As a blogger, we all dream one day we can buy a new car out of the revenue from our websites. At least your dear wife/husband would not regard you totally wasting time on the stupid blogging. But life is not that easy, Google AdSense sucks as most of advertisement network; paid text link would hurt SEO, and eventually kill your revenue in the long run. Thanks god, some generous gentlemen would pay me to write a review, seems they do know what I am really good at.

This just happens inside the blogosphere of China, thanks to Feedsky, the largest Chinese feed management provider(BTW, FeedBurner is GFWed), I read quite a lot about new laptops from Asus and HP. The potential audience is reached, but may have the opposite effect. Because –
I hate paid reviews.

Paid reviews are fake, paid reviewers are liars

I really doubt how many reviewers would buy that laptop, use it for several week, and then write a review for only $20. How come you spread word-of-the-mouth without real experience? You are just compromising the trust between you and your readers.

Stop poisoning my feed

Let’s assume some reviewers take it very seriously, salute to you, but do I care about the product or service you are reviewing for? The paid reviews are nothing but the noise in the subscription. We have been fighting email spam, comment spam and traceback spam for a long time, now we may need another Bayesian classifier to filter the post spam. What is the hell?

Do not write paid reviews, something just should not be traded.

The UI of Write a New Note of Facebook is quite straightforward and … shabby:

If you happen to use Firefox, this userscript would make Facebook’s notes suck less.

Screenshot

Requirement

• Firefox
• Greasemonkey

Usage
Exactly the same as WordPress’s quicktags, — no wonder, the core functionality is a port from WordPress’s quicktags.js:

• You may click to button to start a tag, type some words, then click button again to close the tag.
• Select the words, and click the button to surround it with the corresponding tag.

License
This piece of script is released under the GNU General Public License as WordPress, a compatible license would make my life much easier.

Development
The development is a little bumpy than my expectation. The biggest obstacle in the way is the namespace in Greasemonky is not consistent to the general DOM model. When the page is loaded, GM takes control, we may manipulate the DOM nodes using various ways. When it is done, all the object in GM’s anonymous global namespace runs out of the scope, and they are garbage-collected.

For every rule, there is an exception: the closure as documented in the bible. The anonymous function would create a closure that wraps a function in the GM’s namespace. However this does not work for us since we need to maintain several records to bookkeeping the status. So eventually we have to inject the scripts and objects into the host. Here is a tip to inject the functions, but for the Javascript objects, we have to manually do the dirty work, error-prone and tedious. If you have a better idea to access the objects that resident in the GM namespace, please leave a comment here.

Until today yesterday, I still hesitated to adopt the feed aggregation service from FeedBurner. The main concern is the branding. I would rather secure the feed under the umbrella of my own domain than give it to a bunch of geeks in the silicon valley, no offense, even though the company is most unlikely to go bankruptcy tomorrow and they respect “Do not be evil” motto.

FeedBurner respects such kind of concern and they give the Pro feature, aka you have to pay the premium, MyBrand for free. The only action you should take is to add a CNAME entry in your DNS server:

My scenario is a little bit complicated here. This website is hosted in Jumpline.com while the domain name is registered in 1and1. So I assumed that the CNAME should be added in the 1and1 side as this:

It seemed not working, so I contacted the customer service twice, and they assured me they took care of it, and it would take a little bit of time for DNS propagation. I also tried to update the CNAME in Jumpline’s DNS control panel, and it kept complaining as this:

Eventually, this yesterday morning, I contacted the custom service of 1and1 again, and this time the gentleman confirmed that they could do nothing here and I needed to contact my web hosting company instead. The first time I contacted Jumpline, the custom service representative pinpointed the bug: the very last dot in the domain name is missing.

What a stupid mistake! If I could take a little bit more time reading the help page of FeedBurner or more adventurous to RTFM of BIND, I would not waste the time for the pleasant phone conversation with technical support.

Never, ever oversee the code however confident you are.

I was really shocked and offended when one of friends showed me the “Boycott Beijing 2008″ in Notepad++’s homepage. I respect the developer’s free speech, though I think it is totally wrong:

If you care about the human right in Tibet, come to Tibet and take a look. Do you remember how the media duped the US publicity about the Iraq war?

If you want to boycott the Chinese government with your poisoned prejudice, stop buying anything made in China like my boycott to French products, and leave the Olympic Games alone, the biggest dream for all the people over the world to compete with sports instead of politics.

Regardless, SourceForge is a platform to promote open source movement, not your personal opinion. If you posted in your personal blog, I won’t even bother to demonstrate my disregard at all. Please stop abusing SourceForge, Notepad++.

Happy naked day.

To know more about why styles are disabled on this website visit the

Annual CSS Naked Day website for more information.