I came across the URLs to the YouTube automatically generated thumbnails:-

http://img.youtube.com/vi/XXXXX/hq2.jpg

http://img.youtube.com/vi/XXXXX/2.jpg

Where XXXXX is the video id, which you can find in most of the YouTube URLs. The number at the end can be changed to 0, 1, 2 or 3 to choose a different image.

This speeded things up a bit (although sometimes the generated thumbnails aren’t great) as I bookmarked the link then would paste the video ID in.

However I have finally pulled my finger out and created a slightly more elegant solution which I can paste the full URL in and hit go. Then it displays all the available thumbnails and I can right click and copy the image URL.

Here is my YouTube Thumbnail Generator.

Whilst looking through referring domain and traffic source reports for a couple of websites, I was intrigued  by the amount of traffic coming from ISP homepage portals such as:-

orange.co.uk
sky.com
bt.yahoo.com
talktalk.co.uk
aol.co.uk

These pages are often set as homepages when installing your ISP’s broadband software, or commonly used by home users who have their e-mail with their ISP and access it via web mail.

Initially I thought that the amount of traffic was coming from feed readers embedded on the home, sport or news pages on the portal site. Although in reality most portals don’t link out too much, instead pushing you to their content pages (although a lot of this is supplied not original content). They tend to make some of their revenue through ad networks, so more page impression, more money.

On closer inspection of the full referring URLs nearly all of the traffic was coming from the portals search engines. When you look at the sites, most have a very prominent search box with the “enhanced by Google” badge next to it (image above). The presence of the search box might be why a lot of people leave the site as their homepage.

All of this referring traffic is often reported by analytics software as other sites or links not search engines (except AOL which most recognise as search), which has the potential to be mis-leading if you don’t dig deep enough into your stats.

The odd thing is that most of these portals tuck their search results pages under the sub-domain “search” which should make it easy for analytics software to notice.

A slight side note is that most are using Google not Bing for their search too.

Visiting the page they have a Facebook app which requires to “like” the page before you can access the entry form, which is rather cunning. So Pepsi’s on can promotions are now, not only potentially driving sales of the drink, but also getting people to market the brand for them on Facebook.

After the first stage of the entry form (entering the code from the ring-pull) there is a standard data capture form and terms and conditions etc. After submitting this you are offered the opportunity to give your friends a free chance to enter. By picking them from a list and posting a link to the entry form on their wall.

The only thing that annoyed me through the process was the fact that the competition sends people to the Pepsi Max page even on Regular (which I bought) and Diet cans. Forcing users to like Pepsi Max even if they don’t buy that product. My cynical mind says this is probably deliberate and maybe Pepsi Max doesn’t sell as well as the other varieties, so needs marketing more.

PS: I un-liked Pepsi Max after entering the competition.

I’m proud to say that last week I collected the Website of the Year award for EDP24, at the EDF Energy East of England Media Awards 2010. EDP24 is the website for the Norfolk daily newspaper the Eastern Daily Press, which also picked up Daily Newspaper of the Year too, I work as Digital Developer on the website as my day job.

Ego boost over, back to work now.

When the photos feature launched I wanted to be able to to upload several photos across Norfolk via the EDP24 Foursquare account for people to find at places across the county. Initially I transferred the photos to my iPhone and uploaded them to the venues using that. However I found that I could not find venues that were out of range.

To overcome this issue I decided to start playing with the new API from Foursquare, which is pretty easy to use once you get your head around OAuth (I’ve never needed to use it until now). I then used the API to create a simple HTML form that I could leave on my local machine enter a Venue ID and browse for a photo to upload.

No doubt Foursquare will add this functionality soon to the website, also there are much more elegant solutions to this problem, however this was a means to an end. If I get some spare time I may create a better widget, with venue search and proper response handling.

Warning: This is a very simple tool, which relies on you getting the venue ID correct, always check that you have added the photo to the correct venue and delete any misplaced ones.

Step 1 – Get an OAuth key from Foursquare

Visit https://foursquare.com/oauth/register then login and fill out the form, if you are going to be using the tool from your local machine, enter http://localhost in the website and callback fields.

Once you register you will receive to long codes call Key and Secret, make a note of these.

Step 2 – Obtain the OAuth Token for your user

Next we need to ping a command to foursquare to get our OAuth Token which is required when uploading images and will upload the images at what ever user you are logged in as when you do the process.

So login to Foursquare as the user you want to upload photos as, then enter the following URL into your browser:-

https://foursquare.com/oauth2/authenticate?client_id=KEY&response_type=token&redirect_uri=URL

Replacing KEY with the code we obtained in Step 1 and URL with the address you entered into the Callback field.

When you visit this address it will ask you if you want to allow access, hit the Allow button.

This will take you back to your address, however you will notice you have #access_token=TOKEN on the end of the URL the long code after the equals sign is your OAuth Token, make a note of this.

Step 3 – Create the HTML form

This part is quite simple, create a HTML file in Notepad/Dreamweaver/TextWrangler or what ever your preferred HTML editor is then use this code in the body portion of the page:-

<form action="https://api.foursquare.com/v2/photos/add" method="post" enctype="multipart/form-data">
<p>Venue ID: <input type="text" name="venueId"></p>
<p><input  type="file" name="photo"></p>
<input type="hidden" name="oauth_token" value="YOUR TOKEN HERE">
<input type="submit">
</form>

Be sure to replace the YOUR TOKEN HERE with the long code we obtained in Step 2.

Save the file to your local machine somewhere.

Step 4 – Using the HTML form

Open the HTML file we created in a browser.

Then in a new tab or window open Foursquare and search for your venue, once you have found the venue you want to add a photo to, the URL of the venue whoudl look something like this:-

http://foursquare.com/venue/128530

We want the number at the end, so copy or make a note of this.

Then switch tabs/windows to our form, enter the number into the first box, and select your photo using the browse button below, and hit Submit.

Note: The photo has to be a JPG with the content type image/jpeg otherwise it will fail.

You should then be taken to a page displaying a JSON response on it, if the start of the response looks like this:-

{"meta": {"code": 200.....

And it has a 200 in it then sucess, your photo has been uploaded. Go to the venue page and hit refresh and your photo should be there.

If you have gotten a number different to 200, you should be able to see an error message with a brief explanation of what was wrong.

Update: If you change venueId to tipId you can use the form to add photos to tips you have already posted. Thanks to About Foursquare for this idea

With Christmas only a few days away, I thought I would give my friends over at Soak a shout out, as they have created a brilliant Christmas microsite. It’s great little site that allows you to share your dream Christmas and potentially win a Harrods Hamper too. The design is a wonderful 50s treatment and some of the jQuery effects on the panels below the map are perfectly executed. Well done guys.

However a few minutes after the re-tweet my server (a small rented virtual space) started throwing a few 500 errors at users trying to access the blog post. This was of course due to around 1,300 people (maybe more as the Google Analytics code wouldn’t have been called by browsers that got the 500 error) trying to all read it at the same time.

So I quickly found and installed a cache plug-in, WP Cache Blocks in this case, dropping the required code into my template.

Luckily my theme doesn’t use too many images so that wouldn’t has slowed things too much, however to be on the safe side I uploaded the images to flickr and re-linked them in the post and refreshed the cache.

I also disabled the RSS based widgets on the sidebar incase the sudden influx of traffic annoyed the RSS feed providers (although I realised afterward the cache plug-in would have cached them too).

After this I checked the error log on the server a few times and the 500 errors had disappeared, although did spot a couple of 404s for the favicon.ico file, which I never got around to creating, so I quickly knocked one up to have a nice clean error log.

Thanks Dennis Crowley for the re-tweet, should you (or anyone else) RT a post now the site is prepared. However not sure how it would react with a RT from an uber popular tweeter such as Stephen Fry, but can’t see that anytime soon.

It’s a word prefixed with a hash symbol so #hashtag, #twitter etc added normally to the end of a tweet. It’s normally used to tag a tweet or link with a topic, similar to how meta keywords used to work for search engines to tell the search engine what the page was about. Here’s a couple of examples

@Signalnoise: Wait, one of Kyle Cooper’s teachers at Yale was Paul Rand?! #FITC
@xboxer360: Dragon Age 2 Gets a Release Date and Trailer – http://bit.ly/d6xwBT #xbox #xbox360 #gaming

The first adds a hashtag of FITC which is an event called Flash in the Community, the second adds relevant tags for the console the link is about and a general gaming tag too.

What do people use them for, once I have added them?

On the main Twitter website (and many of the apps too) these hashtags are turned into links to searches, so you can click the tag and find other posts about this topic. These searches can then be added to RSS feed readers so people get all the tweets about this particular topic. Some apps such as TweetDeck allow you to add these searches so that it displays all the posts with that tag as they happen.

But surely only the really tech savvy will use this functionality then?

This may be true that only heavy twitter users or geeky types use the twitter searches or RSS feeds, however these users are also likely to be “influencers” with lots of followers or being followed by the right people, meaning that if they see your post via a hashtag then retweet it, you may find your tweet doing the rounds very quickly.

The thing which hasn’t gotten as much press is that many websites are now showing very few adverts, as they were mostly created in Flash too, with some campaigns having basic fall back GIFs for the few non Flash users. This perhaps shows how little attention users pay to them nowadays.

However the commercial people behind many sites have begun to get worried and are looking into how to create their Flash adverts in a non-Flash format, the holy grail seems to currently be something from Adobe called renderFXG, which is a javascript tool which can render their FXG file format in the browser using the HTML5 canvas tags. This is the ideal solution as ad agencies can continue to use Flash to create ads then simply export them in a slightly different format.

The other option you have with existing tools is the dominant format from the pre flash days, the good ole’ fashioned animated GIF. Which is an art form unto itself, trying to create a good looking animated advert with a 256 colour palette whilst keeping the file size below 100k, can be pretty difficult.

Whilst Adobe beaver away at a solution and as HTML5 is still a draft standard, the animated GIF seems the only good compatible short term solution. So perhaps it’s time to brush up on the Photoshop animation skills again, or even see if ImageReady will still run on that old Mac in the office.

So this is my desk and where I edit my photos, write blog posts, design things and beaver away at code, on the evenings and weekends. I’ve finally got it almost the way I want it in the lounge, with a bookcase of books full of inspiration and near the stereo (which was playing The Kinks when this was taken).