Paul Silver's blog

Freelancing, programming, SEO and various things within New Media

Pausing Adwords campaigns over Christmas

Dec 21

Posted by Paul Silver in Adwords | No Comments

Like a lot of companies, one of my clients closes down over Christmas and re-opens their offices in the New Year. They don’t want their Adwords campaigns running during this time as there is no-one in the office to handle any enquiries, so getting the leads in would be mostly wasted money.

Adwords has a tool to help schedule when you want campaigns paused, called ‘Automate’, but I didn’t find the help for it particularly useful for pausing over the Christmas period. Once I’d got it sorted out, I thought a write up would be useful, for me next year if for no-one else.

What we’re going to do is set up two Automate rules in Adwords, one to turn off the adverts before the holiday, the second to turn them back on after the holiday. This only takes a minute or two once you know the options to click:

First, login to Adwords and go to the ‘Campaigns’ section.

Tick the campaigns that you will want to pause for Christmas / your holiday season (in my case, five campaigns.)

Click the ‘Automate’ menu on the bar just above the campaigns.

Menu from Adwords

Choose ‘Pause campaigns when…’

On the ‘Create Rule: Pause campaigns’ panel that opens up, change the ‘Frequency’ to ‘One time’, and the date and time next to it when you want the campaigns to pause. In my case that’s 12AM (midnight) on 24th December – Christmas Eve. Set ‘using data from’ to ‘Same day’, it’s not actually needed for this rule.

Name the rule something useful, and choose to receive an e-mail whenever the rule runs – this is so you can make sure it runs properly on the day it’s supposed to.

Here’s all that in a screenshot:

Panel in adwords letting you pause a campaign

If you preview the results, it told me the five campaigns would pause if the rule ran now. The rule is going to trigger on 24th December at 12AM so that’s fine.

You can now hit ‘Save’.

 

To start the campaigns running again after Christmas, select the same campaigns as you did for the pause step, then from the ‘Automate’ menu choose ‘Enable campaigns when…’

Set the frequency to ‘One time’, the date to the date you’re going to get back to work (in this case, the client wants to set the campaign to start the day before they return to the office in the new year as they know their customers will start to search for their services to get a jump on their work) and set ‘using data from’ to ‘Same day’.

Once again, given the rule a name so I can work out what it is without having to edit it, and opted to receive an e-mail when it runs (I’ll also set a calendar alert to remind me to check it has run.)

Adwords panel letting you automate re-starting a campaign

If you click ‘Preview results’ it will say none of your campaigns will be affected if you run the rule now. That’s fine, as in the future when this rule runs all the campaigns will be paused and you’ll want them to come back to life the way they are now.

There’s lots more to be done with the ‘Automate’ facility, but that’s all you need to use to pause your campaigns over Christmas. Good luck with it!

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Blog related things I’m playing with at the moment

Jan 14

Posted by Paul Silver in My Projects | No Comments

In my limited spare time I’ve been fiddling with two minor ideas recently.

The first one was a little utility to give me a list of all the blogs written by people I follow on Twitter. I follow a lot of people in the web industry, and I know a lot of them have blogs, but I can’t be bothered to go through everyone’s details to find the blogs I don’t know about. So, enter some quick ColdFusion scripting to get the details of the people I follow from Twitter’s API, then I scrape some likely pages from their website’s looking for references to RSS and Atom feeds.

This went pretty well, although I found some problems with parsing feeds using CFHTTP, which meant I wasn’t always happy with the results. I might package this up in to a small website to give people the ability to do the same (if you want this, please let me know.)

I was quite happy with the results, and it let me find the blogs of several people in the Farm that I didn’t know wrote, leading me to find Arthur’s FTP CMS, which sounds very interesting.

Then, I hit the normal problem I have with following lots of blogs: I’m rubbish at looking at RSS readers. I’ve only had a few over the years and am currently using Google Reader, which is pretty good and has everything I could sensibly want from an RSS reader, except the ability to make me read it. Once I’ve been through my client related e-mail and got a decent amount of work done, and then checked the mailing lists I’m on and a bit of Twitter if I have time, I completely forget to look at my RSS reader.

I may be a bit of an internet dinosaur, but I find e-mail a great way for me to follow things. I’m now using Gmail, having had a falling out with my previously beloved Fastmail last year and moved fully over to Google’s service. I use e-mail all day and always have it open, so it seemed sensible that if I could get the blogs I’m following in to my e-mail, I’d read them more often.

Feedburner gives you the ability to have an e-mail feed from your RSS feed, but not all the blogs I am interested in use Feedburner. I couldn’t find a service that would e-mail them to me, so decided to hack one together. A few hours spread over a week or two later, and I have roughly what I want…

Blog posts in an e-mail folder

I’ve got a database holding a list of the blogs I found from my Twitter investigation, that’s now coupled up to some PHP using SimplePie to parse the feeds, and using Rmail to send them to me. A cron job polls the RSS feeds at regular intervals, looking for new posts.

I’m not sure it’s working very reliably yet, although it doesn’t seem too bad. SimplePie is much better at converting all sorts of RSS & ATOM feeds in to HTML than CFHTTP is, which is why I’ve gone from ColdFusion over to PHP. It’s running on my shared hosting account and seems quite happy. Once the posts hit Gmail I’m filtering them in to their own ‘blogs’ label so they don’t clutter up my inbox.

Most importantly, I’m now reading a lot more blog posts by my friends.

I’ve had to unsubscribe from a few that were linked up to Flickr as too many images were coming through in large batches, and from one or two aggregator blogs that were just showing me shorter copies of a lot of the feeds I was already subscribed to. Overall, I’m finding this a lot more helpful than a full RSS reader, it’s simple enough to do what I want and fit in with the way I like working, rather than giving me another thing to check.

Side note: if you’re subscribed to any of the blogs in the screenshot and you’ve noticed that the name of the feed is not who the e-mail has come from, that’s because I’m using their Twitter name as the sender’s name, rather than the blog title. I find it a lot easier to remember who is writing what that way.

Once again, I’ve wondered if this is worth developing in to a small service for people. I’m presuming I’m not the only person who finds RSS readers a hassle. So, if you’d be interested in this, please leave a comment or get in touch.

Bookmarking service ideas

Dec 10

Posted by Paul Silver in Ideas | No Comments

As my work and life is spread across a few computers, keeping track of my bookmarks becomes a bit of a nightmare if I just use the browser. Even if I’m on my laptop, I have to remember to look in Safari and Firefox in case I’m in the other browser when I’m looking for a site I bookmarked.

This isn’t really a problem, as sites like Delicious have been around for many years now and are very good at storing bookmarks online, and helping me keep them organised.

Delicious has competition from Blinklist, Stumbleupon, A1 Webmarks, and a plethora of other sites. Even Google has a bookmark service. There’s also open source software for it so you can host your own version if you really want.

Last year I started hitting problems with bookmarks, and wanted features these sites don’t offer. Being a developer, I immediately started wondering if it was worth writing my own bookmarking site, or at least hacking around with an existing project and extending it the way I wanted.

Wants:

Keep a copy of the page I bookmarked – I am fed up with having a long term store of bookmarks where the page doesn’t exist any more when I follow the link. If I have a cached copy, it doesn’t matter if the original has disappeared. Potentially I don’t even mind if it’s just cached text, but having the images as well would be good.

Within this, I don’t want the page refreshed after I’ve bookmarked it, in case it’s changed to something I don’t want. Being able to bookmark the home page of a blog means I don’t have to think about finding the internal page where the content won’t change. I just have a copy of it in the state it was in when I bookmarked it.

Let me search on the content of those pages – now I have a copy of the pages I’ve bookmarked, let me search on their content. That’ll help me find the thing I was looking at the other day and stored, but can’t remember enough details to find properly. Having a filter so I can only search on bookmarks from a particular time period would also be good.

I thought Google bookmarks had this, but they run their search against their main search index, so if the page you bookmarked changes or disappears, they don’t have a copy of it any more. The search is great, but I don’t want the contents of it to change over the long term.

I thought up some other little features too, like having my account follow and bookmark links automatically from various Twitter accounts – both mine and other people’s, but they were really little gimmicks on the side of the main features I want.

Given that I was working very hard on client projects last year, then didn’t have much time this year as we’ve got a baby now, these ideas stayed in my notebook and kicking around in my head, gradually refining in to what I wanted. I did get as far as getting a domain for a test site and putting up a copy of ‘Semantic Scuttle’ but not as far as getting it to work properly (I don’t understand why they made the code so complicated to install for such a simple site.)

I started thinking about how I could get something like Solr installed to do the search side for me, and what sort of hosting it would need and whether it’d be simpler long term to ditch the Scuttle code and write my own, and go for a ‘NoSQL’ database store like Redis rather than MySQL.

Once my test site was up I saw one downside of running a bookmarking site: the darker side of the SEO industry started to post hundreds of bookmarks in to it. I don’t even know how they found it, I hadn’t linked to it from anywhere. All I’d done is loaded in my bookmarks from Delicious and let it sit there for a couple of months while I worked on other things. The site isn’t even working properly yet. They don’t get any benefit from being linked to from the site, but that doesn’t stop the links flowing in.

So that’s an issue. Will a new bookmarking site get over-run by people trying to use it to get the perfect link text to their own site? You can nofollow links, but that doesn’t stop people. A lot of the dafter, cheaper link builders actually doing the linking work won’t care or potentially know what nofollowing is about.

Anyway, I had my test site, albet a bit over-run with spam and not working. Soon after, I found out about two sites that pretty much solved my problems, with me having to do anything.

Two sites, two solutions

The first is Klektd, a bookmarking service being put together by Andy Kent.

It didn’t do everything I wanted when I signed up a few months ago, but it had a very nice interface – thumbnails of the sites I bookmarked generated very quickly and the promise of searching on the content of the pages, which wasn’t working then but is now and is exactly what I wanted. Although it wasn’t visible then, the search made me hope for caching of the original pages, and that’s now in with some good controls for refreshing them if you want – very handy if you want to be able to search comments on a page that have appeared since you first bookmarked it and you’re sure a refresh isn’t going to destroy the reason you had a cached copy of the page.

After finding Klektd, I then saw Historious.

Their interface is built around search, and they also show you the cached pages that they are storing to allow the search. It feels more like using a personalised search engine rather than a bookmarking service, which could be good or bad depending on what you like. This is a paid service with a free service for up to 300 bookmarks, which has only recently been introduced so I’ve only had a cursory poke about in the site.

They both have another feature I liked and has existed in bookmarking services for years: sharing links in public if you want it.

With only a few bookmarks in either, I like the interface of Klektd a bit more than Historious at the moment, but that may change as more sites get bookmarked in them and I’ve used Historious more. I was wondering how Klektd would handle having lots of bookmarks in it, as that’s lots of images to show, but of course they have a nice ‘load more’ function that lets you bring more in to a page rather than paging back and forth through your bookmarks.

Spam and adult sites

I’m not sure how either will handle spam. Historious has all it’s links to outside sites nofollowed, which might help reduce the amount of people opening accounts just for SEO linking purposes. Klektd doesn’t, but maybe that’s something Andy will bring in if mass linkers become an issue.

As they run thumbnails, Klektd may have some slight issues in the future: having certain accounts over-run by people linking to porn sites, which will leads to lots of adult thumbnails being on those account’s pages. This might or might not be an issue they have to think about if it becomes a business in it’s own right. It’s the sort of thing that bothers certain people and might prevent it becoming a really trusted site as you’re never sure what you might see if someone gives you a link to a Klektd page.

That said, Andy might have some sort of filtering going on to prevent thumbnails showing porn images, I haven’t tried adding a porn site to my bookmarks to find out.

Keeping going

When I was thinking about making a bookmarking site I thought about how to make money – advertising, a combination of paid & free(mium) accounts, not sure if I got much further. My scribbles decided paid & freemium was probably the best way to go, again just to reduce the problem of spamming. If people doing a lot of linking wanted to do it, they could just pay for an account like everyone else.

Historious seems to have come to the same conclusion, they started fully paid and have brought in free accounts to help introduce people to their service (from what I can see from some threads on Hacker News.)

Klektd seems to be a side project currently and still under quite rapid development given that status, so I guess it’s something they’ll tackle later. You can grow a bookmarking service pretty big on the cheap hosting that’s around these days, but it’d be nice to see some money being made to help with scaling if it does take off. It’s difficult to trust a bookmarking service that isn’t making money as you don’t want it closing and taking all your bookmarks with them because the owners are fed up with paying out for the hosting.

One less idea in the notebook

So, I have one less idea to work out. I could still do it, it’s not like you can’t build a different service to existing ones with pretty much the same features and still carve out a nice niche for the way you do it. But, this was always more of a mental exercise and not really a passionate need for me. I like the way both sites have brought in the features I thought were missing, and I’m looking forward to seeing what they both develop in to.

Moleskine-like notebooks from supermarkets

Sep 17

Posted by Paul Silver in Notebooks | No Comments

My life is a series of notebooks. I find paper a lot easier to work out ideas on than screens, even though my awful hand writing sometimes makes it difficult to work out what I was trying to get down when I come back to them.

Liking notebooks means I have a tendency towards being a stationery fetishist. You start checking various shops for what they do, after a bargain or a new format that might just fit the way you want to work at the moment. My top brand for notebooks is, of course, Moleskine. I have one of their sketchbook pocket notebooks that lives in my bag in the summer, and my winter coat pocket otherwise. I’ve got a couple of their thin, A5 size notebooks too, but not their standard size hardback ones. I’d like one, but I have a nice WH Smiths covered refillable that I use for client meetings, and a Paperchase A5 notebook I’m using for running notes on various work and personal projects.

It’s difficult for me to justify spending around £18 on a notebook. Even before Tom, my baby son came along, it was still difficult to justify. Now, it’s just not going to happen. (Hmm, just checked Amazon and I’m not sure I have the price right, I’m pretty sure that’s what the A5 ones go for in Waterstones, who’re the nearest supplier to me.)

So, the sad note-spotter in me was intrigued when I noticed this notebook in my local Sainsbury’s supermarket:

Notebook cover Lined notebook pages Pocket in back of notebook

A Moleskine-looking notebook, but at supermarket prices. Slightly expensive for a supermarket, really, at about £6. I don’t usually go for lined notebooks, but I thought I’d try this one to see what the quality was like.

It looks like a Moleskine – black cover, curved corners, elastic to hold it shut and a ribbon bookmark. It even has a concertina pocket inside the back cover. Very Moleskine.

Sadly, on closer inspection this is built down to it’s price, as you’d expect. The paper is thin, I can’t write on both sides of a single sheet as the ink shows through the page so much. The cover feels OK but it’s very plasticky compared to a proper Moleskine.

Good points – the lines have a well judged margin at the top, allowing for page headings. If you just want a smart looking lined notebook, this is pretty good. I’d call it a rip-off of a Moleskine, unless it’s licensed, in which case it’s just a poor-man’s version.

A few weeks after seeing the Sainsbury’s version, I was in my local ASDA and saw they also had a range of smart, black notebooks. Delightfully, they were even cheaper than their competitor and I got an A5 squared notebook for £3. At that price, even if I didn’t like it, I’d happily use it up.

Notebook cover Notebook pages Notebook back pocket

I thought they’d be made by the same manufacturer, but the covers are different so I’m not sure that’s the case. The ASDA one is slightly puffier and feels softer to the touch. The elastic which holds it shut leaves a noticeable groove in the cover.

It has all the same items as noted about the Sainsbury’s notebook – back pocket & all.

I haven’t had a squared Moleskine, from memory the squares in them are lighter than the ones here (click piccie for a bigger version.)

Good points – the paper is thicker and you can barely see the ink when you turn the page over, so you can write on both sides.

Bad is that the paper is showing denting or is a little puffed up. I’ve seen this before if thin paper has been left a bit damp. From what I can tell, it’s down to the way they’ve bound the paper so I’m not sure it’s going to be curable. The grid is a bit dark for me, but that might be personal preference. The cover feels like it will take less knocks than the Sainsbury’s one before it’ll start showing damage, but we’ll just have to see about that.

All that said, the thicker paper makes the ASDA notebook one I’m more likely to use more. I’ve got a personal project coming up which will take a chunk of planning, so I think this’ll be the ‘book for that and I’ll see how it goes.

Upshot – if you have the cash, go for a Moleskine. They’re lovely to write in and very hard wearing. However, if you’re in the market for a cheapy notebook for your own notes or to look a little flash when you’re in front of a boss or client, pop down to your local supermarket and see what they’ve got. These may be rip-offs of the classic Moleskine, but they’re also pretty usable and it’s hard to fault them at their price.

Note – I’ve never used a Fieldnotes notebook, if anyone would like to send me one for testing I’d be more than happy to review it! – paul@paulsilver.co.uk

Share ideas through Thought Pipe

Sep 5

Posted by Paul Silver in My Projects | No Comments

During the discussion after my talk at Barcamp Brighton 4, several people wanted a place where they could publically swap ideas, in the hope that someone would pick them up and develop them. This came from Danny Hope’s experience where he described a CSS comment stripping service on his Flickr, and David Stone then built it for him.

As a developer, I like short projects I can build for a fun break from client work, and it looks like I’m not alone in that.

As a starting place for people to talk about ideas, I’ve opened this Google Group – http://groups.google.com/group/thoughtpipe – where people can start talking about their ideas. Please join up and put your oar in.

The inspiration for my small projects was the 5K App competition, organised by John Montgomery and you can read about what I did here in my 5K app posts.

I’ll put some ideas in to the group in the next day or so to try to kick things off. If it sounds interesting to you, please subscribe and join in.

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5K App competition tie up

Apr 24

Posted by Paul Silver in Uncategorized | No Comments

I didn’t win the 5K App competition, Seb did with a very impressive 3D Moon Lander game in Flash (write up), which has since been featured on Wired’s Geekdad blog.

There’s a video up which is mainly my presentation of the three apps I made. Hopefully more video will be appearing on the £5 App blog showing Seb’s Lander, Dougie from Future Platform’s Location SMS app, and a chap Armandas from Sussex University who had an electronics toolbox cataloging system made in Python.

I really enjoyed the competition and it re-invigorated some of my coding muscles, so I’d like to say a big thanks to John for organising it all.

[Updated with some better links and Armandas' name]

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5K App: Article Suggester

Apr 18

Posted by Paul Silver in My Projects | No Comments

For my third and final 5K app for the £5 App competition I built a cut-down version of something I’ve been meaning to build for ages, which is part of the reason for having the 5K limit in the first place – it forces you to concentrate on the main point of a script or programme and leave out everything else.

At heart, the Article Suggester is a very simple application: you give it a bunch of text (for instance an article or blog post that you’re writing) and it will suggest a list of articles from the Guardian website.

Behind the scenes, things are slightly more complicated. When the form containing the text is submitted it’s first run through the Yahoo Term Extraction tool, which gives back a list of words and phrases it thinks are important from the text. The script then runs this list through the Guardian’s Open Platform content API and gets back a couple of articles related to each phrase, offering them up as links next to the submitted text to help with further research.

Try out the Article Suggester.

Both the Yahoo API and Guardian API have limits on their use, so if this gets popular it may not work. I’ll post up the source code soon so people can get their own API keys and extend it any way they want.

The code is written in PHP and uses SimpleXML to work through the data coming back from the APIs. Currently it’s only 2,292 bytes, so there’s loads of space left in the 5K, I just don’t have any time to add new bits before the competition presentation and judging on Monday.

If you’re interested in seeing the competition presentations, it’s happening at the Skiff from 8pm on Monday 20th April.

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5K App: Portal Me

Apr 18

Posted by Paul Silver in My Projects | No Comments

I enjoyed building my first 5K App, the Twitter Biorhythm bot, so much I started building another app. In fact, I started building the second app. before I’d even finished the bot because it was so easy to put together.

This app. was inspired by Jeremy Keith’s talk at the £5 App meet in February about HuffDuffer, his podcast creation service. Within HuffDuffer Jeremy uses Google’s ‘Social Graph‘ API to help broaden the usefulness of the site without bothering the person using it. For instance, if you give it your Twitter name it will use your Twitter icon as your icon on Huffduffer, and it will also offer links to other popular services that it’s found you on using the Social Graph. You can see this at work on the ‘Elsewhere’ section of a profile, the links are created by looking up where else you have profiles via the Social Graph API.

In the past I have thought it would be useful to be able to put someone’s name in to a web page, and get back a set of their posted information from various sites. This is a bit cyber-stalking like, but it’s helpful to be able to get a quick picture of someone’s online life, especially if you’ve just met them as a potential client or through networking.

The Social Graph information would give me a simple way of looking up at least some information about someone. After a poke around in the documentation I found I could easily build a URL that included the URL of a page about someone that could be included in the graph, e.g. their blog or Twitter page. Giving this to the API and asking for ‘otherme’ information meant it would give me back a bunch of XML which includes profile pages on sites registered to that person, including the URL of RSS/Atom feeds from  those pages. I could take those feed URLs and make a page of posts from the person from various sites.

As this was to be a 5K App, I started knocking the code up in ColdFusion, which only needs a very small amount of code for parsing RSS and Atom feeds using the CFFEED function, and it’s XML parsing is pretty short too.

I got a prototype working and it only needed a couple of K’s worth of code. As I had so much spare, I decided to add some basic caching so it wouldn’t request the RSS feeds every time the page was refreshed.

The caching first checks a directory where feeds are saved. If it can’t find a feed, or the saved one is over an hour old, it goes on to request the feed and save it in to the cache directory. Then it reads the feed out of the cache.

Finally, a bit of styling, giving away the fact that I’m not a designer, and it was finished. The code is 4041 bytes, and you can try it out for yourself here: Portal Me.

It works best with people who have several sites which are registered in the Social Graph, and it only works for sites which are tied to the person by using the ‘rel=”me”‘ microformat code on the link (places like Flickr and Twitter do this automatically for you.)

Here’s a Portal for Jeremy Keith from his website address, and one for my friend Josh Russell based on his Twitter account.

One problem with Portal Me is that the Social Graph isn’t perfect, and if you haven’t tied your accounts together properly it shows some odd effects. For instance, if you make a portal for me based on my Twitter account you get less results than if you look me up via my main website address. I’ve only recently started making sure all of my various profiles link to the same site, and also that the site links back to tie them all together, so it may be sorted out over time.

I’ll put some coments in the code and put it up for downloading soon.

Try Portal Me for yourself.

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5K Twitter Biorhythm Bot: Byobot

Apr 15

Posted by Paul Silver in My Projects | No Comments

John and Ian, the nice chaps behind the Five Pound App meetings are holding a competition to build the best application or website you can in 5K of code. The prize? £51.20, which is 5K (5120 bytes) in pennies.

I was initially dubious that I’d have time to make any apps, partly because I have a lot of client work on, and partly because I couldn’t think of anything to make. 5K is small and making something useful in it is a tricky. However, I was inspired by John’s demo applications to at least do something. Recently I was fed up with the work I was doing and went for a walk down to the sea and finally, inspiration!

My first app, and oddly the last one completed, uses Twitter. I wanted to build something relatively useful to an audience, and that would run itself. I built a Twitter joke poster a while ago at the Farm Hack Day event I organised, and the problem with it is I haven’t had time to compile jokes for it for ages (although it’s still on my to-do list, which is unfortunately just a little longer than my arm right now, and I have very long arms.)

I started thinking about information that updates often, and that the non-geeks who are joining Twitter now might like to have. I thought of horoscopes, but quickly realised it would be difficult to compress these down to 140 characters without needing human intervention (and have since discovered a couple of people doing the same thing.) I then remembered biorhythms. These are supposed cycles of Physical, Intellectual and Emotional states that you go through, related to when you were born.

Biorhythms were popular in the mid-’80s, when my sister had a biorhythm calculator on her BBC Micro, and they’ve drifted in and out of fashion since then, and probably way before. This means they’re likely to be in fashion for some people, or will be at some point. Another major plus is that they’re quite small pieces of information, which means they can be crammed in to a tweet without too much trouble.

So, my first 5K app (finished today) is…

The 5K Twitter Biorhythm Bot

Twittering as @byobot if you send a message to the bot in the format @byobot yyyy-m-d (e.g. “@byobot 1942-1-8″ if you were Stephen Hawking) then it will reply back with your biorhythm for today.

There’s not a lot of error checking, so if you don’t get the date in the right format, you just get a friendly error message sent back to you.

The code is written in PHP and uses a greatly cut down version of the biorhythm class by Iztok Strzinar for the main calculation. Twitter is handled by a combination of Curl and SimpleXML.

Once I’d found the class, the main things I had to work on was compiling the message so it was short enough to go in a tweet (including leaving space for the @ reply to the person wanting the biorhythm.) And also a way of storing the last tweet read, so the bot wouldn’t keep replying to messages it had replied to before. By using the XML version of the ‘mentions’ stream from the Twitter API I was able to store ID of the last tweet replied to and use the ’since_id=’ variable in the URL when getting the stream so it receives the 20 tweets after the last tweet that the bot read.

The code, plus a file to store the last tweet ID in, is 4,605 bytes. I managed to make a very light logo for Twitter by reducing the colours used in the GIF down a long way – this was a little problematic as Twitter wouldn’t accept a GIF with only 16 colours, I had to go to 32. Altogether, code and image come to 5,036 bytes, which means I have 84 bytes left to play with.

I can think of various things to do with the Biorhythm Bot, the first one to be adding direct messaging to it can give private results to people, but that’s outside the scope of a 5K project and won’t happen for a while anyway as I have too many other client and personal projects on the boil.

Give byobot a go

Why ‘byobot’? When I first started thinking about this project, I wanted to use ‘biorhythm’ as the account name on Twitter, but both that and ‘biorhythms’ are already in use. I had thought of using ‘bior’, but that got registered while I was messing around with the code. Let this be a lesson to you: if you’re going to do a project, register the damn account / domain name while you still can!

[Update] I’ll be talking a little about the biorhythm bot at the next Five Pound App meet up on 20th April at the Skiff

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Death and Social Media

Oct 1

Posted by Paul Silver in Social Media | 2 Comments

People die. This is an unfortunate fact that we don’t like to think about, especially young people. And it’s generally relatively young people who are building websites and advising clients on how to build them. Whether through accident, illness or misadventure, people die every day. Even if none of those get you, old age eventually will. It’s something we don’t often think about, but if you make websites for a living, like I do, it’s something we should be thinking about, because our sites have to deal with it.

Lets look at things another way. Say someone in your family dies. Your brother or sister, son or daughter. Or a good friend, a friend of the family. They use the internet, they’ve got e-mail, a Facebook account and an old page on MySpace. You know about computers, so you’re asked to sort it out – to let their friends know what’s happened. You’re asked to sort it out, so what now?

If you die in the UK, your next of kin is given a death certificate. This is an official document notifying that a particular individual has died. To close bank accounts, sort out council tax, utility bills and credit accounts, you use the certificate to show a person has really died. This sort of paperwork is not a pleasant thing to deal with when you’re grieving for a loved one, but at least all the organisations you’re dealing with have policies and procedures to follow. What about websites?

E-mail

Lets take it that you don’t have the password to their e-mail. If you have, that will make everything much easier as you can use the ‘forgotten password’ facility most sites have to get access to online accounts.

If their e-mail is provided by their ISP, you may be able to call them to the get the username and password either provided over the phone or sent out by post. Then you can login to their account. Depending on the set up you’ll either be able to read all of their mail or just new items, but you’ve got access.

If they used webmail, such as Yahoo, Hotmail or Gmail, you’ll start hitting problems. I looked for the policies of the top three webmail providers, which takes quite a bit of searching and I eventually had to contact Yahoo Mail and Hotmail to ask for their policy. This would be very awkward for next of kin at such a distressing time.

Yahoo Mail – Yahoo won’t give you access to someone else’s e-mail, saying it breaks the data protection act. They didn’t say if they’ll shut down accounts or not and it took them about four weeks to respond to my inquiry.

Hotmail (free version) – Will delete all e-mail when no-one logs in for 120 days, and may delete an account if no one logs in for over a year. No reply to my inquiry yet (over a month later.)

Gmail – May delete the account after nine months of no-one logging in. They may give you access to the account if you send a copy of an e-mail that was sent to you from the account, and a copy of the death certificate or a power of attorney document. This information is available in their help centre, and wasn’t too difficult to find.

So, if your friend was with one of the top three webmail providers, you’d better hope they were with Gmail if you want access to their account. And you really need access to their e-mail because without it, you’re not going to be able to access any of their other sites.

Social Networking Sites

As mentioned before, your hypothetical friend had accounts on Facebook and MySpace. If you have access to their e-mail, you can use the ‘forgotten password’ facility on these sites to gain access to their accounts and friends lists.

What if you don’t have access to their e-mail?

MySpace – will not pass over access to an account to the next of kin as this would break their Terms and Conditions. However, if presented with an obituary or death certificate they will shut down or leave the account up so friends can leave comments.

Facebook – had the easiest to find policy, which is in it’s Terms. When told of a death, they will keep an account open for ‘a period of time’ to allow others to post comments on to the profile. This is a ‘memorialized’ state, and the comments the person has left on other pages will only be visible to the owner of the photo or original thread.

Apparently they used to close down accounts, but changed this policy after the Virginia Tech shootings, after which many friends of the pupils who had died wanted to leave comments in a format they were used to communicating over.

Bebo – I tried to find their policy and used their contact form, but haven’t heard anything back yet (it’s been over a month.)

Twitter – I wasn’t confident about getting an answer from Twitter, who are more of a loose shared commenting system than a full on social network, and were struggling to keep their service running at the time so probably have bigger issues than their policies on members who die. They use Get Satisfaction as a support forum and I haven’t had a response to my question on there yet.

If you don’t have access to the person’s e-mail, you won’t be able to access their social network accounts. If you tell the network about the death, they may be able to tell the person’s friends by changing the status of their account, or you may need to leave a comment on the account yourself via your own account on the network.

Issues

The social networks have a problem, in the case of a member dying, they need to satisfy both the wishes of the next of kin and family, and those of their friends on the network.

Frankly, this is a no-win situation for the site. People grieve in different ways, some people will want the person’s profile taken down, others will want it to stay up, forever.

If a profile stays up, is that good or bad? Do people want a constant reminder of the loss of a loved one? Their profile and comments will always look fresh, keep up to date with the latest site design, their profile picture never ages. Will this prevent us from properly moving on and coping with the death of a loved one?

What would ‘unfriend’ing a dead friend or relative mean to someone who is grieving and doesn’t want to see a reminder of them in their friend list?

Websites like MySpace and Facebook aren’t going anywhere, they are massive businesses which are worth a fortune and currently have tens of millions of active users. Even if social networking becomes less popular, they will still have a massive user base. If they do not remove accounts of deceased members, will they eventually fill up with a mountain of old users? Will it be like Hotmail of a few years back, where a future ‘Paul Silver’ won’t be able to sign up as ‘paulsilver’, but can only get ‘paulsilver1434′ because I got the first ‘paulsilver’ account when the site launched in 2008 and lots more Paul Silvers have signed up since. When I search for friends, will I mainly find deceased users whose profiles are acting as shrines to history?

Looking at this from another direction, we have a fantastic opportunity here. In the past, history has been fleeting. Conversations disappeared as soon as they were spoken. Letters may or may not get kept in family archives, but would not get passed on to anyone else. Currently, discovering the thoughts of everyday people from 200, 300, 1000, 2000 years ago would be a absolute delight to historians. We have the opportunity to save those conversations and thoughts, and keep them alive to become future history.

Maybe most contact in MySpace or Facebook seems facile, a forwarded joke here, some sarcasm about a night in the pub there. Within the muck there’s brass, but we’re not best placed to judge what’s what, because our history hasn’t happened yet. What would it be like if you could look back at your great-grandparents, and see the initial flirty comments made about each others photos, or see the photo that their friend Jack took on their phone in the pub when they first happened to meet with friends, and is still there in perfect condition 120 years later?

With the right sort of organisation, we can make an archive that can serve to help people in the future understand our time, and all the time after us, in a relatively cheap way.  I’m hoping to write some more about this in the near future, but this is getting slightly off the point of this post.

A final issue I’d like to raise is domain names. Many sites use e-mail addresses as logins. I know I’ve made many that do this – it’s an easy way to get a login that’s unique for each member, and it’s easy for people to remember. However, long-term the problem with domains is that they’re rented, rather than bought. I currently own a few domains, including paulsilver.co.uk. At some point, if I don’t renew it or after I die, someone else will own paulsilver.co.uk. Lets face it, their name will probably be Paul Silver and their e-mail address paul@paulsilver.co.uk

Presuming this, that person will find it very easy to get access to lots of sites I’m registered with, because I use that address. If they try to register with that address, they’ll be told they’ve registered before, and then they can use the ‘forgotten password’ facility to get a password for the site. Suddenly, they’re me on the site. They can change my profile, delete old messages, see friends lists if it’s that sort of site, and so on.

Tentative conclusions

After a member dies, social networks should have a human keep an eye on the comments on their profile, but keep the profile active for this purpose – basically, copying what Facebook do. They may want to look at a way of limiting the visible content, depending on the wishes of the next of kin.

Sites should have a public policy on what to do when a member dies and it should be easy to find, and have a contact that’s simple to find. This is a very difficult time for the next of kin, and digging around for details will just make the situation harder for them.

Sites should look at having an extra contact for people when registering. This would effectively be a next of kin for the site. This would give them another trusted person who would be allowed access to the account, or at least friends lists, if the user dies.

Potentially there should be a time limit on what a user can change if they don’t log in for a protracted length of time. Their profile and comments could be archived to an uneditable status, so if it’s actually a new user coming to the site that happens to have the same e-mail address, they can come in to the site as a new user, but not have the ability to change an archived version of the original account.

I talked about this at BarCamp Brighton 3 and Mark Ng suggested that OpenID could run a service to let sites know of users dying, as they are plugged in to a growing number of sites for as a login system (also suggested here). Alternatively he suggested a ‘DeathAuth’ system as a kind of official notification that sites could plug in to. During the discussion we agreed there would need to be some sort of official paperwork involved in the process so erroneous authorisations could not be sent out.

Thanks

Thanks to the people at Tuttle Brighton, Brighton Farm, and BarCamp Brighton 3 for discussing this topic with me, especially as it’s quite morbid in parts.

Carl Jeffrey owns the domain Deathbook and is talking about using it to push social sites to think about these issues more thoroughly, I wish him all the best with that.

Thanks to you for getting through this massive post, I hope it’s stirred up some interesting thoughts. Please comment with your views.

[Update, Feb 2009: Apologies to everyone who commented when this was first posted, I made a mess of the database that stored my posts and the comments in and couldn't recover them. This is a restored version of the post from before it was posted.]

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