After this interchange, I figure they don’t have the title, I can’t rent it and that’s why. It was really just a throwaway comment, because it’s the first film I’ve searched for that I haven’t been able to queue for reasons other than its release date not having passed. I have since received an email from a customer service representative:

Dear Jasper,

Further to our conversation on Twitter, unfortunately, “9″ is not currently available to rent from LOVEFiLM due to very recent problems with the supplier of rental copies. I‚m sorry for any inconvenience or disappointment this may cause you. If this situation changes we will of course let you know. To make it up to you we are crediting your account with a free rental.

Now, this is how you treat customers. I am on an unlimited plan, so an extra rental isn’t really going to affect me that much, but the gesture is the point. This shows me that, even though this isn’t a fault of theirs, they’re trying to show that they care about my experience with them, and (I hope you’re listening Panelfly and Sony Playstation – I know my updates are protected now, but they had weeks to respond before I did that!) ensure that every experience I have with their company ends with me being happy. You certainly nailed it again, LOVEFiLM.

Go me, and hypocrisy.

I was linked to a quote on twitter by someone way higher profile than me, and it appears to have sparked a bit of a debate, so I’ll weigh in.

Honestly, I’m shocked that in 2010 I’m still coming across ‘web designers’ who can’t code their own designs. No excuse.

I 100% wholeheartedly agree with this. How can you possibly design for the web if you don’t understand the limitations of the platform? Sure, you can draw a picture of a website, but will it work? If you’re lucky. Not EVERYTHING you can draw is easy or even sensible to interpret to a website layout, so you’re really limiting yourself or risking a substantial backlash if your design process isn’t influenced by a knowledge of CSS, browser inconsistencies and all of the cool little things web browsers can and can’t do.

I have to work with quite a few people who are “web designers” but don’t know HTML and it’s the most frustrating thing. It’s so clear when you’re working with a design of someone who doesn’t know the platform.

A couple of responses were to do with top chefs not working in their own restaurants or product designers not making the products they design. That has missed the point entirely (which is odd, because the source of one of those comments is incredibly well-respected) – chefs CAN cook, and could do it beautifully if they wanted/needed to. Product designers MUST know about the production process of the product they’re designing – you couldn’t just sit down and design a car or an aeroplane without knowing about production, materials and the thousands, probably millions of things you need to know about the product and production process.

So, from now on, if I work with you in your design capacity and you don’t know HTML or CSS, you’re not a web designer, you’re a website picture drawer.

Considering the time of year, there’s been a lot of girly, scream-free music on the turntables this week.

Thanks to the [very] few for understanding.

Enjoy!

Yesterday, I spent 3 hours trying to SSH into a mediatemple share, only to find out that I’d been IP banned without being told. My attempt to connect was timing out and timing out with no feedback whatsoever. At this point, I didn’t have a client login, so I could only assume that (seeing as my colleagues could connect to the share) it was an issue with my connection. After 3 hours of debugging, I asked for a client login which was promptly created. When I logged in to the web interface, I was greeted with a “someone is trying to log in from your IP, but we’ve banned them” message (which the person who created the account didn’t get, by the way!) that allowed me to remove the lock from my IP.

Needless to say, I was furious (I have quite a short fuse), so TO THE INTERNETS I went. What followed can only be described as the best way to handle a public complaint about a company/service:

So, now I’ve wasted my afternoon, but I’m not mad about it any more – I’m actually pleased that mediatemple took my thoughts on board (or at least appeared to – whether they’re implemented or not is largely irrelevant, next time I can’t connect, I’ll just check if I’m locked out again!) and made the effort to resolve a problem, even though I didn’t direct it right at them.

So yeah, moaning is OK sometimes. As long as you’re moaning about something that cares about how it looks!

The key factor to this, in my opinion, is that it always seems to be approached from the angle of “how can we least irritate the users of this site, but still gain money from their use of it?”. This, to me, is a fundamental flaw in the logic. You are much more likely to successfully monetise a site if people actually benefit from what they’re paying for. It’s obviously easier to do this by offering perks to paying users in the same vein as flickr or vimeo’s increased bandwidth/storage space limits, but you really have to rack your brain for a decent model when it comes to most of your users having free accounts.

Untargeted advertising is awful. It’s intrusive, mostly irrelevant and makes designers cry. Google tried to combat irrelevance by keyword matching content of sites or, more controversially, emails. It almost worked, except for the fact that it somehow didn’t. No-one clicks Google text ads unless they’re specifically trying to generate click revenue for a site. This means that the advertising has failed. It’s not a scalable or future proof way to monetise a site, so it’s out. No untargeted ads.

Facebook have recently been really picking up the game with respect to advertising. I mention that I like movies and music on my profile. I talk to my friends about web development, gaming, social media, photography and more and I get small ads (which are obviously Facebook-approved and sit inline with the design of the site (I don’t want to get into Facebook’s design. That’s a whole other can of worms)). They also offer me the ability to vote-up or down an ad. I’ve not seen the movie Slumdog Millionnaire, and I have no interest in doing so, so I vote the ad down and don’t see it again. Brilliant.

Now, if I were a sensible businessman, I would take these ratings and apply them to conversations I have with my friends about movies. If one of my friends mentions that they like movies, and maybe even give as much detail as sharing similar film taste, my voting-up an ad would make it more likely to appear in their ad rotation. Brilliant. That, to me, is the way that targeted advertising should be done. Friends talk about things together, they recommend things, they get adverts that logic dictates they might like. They’re not all going to be winners, but it’s a solid foundation that, with enough data and participation, could provide a self-perpetuating engine for revenue generation that all the owners have to do is assign keywords to and release to the wild. Yes, a lot of programming has to go into this sort of thing, but the rewards are potentially phenomenal. Especially with the userbase that Facebook has.

So, where does that leave twitter? I don’t have any statistics, but I see a lot of businesses have adopted twitter. I’m a particular fan of indie Mac developers and I exercise this enthusiasm by following their updates on twitter. I’m a bleeding-edge kinda guy and I like to know when new stuff is coming out that I can play with. What if you were to apply the same model to twitter? You already have the interaction between consumer and business right there, but it lacks the audience in some cases, so we make it special.

Say every twitter user has their own tag cloud (for those of you who don’t read any other blogs, a visualisation of word density/popularity comparative to overall volume) to target ads to. I mention the word “Mac” or “Apple” (probably) on a freakishly regular basis and so do a lot of my followers/followees. I, therefore, see a valuable type of advertising which has a special kind of (purchased) tweet with a wider scope. Say the good people a PotionFactory want to send out an ad, they hit up twitter, buy a “penetweet” (I should TM that it’s so good), associate some keywords and BAM, anyone who follows PotionFactory sees the ad. Anyone who’s friends with someone following PotionFactory who has a high enough keyword density of any number of the keywords PotionFactory bought when they bought the ad sees it. It appears inline with their tweets, it doesn’t say the word “sponsored” on it or anything tacky like that, it just sinks down with the rest of the tweets (or maybe stays up longer for a premium (not too long, though)) and everyone goes about their day.

So, there you have it. An unintrusive, targeted advertising engine built on the contents of people’s tweets, who they follow and who their friends follow. It easily fits in a tiered model (different tariffs give you access to more keywords, lower concentration of keywords for ads to be shown to users) and is far better, in my opinion, than the arbitrary character-limit-increase-based model that I’ve seen floating around recently!

I’d love to hear any readers’ thoughts on this, as I know most twitter users will have floated around their own ideas, if only internally.

What foods don’t you eat? Don’t include stuff you’ve not eaten, and if you’re a veggie, don’t list meat.

Here’s mine:

• Potato
• Tomato
• Mushroom
• Avocado
• Aubergine
• Beans
• Chickpeas
• Courgette
• Celery
• Parsnip
• Swede
• Turnip
• Sweet potato
• Cucumber
• Beetroot
• Pulses
• Yoghurt
• Cream
• Milk
• Broad beans
• Soup
• Blue cheese
• Olives
• Porridge
• Celeriac
• Fennel
• Strawberry
• Banana
• Raspberry

That’s all I can think of right now. I’m sure there must be more!

It’s been literally minutes in the making, but it’s here. Now with lovely added templates, to save you lazy people even more leg work, you can do things like:

{twitter:jaspertandy:avatar_link}

and get , and

{twitter:jaspertandy:username_link}

and get jaspertandy. Awesome, huh? I’ve also added the ability to force re-caching. If someone updates their avatar before your cache refreshes (this will probably only happen with people upgrading, but still!), then you’ll get a dead image link or an error. If you append :force to your tag, their data will be re-cached and their avatar updated:

{twitter:jaspertandy:avatar_link:force}

Becomes . Only use :force if you get broken images, though, as it unnecessarily bullies twitter’s api.

I have also made it easy for you to create your own templates by adding a function with the incredibly convoluted prefix; template_, so your personal functions might look something like:

public function template_jasper_rocks($user_json){
return 'jasper rocks!';
}


Obviously, if you don’t do any scripting then stay away from this or you’ll break stuff. If you do, then make sure your function returns a string to replace the tag and you’re good to go.

As before, if you break it then come crying to the comments box. If you don’t know any PHP, but would still like a custom template, hit up the comments box and if you find this useful, say so. It’s nice to hear from people!

Installation is the same as before, so once you’ve downloaded this, either copy your old config stuff or follow the original post. I’ll do an interface so you don’t have to keep doing this, if it becomes apparent that more than two people are using the plugin!