Don't Back Down

So after finally getting my submission, well, submitted, to become a member of the iTunes affiliate network, I was rejected. Huh. They sent a form letter, saying it's one (or more, potentially) of these reasons: Content unrelated to iTunes, site is down, wrong URL, an aestehtically unpleasing site, promotes tobacco, alcoholic beverages or excessive drinking/drug use, extreme religious content or the site is international and/or written in a foreign language.

Interesting. The content is pretty well unrelated, as I don't talk about songs much. Or even music. But good grief - I just posted an entry on music last week. Not only does iTunes carry Alice Cooper, they actually have the full Welcome to my Nightmare CD available. So that's probably not it.

Site is down? While it may have been down for a few minutes here or there, it hasn't been down for any length of time. I sit in front of the computer every day. At least some of that time, I'm playing with the site or a plugin or something. If it was down, I'd generally know. Highly unlikely.

Maybe I gave them the wrong URL. Possible. I type the thing thirty times a day - I think I'm pretty good at it. But I do type quickly sometimes and letters end up where they aren't supposed to be. So far, this sounds like the most likely option.

Aesthetically unpleasing? Maybe so. But are you telling me that every single site that ever applies gets viewed by someone to see if it looks nice? I find that difficult to believe. Except for this one, every other item can be handled with a bot of some sort. If code exists to determine what's ugly and what's not, I'm in trouble. As if worrying about funkiness weren't bad enough.

I don't believe that I've ever mentioned anything to do with alcohol, tobacco or drugs (except perhaps someone doing something stupid because of them). I think I mentioned once that I was a Christian. Perhaps that is extreme religious content? And while certain countries may view the site as being international in nature, or written in a different language, I wouldn't suspect Apple would have that thought.

Guess it just wasn't meant to be. Oh well. Looks like Amazon gets the traffic instead.

Apparently inspired by my wildly successful offering of a single GMail invitation, the fine folks at Google have seen fit to offer me another six of 'em. First come, first served. Include first name, last name and a valid email address. If this keeps up, I might have to create a mechanism rather than posting each time I get more...

Update: Looks like Peter was right. Not that I didn't believe you, Peter. So I invited a couple of you, then went back to send another and I'm back to 6 invitations. If you want one, let me know. Remember to send your first name, last name and a working email address (it won't show up on the site).

MT-Notifier does not currently support entry notifications. With some work I am sure that I can add this feature to the plugin.

However, I find that I don't have as much free time as I'd like to have, or as I used to have. As a result, I can't currently justify the development of yet another feature, not to mention the support required to use that feature, when I don't get paid - and in fact, give up paying work - to do so. Thanks to David, we have an answer.

Introducing my first feature ransom using Dropcash: MT-Notifier Entry Notification.

Read "Entry Notifications" »

So I'm trying to ship a package via FedEx (cheapest price for my needs). First, I find that Firefox won't work. Back to IE.

Poking through options, and find one that tells me that some FedEx service offers automatic sortation. What the heck is sortation, and why can't I do it manually?

In any case, I press on. I find option after option where I'm told that the option isn't available with my account. Why is it that people cannot read your profile or account information and know that the option isn't available? They do it later, in telling you that you can't do it. How about reading it early, then presenting only options that you can choose? Has no one ever heard of usability?

Further on, I find page after page where nothing displays. I received lots of 404 errors when trying to use Firefox. Now I'm using IE and I get a whole bunch of nothing. I don't know which I like better. At least you can blame the 404s on sloppy coding. With an empty page, I'm left feeling like I did something wrong. Don't know if I like that at all...

I don't know why I even bother signing up for webmail accounts. I have at least one at Excite, GMail, MyWay, Netscape, Hotmail and Yahoo! I can't imagine the last time I received anything useful at any of these accounts.

So just now, I went digging through the Yahoo! options to see if spam filtering was on. It was. Yet I had 650 emails in the last month that were spam. I noticed that I didn't have a folder named "Bulk", so I thought maybe it couldn't find anywhere to put it, and it wasn't working. I tried to create it. Nope. That's a reserved name. So apparently you can delete the folder - or exist without it - but you aren't allowed to create it. Nice.

Ooo, ooo! I can finally say that I've got an invitation to hand out to GMail. If there's actually anyone out there who still wants one and doesn't have one, let me know. First come, first served. First name, last name and email required. If you don't want that info to show up on the page, email me directly.

I've released another small update to MT-Notifier.

This release will handle the case where you specify an invalid code when trying to login using the akey parameter, and then try to correct that parameter on the same screen and resubmit. Previously, this wouldn't work. Now it does.

Read "MT-Notifier 2.2.4" »

The Panthers cut 14 yesterday. Understandable. They still have 4 to go by today's deadline, but I can't understand why they cut Rod Rutherford, who played as a 4th string QB during the preseason. While Rutherford only had a few snaps during these four games, he made several nice plays - with his arm and with his legs. That alone is a bit of an accomplishment among Panthers' quarterbacks (Jake's red zone scramble a couple weeks ago notwithstanding).

Comparisons to Michael Vick may be a bit overstated, but still - I think they should have kept this guy. While he's listed as a practice squad possibility, that means the Panthers have to cut him first - and with an exciting (though brief) preseason, other teams may have some interest. I hope he makes it through to come back and be on the practice squad. You have to wonder what they were thinking - is it really worth keeping near senior citizen Rodney Peete on the roster to give up potential like this?

I've made another small change to MT-Notifier, and released another update.

Specifically, the auto-update feature would work with Movable Type 3.1, but it wouldn't look nice because of some new indenting in that area of Comments.pm.

This release fixes this, so that it looks like the MT-Notifier code belongs there.

Read "MT-Notifier 2.2.3" »

I've updated MT-Notifier to include a change that apparently was lost earlier.

There was a subscription method used outside of the management interface (introduced in MT-Notifier 2.2.0) that apparently was lost somewhere along the way, probably in the follow-up release that was supposed to correct other issues. This has now been fixed.

Read "MT-Notifier 2.2.2" »

As everyone and their mother knows, iTunes introduced a new affiliate program. I decided to sign up. Easy enough, but I couldn't get the registration to work.

Bewildered, I tried it in Internet Explorer instead of Firefox. Bingo. Does anyone else find it strange that the signup process wouldn't work in Firefox, but would in IE?

I've installed the new 3.1 release of Movable Type on the site. I've had beta versions installed for a while now, and decided I'd install the new release as it doesn't seem to differ a whole lot from the latest release candidates.

Read "Movable Type 3.1" »