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<item rdf:about="http://aplawrence.com/Web/Bubblews_addiction.html">
<title>Bubblews Addiction - no joke!  </title>
<description>
<![CDATA[
Web-HTML 

2013/10/05<p><br /></p>

<!-- PLACEAD --><!-- BIG LEFT -->

<p>I am not joking about this and I am not using "addiction" in any light hearted way.  I'm very serious.</p>
<p>First, if you don't know what <a href="http://bubblews.com">Bubblews</a> is, I'll explain it.  Bubblews is an Internet writing site with similarities to Facebook.  It only requires short posts of 400 characters, which is 80 words or so. Like Facebook, it is very socially oriented, but unlike Facebook, the members are paid for their activity.</p>
<p>I wrote there for just short of 7 weeks, posting 238 articles.  I earned a little over $200.00 in that period, which would be pretty poor pay were I not also having fun doing it.</p>
<p>I've quit posting there temporarily, though not because it's not fun.  I quit because I think the site is doomed to failure and I detest seeing my articles go down the drain with it.  I therefore don't want to add any more; losing those 200 would be bad enough.</p>
<p><i>Update:  I decided to give them another chance.</i></p>
<p>Why didn't I post them here?  Because they don't fit here. They are on subjects unrelated to anything I do here.  It's that simple.</p>
<br clear="left" />
<h2>Addiction</h2>
<p>I'll get to why I think Bubblewswill fail soon, but first I want to mention the addiction issue.</p>
<p>It really seems to me that Bubblews was *designed* to be addictive.  As one of the principals has a background in psychology, that's certainly possible, but whether by design or accidental, Bubblews is a slot machine that keeps you playing and makes a lot of money for the casino that owns it.</p>
<p>Let's first look at The Bank:</p>
<div style="text-align:center">

<p><a href="http://aplawrence.com/cgi-bin/showpic.pl?image=bubblews_bank_lg.jpg&amp;mytitle=Bubblews%20Bank%20page&amp;returnpage=Web/Bubblews_addiction.html&amp;returntitle=Bubblews%20Addiction%20-%20no%20joke!"><img src="http://aplawrence.com/images/bubblews_bank_sm.jpg" alt="Bubblews Bank page" title="Bubblews Bank page (click for larger view)" /></a><br /></p>

</div>
<p>Did you notice "This is an important area to check out frequently"?</p>
<p>The money builds from views, likes, dislikes and comments.  On average, each action is worth about a penny.  Your take builds slowly usually, but there is always the possibility that some post might catch fire and attract many thousands of views.  That happened to a post I made here recently - over a few days it had over 20,000 views.  Had that happened at Bubblews, I would have earned over $200 from just that post - a Jackpot!  That's why Bubblers (members of Bubblews) keep watching their bank.</p>
<p>Bubblers also get positive reinforcement from Likes, social media shares and comments.</p>
<div style="text-align:center">

<p><a href="http://aplawrence.com/cgi-bin/showpic.pl?image=bubblews_likes_lg.jpg&amp;mytitle=Bubblews%20likes&amp;returnpage=Web/Bubblews_addiction.html&amp;returntitle=Bubblews%20Addiction%20-%20no%20joke!"><img src="http://aplawrence.com/images/bubblews_likes.jpg" alt="Bubblews likes" title="Bubblews likes (click for larger view)" /></a><br /></p>

</div>
<p>Notice the size of the Like/Dislike buttons.  Those are begging to be clicked, aren't they?  Pretty colors, too.  The only difference between those and a slot machine is that they don't make a cool noise when people click them!</p>
<p>Finally we have Notifications. </p>
<div style="text-align:center">

<p><a href="http://aplawrence.com/cgi-bin/showpic.pl?image=bubblews_gambling_lg.jpg&amp;mytitle=Bubblews%20Notifications&amp;returnpage=Web/Bubblews_addiction.html&amp;returntitle=Bubblews%20Addiction%20-%20no%20joke!"><img src="http://aplawrence.com/images/bubblews_gambling_sm.jpg" alt="Bubblews Notifications" title="Bubblews Notifications (click for larger view)" /></a><br /></p>

</div>
<p>One not so obvious thing here is that you only get to see the last 200 notifications.  If you are active, you may receive more than that many over night. This creates urgency - did someone mention my name or Like my post?  I need to get back to Bubblews to find out!</p>
<p>The lack of detail in the notifiers also encourages activity.  Rather than showing you the name of the article or comment referenced, only the word "comment" or "post" is used, encouraging you to click through to learn what it was about. Pull that slot machine lever again!</p>
<h2>Addiction</h2>
<p>Sum it up:</p>
<ul>
<li>The exhortation on the Bank page - check me frequently!.  </li>
<li>The 200 notifications - rush back, you might miss something!</li>
<li> The big Like button - they Like me!</li>
<li>The trickle of pennies - they are giving me money!</li>
<li>I might hit a Jackpot!</li>
</ul>

<p>I can testify that even though the money was obviously not an important factor, I felt the tug of true addiction here.  It was FUN to write, fun to collect Likes and views and comments, fun to get paid for them!</p>

<h2>Why do I think it is doomed?</h2>
<p>If this was designed to be addictive, the designer forgot that these addicts can cheat.</p>
<p>How?  By indiscriminate Liking.  If you run through clicking that big Like button on every post and comment you can find, you are feeding pennies to other Bubblers.  Some of them will do the same to you. That's (unfortunately) human nature - you feed their addiction, they return the favor.</p>
<p>You can make a lot more money this way.  Slap up a bunch of useless 400 character posts (or even a bunch of useful posts!) and rake in the cash.</p>
<p>I tested this proposition by writing an article that explained exactly what I was doing and asking visitors NOT to like it.  Of course it still got Liked! Those were the people gaming the advertisers.  They didn't READ, they just clicked Like in hopes that I would do the same for them.</p>
<p>You'd even see people writing about how to most efficiently "manage" their notifications.. in other words, how to more quickly identify the people you expect to reciprocate!</p>


<p>If you could cheat at slot machines, the casino would either fix them so you could not or pull them out.  The money for Bubblews obviously comes from the advertisers.  The cheaters aren't reading ANYTHIG, they are just clicking Like.  Advertisers don't like that.</p>
<p>There is also a large amount of plagiarism at the site and neither of these problems are being addressed very well by Bubblews staff.  In fact, Bubblews support actively ignores many questions relating to such cheating.  That is, you will get answers to some support issues, but not to others.  That's not good.</p>
<p>I still have hope for the site.  As I said, Bubblews is a tremendous amount of fun. I particularly like it because I could write on subjects that do not fit well here.  If they can fix their obvious problems, I'd love to go back.</p>



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<p><i><b>I resell or can earn commissions from the sale of some of these items.  Links within these pages may be affiliate links that pay me for referring you 
to them. That's mostly insignificant amounts of money; whenever it is not I have made my relationship plain.  If you have any question, please do feel free to contact me.</b></i></p>
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</item>
<item rdf:about="http://aplawrence.com/Unixart/is_pdf_dumb.html">
<title>Are pdf files dumb? </title>
<description>
<![CDATA[
PDF,Web-HTML 
<h2>Are pdf files dumb?</h2>
<!-- PLACEAD --><!-- BIG LEFT -->

<br />
2013-08-16
<p><i>(The first part of this was written in 2000)</i></p>
<p>I certainly agree with this. PDF is great if you really need it, but I see far too much PDF used where HTML would have been a better choice because there 
was no need to control the display.  PDF requires another program (even if it is configured to run as part of your browser, it is still another program) and is harder to edit and search.</p>
<p>I think you also need to consider the importance and urgency
of the information.  If the document in question contains
information on the sonnets of some obscure French poet, it
may not be a burden to require extra software to read it. 
Where I get really teed off is when technical articles are
presented in pdf or other formats that require third party
software.  If your Mac is barely running, and is crashing at
the slightest provocation, the last thing you need is to
have to run Acrobat to read about what might be causing your
problem.  Straight HTML can be read (not prettily, but
certainly accurately) with nothing more than telnet working-
no IE, no Netscape, and certainly no Acrobat.</p>

<p>There is also the issue of speed.  I may not care how long
it takes to download the French Poets page, but when I'm
stuck with a 14.4 modem because it's the only working piece
of junk available at 9:00 PM at a broken customer's site, 
and I need information from your technical site, I will not
be happy to see pdf as my only choice.</p>

<p>Another good general rule is that people shouldn't have to
download anything to view your site.  They may not have
space, they may not have time, or (again) there just may not
be a version that runs on their OS.</p>
<div style="text-align:center">
<img src="/images/need_to_be_pdf.jpg" alt="Does this need to be PDF?" />
</div>

<p>I had a funny (!) conversation recently with someone who
designs web pages.  He was showing off his home page, and I
noted that he made heavy use of Java.  I questioned that,
noting that people with 56K dialups would be frustrated by
the slowness.  He said that was exactly his intention,
because his company also sells DSL!  So the concept is that
his customers will be convinced to get a high speed
connection to properly view the pages this guy designs for
him.  I pointed out that this attitude doesn't do much for
the ultimate readers of his customer's pages, but he didn't
care..</p>

<p>So, it does depend on what kind of documents you are
presenting and whether you care if some people can't read
them or have difficulty.  I have no idea what kind of
documents you are putting out there or for what purposes,
but a "it's their problem" attitude may be appropriate- or
then again, it may not.  I certainly know it is not
appropriate for technical sites (yet it is done) and it's
probably not wise for any site trying to maximize their
exposure.</p>

<pre>
Subject: Re: dumb pdf files
&gt; 
&gt; I'm reading your Corel Linux Deluxe review and was surprised by the
&gt; "those dumb pdf files that web morons put up on their sites"
&gt; statement.  We've started using pdf with increasing frequency to
&gt; distribute documents.  I'm curious as to how moronic we are.


The problem is that pdf's requre a separate viewer- Acrobat
Reader.  If the documents really need to be pdf, that's
fine, but if not it is harmful in several ways:


o It requires that extra reader that isn't necessarily
available on the platform the user has, either because Adobe
chooses not to compile for that platform (they won't compile
a SCO vesrion, for example) or because the reader is using a
strictly text based browser such as Lynx or one of the teeny
browsers starting to be built into cell phones and PDA's. 
There *are* other programs that can sometimes do a
half-assed job of reading pdf's, but because Adobe keeps
changing it, those programs have marginal use.

o That extra reader of course requires more computer
resources, and on marginal equipment owned by the less
wealthy parts of the populace, may run horribly or not at
all.

(Update: today's computers are so fast this barely matters.)

o Search engines index text.  Anything withing PDF's is not
going to be indexed by any engine I'm currently aware of,
and therefore remains effectively invisible to web searches.

(Update: that's no longer true: <a href="https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35287?hl=en">File types indexable by Google</a>.)

o Visually handicapped people can easily find programs to
read straight html, but pdf's present a greater challenge. 
I'm not sure anything is available, and if it is, I bet it's
only for Windows (a platform that more and more of us choose
not to run except when absolutely necessary).

(Update: also no longer true: <a href="http://www.nvaccess.org/">NVA Access</a> and <a href="https://wiki.gnome.org/Guadalinfo_accesible">GUADALINFO ACCESSIBLE PROJECT</a>.)


Of course, there are advantages to pdf's, and if you really
need that precise formatting, then you should continue to
use them.  However, I'd still recommend an alternate
straight HTML/GIF version be produced for the reasons given
above.
</pre>
<div style="font-style:italic">
<p>Update 2013:</p>
</div>
<p>The problems of some people being unable to read PDF's still exist, 
though it's far less common today.  Although many of my original reasons for disliking PDF have gone away, I still cringe when I see 
something that easily could be html (or worse, plain text!) presented as a PDF.
Fortunately, I don't see it all that often.  My fear when I wrote this 
was that PDF abuse would become more common, and in some cases it has (technical documentation has drifted strongly to PDF) but it has not generally over run the Web.</p>
<p>Here in 2013 (this article was first written in 2000) I'm not sure 
that my dislike is justified.  I found <a href="http://www.websuburb.com.au/HelpDesk/Content/PDFAcrobatics/tabid/754/language/en-US/Default.aspx">Advantages and disadvantges of PDF</a> and many other matches when I googled for "disadvantage of pdf", but many of these are as out of date as this page was.  For example, many will confidently state that there is no Linux PDF viewer, but <a href="http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/4-best-linux-pdf-viewers/">that's definitely not true.</a>. </p>
<p>So - do I need an attitude adjustment? Should I stop thumping my old man cane and accept PDF's on the Web?</p>


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<p>Want to showcase your product to our audience? Check our <a href="http://aplawrence.com/advert.html">advertising options.</a></p>
<p><br /><br /><i><b>Many of the products and books I review are things I purchased for my own use.  Some were given to me specifically for the purpose of   reviewing them.</b></i></p>
<p><i><b>I resell or can earn commissions from the sale of some of these items.  Links within these pages may be affiliate links that pay me for referring you 
to them. That's mostly insignificant amounts of money; whenever it is not I have made my relationship plain.  If you have any question, please do feel free to contact me.</b></i></p>
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</description>
<link>http://aplawrence.com/Unixart/is_pdf_dumb.html</link>
</item>
<item rdf:about="http://aplawrence.com/Web/link_checker.html">
<title>Another Perl link checker  </title>
<description>
<![CDATA[
Code,Perl,Web-HTML 

2013/07/11<p><br /></p>
<!-- PLACEAD --><!-- BIG LEFT -->
<br />
<br />

<p>Checking links is the <a href="http://aplawrence.com/Opinion/webmaster.html">most unpleasant part of running a large website</a>. While there are hundreds (if not thousands) of linkcheckers available on the web, none of them really meet my needs.</p>
<p>I explained a bit about why at <a href="http://aplawrence.com/Web/smarter_link_extract.html">Smarter HTML Link Extractor</a> and I used the code presented there for some time even though it wasn't what I wanted either.</p>
<p>Recently I started using this code, which, while not perfect, meets my needs more closely than anything else I have used. I'll explain why after we look at the code:</p>
<br clear="left" />
<pre>
#!/usr/bin/perl
use LWP::Simple;
use File::Basename;
require HTML::LinkExtor;
$checkfile=shift @ARGV;
open(LINKS, "&gt;/root/linkcheck.out");

$cookie_file = "/root/data/cookies/cookies.txt";
if  (not $checkfile) {
  print "Getting paster\n";
  $checkfile=`cat /root/data/paster`;
  $debug=1;
}
chomp $checkfile;
$p = HTML::LinkExtor-&gt;new();
$p-&gt;parse_file("/root/data/text$checkfile");  
@links=$p-&gt;links;

 foreach (@links) {
        $type=@$_[0];
        # only want anchor links";
        next if $type ne "a";
	$link=@$_[2];
        next if $link =~ /mailto:/;
	chomp $link;
        print "Checking link $type $link\n" if $debug;
        print "LINKS Checking link $type $link\n" if $debug;
        if ($link !~ /http:/ and $link !~ /https:/ and $link !~ /ftp:/) {
          print "Fixing relative\n" if $debug;
          print LINKS "Fixing relative\n" if $debug;
          $link=~ s/^/http:\/\/aplawrence.com/;
        }
        $blink=$link;
        $blink=~ s/http:..//;
        # No need to check links to interior pages
	next if -e "/srv/www/aplawrence.com/apl/$blink"; 
        $deep=0;
        $moved=0;
        $resp=0;
        $r=check($link);

        myprint("$link may be dead\n") if not $r;
        print "Relocated\n" if (not $r and $deep);
        if (not $r and $resp) {
         print "but did get a response\n";
        }
  }


sub check {
my $url=shift;
$resp=0;
@stuff=();
# If this is the first try, let's just see if we get a page
if (not $deep) {
myprint qq(curl -c $cookie_file  -m 1 -r 0-1024 -A "Mozilla/4.0" -s  $url 2&gt;&amp;1) if $debug;
@stuff=`curl  -c $cookie_file  -m 1 -r 0-1024 -A "Mozilla/4.0" -s  $url 2&gt;&amp;1`;
foreach (@stuff) {
  s/^\s+//;
  next if not $_;
  if (/&lt;html/i or /DOCTYPE/) {
   $resp=1;
   last;
  }
}
}
# Get headers
@stuff=`curl -G -b $cookie_file  -m 1 -A Mozilla/4.0  -s --head  $url 2&gt;&amp;1`;
if ($stuff[0] =~ /curl.* Couldn't resolve/) {
 return 0;
 # No such site
}
if ($stuff[0] =~ / 200 OK/) {
     myprint("$url\n") if $debug;
    if ($deep) {
     myprint("\n\nPossibly replace $link with \n $url \n");
     }
     
    return 1;
}

if ($stuff[0] =~ / 301 /) {
 myprint("$url: $stuff[0]\n") if $debug;
 $moved=1; 
 # Moved ..
}
foreach(@stuff) {
chomp;
if ($moved and /Location: / and not $deep) {
  $deep++;
  s/Location: //;
  print("Recheck $_\n") if $debug;
  return(check($_));
}
}
# Some other return, needs manual checking
return 0;
}
sub myprint {
my $string=shift;
print $string;
print LINKS $string;
foreach(@stuff) {
  print LINKS $_;
}
}
</pre>
<p>I think that's about as close as I'm going to get, for various reasons.</p>
<p>First off, you'll notice I used curl.  Actually, I originally wrote this using <a href="http://aplawrence.com/Words2005/2005_05_23.html">LWP</a>, but it was easier to debug problems using curl at the command line, so I went that way instead.  Now that I've figured out what I need to do, I could rewrite it for LWP, but really, why bother?  The speed issue here is the internet, not the cost of firing off "curl".</p>
<p>The other issue is that it needs to be slightly broken.</p>
<p>Yeah, that sounds funny, but consider this: sometimes a website will accept a link that is long gone and relocate you somewhere pointless - or at least pointless from this point of view.  While the relocate might make sense for an old link in some cases, it may not in others, so I need to look at all those cases individually.</p>
<p>There are links that will fail for other reasons: they need a POST instead of a GET, for example.  Again, I want to look at those manually before I accept them or let them pass.</p>
<p>Finally, I don't correct relative links of the form "xyz.html".  I don't want to leave those like that anyway as they will fail should I someday move the page to some other directory, so I let them fail the check even though they are usually valid.</p>
<p>I thought about adding some code that will make a record of "accepted" links so that I need not check them again the next time I run this, but as things at the website may have changed by then, that doesn't make sense. I may need to repeat my work next year, but that's the way it is.</p>
<p>As there is so much to check, I don't even try to run through the whole site. I run this when I have some other reason to look at a page: somebody left a comment, or it came up when I was searching for something. Other than that, broken links could sit here for many a year!</p>


<p>Comments: <a href="http://aplawrence.com/cgi-bin/newcomm.pl?commenting=/Web/link_checker.html">Click Here.</a></p>

<p>Want to showcase your product to our audience? Check our <a href="http://aplawrence.com/advert.html">advertising options.</a></p>
<p><br /><br /><i><b>Many of the products and books I review are things I purchased for my own use.  Some were given to me specifically for the purpose of   reviewing them.</b></i></p>
<p><i><b>I resell or can earn commissions from the sale of some of these items.  Links within these pages may be affiliate links that pay me for referring you 
to them. That's mostly insignificant amounts of money; whenever it is not I have made my relationship plain.  If you have any question, please do feel free to contact me.</b></i></p>
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<td> - </td>
<td><a href="http://samepage.io?partner=683d6fe8b2973c7cc2a4ba099fd949be56d864fe">Samepage - Redefining how people create and share information</a></td>
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</tr>
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</item>
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