickly through articles to find what we want (Google is all about helping the users and increasing accessibility) but news sources in general are failing, especially print with readers getting more and more of their information from online sources and blogs. It’s obvious that something has to change, I was really excited to see some names that they "partnered" with but once on the page I was confused. I started flipping through the articles and I had to click the button pretty quickly to see the loading message... good so far. Then I happen upon one I wanted to read but I quickly realized that all the articles are just rendered screenshots off the actual website, and it’s done with poor rendering engine that doesn't have all the features. First I find this little issue on BBC page but good coding on their part replaces the video with a picture.

but just a few pages later and I find another error this time on the cosmo girl article

There’s nothing on this entire page. Where’s the content? There are only 40 pages and it’s the first day for public release and there are broken articles. I try and click on the article and I can instantly see what’s going on, it’s all flash (if you don't support flash shouldn't you make sure the page isn't based on it?), I find other articles missing their advertisement missing (JavaScript doesn't render) what’s wrong? I don't get it. I know it’s a beta but this method for showing news will never work it’s just screen shots. You lose all the good parts of the internet (analytics for the most part) and the content still doesn't work. Heres what I thought it was going to do... Google would get a special raw story feed from newspapers and would show just the text and a few ads placed throughout the article preloading the stories as you flip through them. Even better it should load the text then if you stay on the page for a couple seconds then load the adverts. We use html to track all kinds of things the newspapers would get info on what stories catch user’s eyes and still get their ad revenue in. I don’t want to have to click an extra time to get to the real article. I’m a RSS user and I love Google reader it’s how I happen across this lab in the first place. I feel like it’s just not up to the standards of what Google normally puts out and doesn't really help the usability of the articles. I like to believe I’m a "power" Googler and have almost every service they offer and constantly are referring my customers to their apps but I really don't think this will work which brings me to my rant about online news. Are newspapers just not getting it? The internet is about making things easier and open. Running through my RSS today I found an article on the Wall Street Journal and i got this

I feel like its lying about what’s on the page. Now I give them credit for trying to monetize their online traffic its better than some of the other places that don't even want you linking to them (like the AP). But are you crazy? Links are traffic, trust and rank and that’s means money. Learn how to make money online and stop grasping for the old ways of publishing news. Penalize people for using / liking your content is just stupid. In search engine optimization we love people using and linking to use its called user generated content and it is often hard to get. They are driving you the traffic, you just need to learn how to make money off it not sue them for it. I don't know anything about the newspaper industry and I’m just giving my opinion but look at Hulu they have finally figured out how to distribute TV properly and I don't have to pay. I thought that would never happen, newspapers need to grow up and stop being like the RIAA, your industry is changing and you need to get with the times and stop biting the hand that feeds you.

I really thought I used too much voice in this post I want to keep an objective view on events and things I review here so please take the time to comment and let me know what you liked / hated.

Thank you for your time

relevant links:

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/09/read-news-fast-with-google-fast-flip.html

http://www.citmedialaw.org/blog/2009/ap-tells-google-and-other-news-aggregators-pay-or-face-lawsuits

http://w2.eff.org/IP/eff_fair_use_faq.php

virtual tarot cards | leveraging Scriptaculous and Prototype for web 2.0 style sites

2009-09-07T16:30:00.000-07:00

So as i learn more ajax stuff and switch between jquery with theme roller and scriptaculous on prototype i happen to dabble in the tarot cards a little. I decided that i wanted to make a virtual tarot card dealer so i went about learning the definitions and positions of the most common spread the "Celtic Cross". This is what i came up with: Automatic Tarot Cards you can see the example below:

i did some stuff with the builder object so its easy to call and create the cards in any position. I use google awesome ajax api to host all my code for me (see page here) and load it on startup using 2 lines(way easy to implement) thanks again google. the api looks something like this

<script src="http://www.google.com/jsapi"></script> 
<script> 
//your awesome google
  google.load("prototype", "1.6");
  google.load("scriptaculous", "1.8.2");
</script>

i use an array to keep track of all the words. if anyone wants more spreads or has better definitions of the cards or i have anything wrong please let me know

Carter Cole the Guru | Great link bait and viral marketing

2009-09-03T08:33:00.000-07:00

We all love ourselves so when i saw this little flash ad that Cisco made i decided i would actually click on it this time. It connected to my webcam took my picture and made this awesome movie. they allow you to share on Facebook as well as Twitter and you can even embed it. This is free advertising and i wanted to make a point of how simple it can be make something everyone is going to want to share and then make it easy to do so. Retweet buttons as well as making sure your pages have the correct markup so Facebook can create a pretty link for you.

this is how my donation page looks when shared in Facebook

cool huh? it has a custom description and title different from what would normally be shared by Facebook.
i use 3 meta tags

so now you know how to add some support to share your page on Facebook and don't forget carter is a total web guru

thanks for the video Cisco! Great marketing

Carter Tomorrow Fund | linking Wells Fargo to #twitter

2009-09-02T21:13:00.000-07:00

When i was young i created the Carter Tomorrow Fund and im happy to say its now back!

But i wanted to take it a step further so i found this way cool site http://tarpipe.com/
Tarpipe lets you fire off a bunch of stuff by connecting pipes in workflows. So i make a filter in gmail to forward to my Wells Fargo alerts to the tarpipe workflow email.

and now i get these nice alerts on my twitter http://twitter.com/CarterCole/status/3623058706 everytime i overdraft or my account drops below $20 so all my social networks can know and my friends can donate to keep me from paying overdraft fees

Someone even donated some! so help out and automate your banking alerts on twitter and give some to the fund

my free $90 for #google #adwords | thanks google

2009-08-27T21:12:00.000-07:00

this is the second in a series

So after i got an email from google about $100 free adwords i added the coupon and paid the $10 to get the account activated so im only counting it as $90 but its still way cool and i like having my name all over the first page of the serp so this is like to say thanks to google

Exerpt from my email from google (and the reason i love google)

Try Google AdWords

with a $100 coupon

Dear Google Analytics user,

You already know that Google™ Analytics helps you gain rich insights from your website. When you combine Google Analytics with Google AdWords™, you can get even more from your website: more traffic, more conversions, more business.

Flickr

2009-08-27T21:03:00.000-07:00

This is a test post from , a fancy photo sharing thing.

how to link your hulu history to twitter

2009-08-23T17:14:00.000-07:00

i wanted a way to tweet my hulu activity and i came across this way i could post to twitter from a rss feed from my blog so i was thinking to myself, self i could use the rss history feed from my hulu account to post my hulu history to my twitter account

this is the solution i came up with

1)

Login to Hulu and go to your profile then the history tab and get the link for your hulu history as rss

the url looks something like this:
http://www.hulu.com/feed/history/username

From hulu.com:

2)

This is the website that does all the work for you
Twitter Feed

Its called twitter feed all you have to do is use oauth to link twitter feed to your twitter account and paste in the rss link and your pretty much done you can change the settings to add a prefix see mine below

and an example of how it shows up in my twitter
automatic post on Twitter

why textual captchas are FAIL

2009-08-15T14:34:00.000-07:00

there are tons of captcha solvers and sites that break images like here but i have been seeing a rise in math captchas so i wanted to real quick discuss something that i thought was kinda funny. its the idea that simple math problems are difficult for bots to solve. i found math captcha or a text based captcha that i thought would be really easy to solve so i decided i would break the captcha real quick.

basically an image captcha had a "textual riddle" version of the code in its alt tag.

one of the most difficult lines it returned was
(((((??? - 1) - 7) - 8) * 8) - 4) = -76
but i knew it had to be a number from 0 to 9 so i wrote a function to spit this out
if ((((((0 - 1) - 7) - 8) * 8) - 4) = -76) then line = 0
if ((((((1 - 1) - 7) - 8) * 8) - 4) = -76) then line = 1
if ((((((2 - 1) - 7) - 8) * 8) - 4) = -76) then line = 2
if ((((((3 - 1) - 7) - 8) * 8) - 4) = -76) then line = 3
if ((((((4 - 1) - 7) - 8) * 8) - 4) = -76) then line = 4
if ((((((5 - 1) - 7) - 8) * 8) - 4) = -76) then line = 5
if ((((((6 - 1) - 7) - 8) * 8) - 4) = -76) then line = 6
if ((((((7 - 1) - 7) - 8) * 8) - 4) = -76) then line = 7
if ((((((8 - 1) - 7) - 8) * 8) - 4) = -76) then line = 8
if ((((((9 - 1) - 7) - 8) * 8) - 4) = -76) then line = 9
computers are really good at math this takes no time to create and execute this simple vb
code:
function solveMath(phrase)
for i = 0 to 9
solveMath = solveMath & "if (" & replace(phrase,"???",i) & ") then line = " & i & vbcrlf
next
execute solveMath
end function
so now this captcha whose images are actually kind of hard to segment and classify is broken because of 4 lines of vb code

im working on cracking my second image captcha this time the letters aren't fixed with and have a rotation. i plan to use a feed forward back propagation learning neural net so ill let you know how that goes and hopefully get to post again about another captcha ive cracked

follow me on twitter ! im @cartercole

2009-08-13T19:26:00.000-07:00

Im on twitter now! well ive been there but i want to start ranking for the words follow me on twitter so im going to go ahead and make an entire post about it but its not all twitter spam i found this really cool little twitter bar maker they look sleek and i like mine here are a few of the choices

Edit: i should prolly put the url up
http://labs.creazy.net/twignature/

Compare the results of Google and the new Google Caffeine

2009-08-11T08:28:00.000-07:00

Update II : we got the ip of data center that will respond about 50% of time with caffeine

based on this post from search engine land we now know that the ip of the caffeine data center is

209.85.225.103

. ive updated my tool to compare the two flavors of search so it will use this new ip and it should return caffine results about half of the time. and again the release data is sometime after the holidays... Google has also been testing a new layout and i have speculated that it may be released when caffeine rolls out...

UPDATE: Google has finished its preview of caffeine and the tool no longer works...
our friend Matt Cutts has stated in his blog that caffeine wont be released until after the holidays and that they will be continuing to test the new version of caffeine transparently at one datacenter and that he will probably be releasing the ip of that data center (at some point) because the dev preview has been closed
(see above we got new ip and updated comparison tool)

sorry if anybody missed it but they closed the preview and it just has a little message:

We appreciate all the feedback from people who searched on our Caffeine sandbox.

Based on the success we've seen, we believe Caffeine is ready for a larger audience. Soon we will activate Caffeine more widely, beginning with one data center. This sandbox is no longer necessary and has been retired, but we appreciate the testing and positive input that webmasters and publishers have given.

this is old article text you can still read it if you like but caffine release date is quickly approaching and will soon be the standard google search...

so i just saw a update from the Google blog about Google caffeine its basically a different back end for their searches that should allow faster better and smarter indexing and updates. But what has really changed its hard to tell the difference so i created Google vs Google caffeine it lets you look at the different results side by side so you can see for yourself its here at

Compare the search results of the current Google and the new flavor of Google caffeine

so check it out and give me feedback

Edit:
i thought id give some more info on what Google caffeine is and here it came from so here are some other sources:
Search Engine Land about new Caffeine Google

The official Google blog asking for some help and announcing the dev preview

not sure on when the release date of Google caffeine is but should be soon based on them releasing the test site for public review

my analytics on google vs. google caffine is

5,638.46%

Edit 2:
8,030.77%

carter as a kid in south park | watch southpark online

2009-08-02T00:32:00.000-07:00

Hi im carter a geek from houton... southpark has a contest going on right now for you to join southpark as a cartoon but they also offer this way cool avatar creator that lets you make south park charecters...
this is me as a southpark dude its way easy to make and ive done a few of them

http://www.southparkstudios.com/fans/avatar/

and if you were not aware they give all the episodes of southpark away for free at southparkstudios.com

so mosy you way on over there and check it out and if you like making custom avatars you will probably also like the Simpsons avatar creator they got i also make some avatars on it (they are in flash with backgrounds and walk around its also kinda cool)

Oh and here is my twitter

2009-07-24T23:08:00.001-07:00

http://twitter.com/cartercole

oh and another simpsons peep

Edit:

robert made a very good point http://www.simpsonsmovie.com/main.html is where you can make your own

the longest running comedy on television and i got an avatar for it!

2009-07-24T23:08:00.000-07:00

the first Simpsons episode ran in December 17, 1989 it is the Longest running Prime-Time Comedy with 441+ episodes

check out other long running shows here but some are lame...

the simpsons avatar creator is on this site although it seems like they are having some issues so ill see if the embedding starts working or this post will turn into a rant about not letting link-bait die...