TechnoCloud

A couple of weeks ago, a terrible thing happened to my favourite gadget. Yes, I dropped my iPhone in a sink full of water.

Initially all looked fine and it worked as normal. However, the next morning the water that had penetrated the phone started to corrode its components and the Home button stopped working.

The rest of the iPhone worked as normal, quite an achievement after a full immersion in water.

An iPhone app developer suggested putting the phone in a bowl of brown rice to draw out the moisture. Worth a try if you can do it straight away, but unfortunately the Home button was too far gone in my case.

The beauty of the iPhone is the simplicity of its user interface, with the touchscreen requiring only two addition buttons. Of course the drawback is when one of these buttons stops working you are in trouble.

My iPhone had passed its one year warranty date, so Apple were unable to replace it for free. My phone contract only had a few weeks to run, so it seemed too expensive to buy a replacement for a few weeks only when a lower priced subsidised device was on its way, particularly as I was looking to upgrade to a 3GS.

Over time, I’ve learned how to use an iPhone without the Home button:

- Move from app to app, as most apps allow you to open at least the browser (especially ‘terms and conditions’ usually contain hyperlinks). Email contains hyperlinks which open the browser. Contacts and Calendar allow you to put in a URL which opens the browser. Open a ‘purchase app’ link within the browser and then download a free app and you are back to the starting point (or incorrectly enter your password to avoid downloading lots of unwanted apps).

- Of course, some apps are dead ends. In this case, you have to restart your phone.

- If the phone gets stuck on the Apple loading screen (about 1 in 5 times for me), then you have a problem. As you need the Home button to force a restart you have to wait for the power to run down. Fortunately, the loading screen uses up lots of power, so it normally powers down within a day. The trick is not to fully charge the phone, so you don’t wait all day if this happens.

- And most importantly of all… Don’t drop your iPhone in water!

As regular readers will know I’ve been running an ad trial on the site to learn more about ad placement with a view to sharing the knowledge on here and with colleagues.

Having completed a short test of Google Adsense Link Units vs Ad Units, I’m going to follow up with one of the questions I raised about unit type over positioning.

As a result, there are two ad units between the post and the comments to see if the higher click through rates of the link units in that position would result in higher overall revenue using ad units.

I’ll admit that these two ads are more obtrusive than I would like, so I’ll look to change them once I’ve gathered enough data to share.

If you have your own experiences to share, please do so in the comments.

In a post last year, I explained that I was looking to run an ad trial on the site to test ad optimisation service Pubmatic as a way to test it for some much larger sites.

That test is now over, partly as this site doesn’t really get the traffic to provide precise enough data, but also because it became quickly apparent that Google Adsense was providing the higher quality ads and higher click-through rates of the ad networks tested.

So, to cut out the middle man, I’ve kept Google Adsense in the hopefully unobtrusive position on the right-hand column, as it’s fascinating to see the responses on different categories and pages.

I’m keen to learn more about the impact of ad positioning and ad unit, so if you’ll bear with me, I’m going to trial another style of unit on single posts in between the post and the comments.

Again, as payback for the ads, I’ll share the results in due course.

Back in November, I started an experiment to improve the bounce rate on the blog through the related-posts plugin in Wordpress. As below, this typically displays three related posts based on tag, category, body and title.

I’ve been monitoring the changes in the bounce rate each month since the plugin was activated with encouraging results. This has seen the following improvement on a monthly basis over the initial level:

- November: improvement of 7%
- December: improvement of 10%
- January: improvement of 11%

Not huge, but a c.10% improvement in bounce rate for the addition of a simple free plugin is not to be sniffed at and shows the value of presenting contextual next steps to encourage users to delve more deeply into the content you have available.

Among the increasing number of ways to stream music legally (imeem, last.fm, youtube…), one service that has caught my eye is Spotify. At present a desktop application with ambitions to go multi-media, the service provides ad-supported (or ad-free for £9.99/month) European access to streamed versions from all the major music labels.

It’s iTunes-inspired interface is intuitive, with impressive artist profiles and even more impressive back catalogue. In fact it’s become something of a challenge to those I show the application to find an obscure band from their childhood not featured.

With physical music sales continuing to decline and digital sales not making up the shortfall, this service and others like it are going to accelerate that trend. Certainly, desktop-only and ad supported is not going to be for everyone, but it’s an acceptable trade-off for me, particularly if the service can go multi-media.

Interesting then to see a job posting on their site shows they are specifically looking for a Nokia S60 platform software engineer:

“We’re now looking for an outstanding software engineer who knows the ins and outs of C++ and the Nokia S60 platform like the back of his hand. You’ll help us make Spotify mobile and take part in changing the way people listen to music forever.”

Looks like Spotify mobile is coming soon.

My post on the launch of Google Chrome was one of the top 10 posts of 2008, so I should follow up now Chrome is out of beta.

There remains much to admire, but still much to come until this gets nearer to replacing my current browser choices.

The biggest of all remains the lack of an extensions platform that make Firefox such a useful browser. As they said at launch and again coming out of beta, this remains in the pipeline. Given its importance to browser users, it might have been a better time to come out of beta when this platform actually launches - even better when the Mac and Linux versions were ready.

Flash also remains inconsistent in Chrome for some (hardly unique to Chrome though) and given its near 100% penetration is an important consideration, particularly on older versions of Flash which many locked down corporate users are forced to use. Finally, as Google admit, better RSS support and auto-complete for forms would be welcome and is on its way.

Certainly a step forward, but as yet no world-beta (ouch)!

In my role I give a lot of presentations which involve demoing multiple sites in a browser.

To have all the URLs preloaded when I start the presentation, I’ve experimented with a number of tools:

What I need is a painfully simple and reliable way of opening multiple tabs on any PC.

Step forward URLOpener. You simply paste in a list of URLs, click submit and it will open them as new tabs. Done.

Put any better ideas you may have in the comments section below.

In an attempt to improve the bounce rate on the blog, I’ve finally added a related posts plugin which exactly what it says on the tin. After some experimentation with the Wordpress plugins, I settled on the amusingly named ‘Yet another Related Posts Plugin‘ which is anything but yet another plugin.

With a simple install and a very handy options menu accessible via settings, it now displays up to five related posts at the bottom of individual posts (although unfortunately not by default on the category, monthly or homepage aggregation of posts).

It judges a related post by title, body, tag and category and you can even adjust the sensitivity through the ‘match threshold’ (I settled on 3).

If you can’t see it (see above brackets), then click on the post name. I’ll report back if the bounce rate improves.

Something strange is happening on one of my archived posts, Pimp my blog.

The majority of non-spam comments that I get on the site are relevant and informative, but for reasons unexplained that post has now attracted a request for help with SQL, a test message, a joke, a business article and even a comment on the randomness itself.

Given it doesn’t contain spam links I can only assume it’s developed into someone’s test page, but for what I’m less sure.

Theories and more random comments below please…

Although I’ve long had access to one, I’ve borrowed a Wii for a long overdue extended trial of the console and am working my way through the various Wii Sports games that came with it.

After initially being underwhelmed by the graphics and simplicity of the gaming, I’ve started to be pulled in by the points accumulation system and its ability to get even the most cynical members of the family playing instantly through its intuitive gameplay.

Baseball (Rounders surely, ed?) has been a particular favourite leading to the universal question from those who have played of ‘where’s the cricket?’

Given the size of the cricket diaspora and the suitability of the Wii Remote as an extended cricket bat, I expected a quick search to reveal the game.

However, Wii Cricket is not yet in existance leading to several internet campaigns to push the likes of EA Sports to develop it. Its development has been hindered by the lack of cricket played in key markets, such as North America and Japan, but it looks like the decision is about to be reversed if comments by EA Sports’ President Peter Moore are anything to go by:

We continue to look at Cricket, you will see us talk about a little bit more about the Indian market for Cricket. We continue to watch the 20/20 format and seeing where that is going, but the National Test game is still the preeminent way people want to play the game. We have not done a game in a couple of years I think.

To add to the campaign, if Wii Cricket does come along, then one household at least will be purchasing a shiny new Wii to play it…