Google’s new Page Creator tool has had that many traffic that they’ve shut down new signups.

Thank you for your interest in Google Page Creator! Google Page Creator has experienced extremely strong demand, and, as a result, we have temporarily limited the number of new signups as we increase capacity. In the meantime, please submit your email address and we will notify you as soon as we are ready to add new accounts. Thank you for your patience.

What does it say for the development of online tools when Google can’t handle the load?

Update: They’re back up again

The National Australia Bank, who have decided to follow KFC’s lead in turning themselves into an acronym (yes I know KFC is only an abbreviation), have also decided that confusing their internet banking customers is also a good idea.

On their homepage the links to internet banking & online trading has been moved from a large bold link up the top of the page to the right side of the page in small font. Why this was done is a mystery to me. It doesn’t really affect me, as my eyesight is fine and I’m fairly comfortable with navigating web pages. However, for the less web-savvy and those with poor eyesight it’ll be making things just that little bit more difficult. Sure, it’s not a big issue, but why make it more difficult than it needs to be. Remember the user’s mantra is “Don’t make me think!“. And making internet banking harder to find will just push more people into the branches, which is something all banks are desperately trying to avoid. I can only think that it has been moved for design reasons, that is, their designer (or agency as I assume it will be) has come up with a design that has the login box over there. It really is a strange decision, becuase as this eyetrack heatmap study shows, the top-right position is possibly the worst place to put anything as it’s the last place people look on a page.

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The Image Replacements WordPress Plugin has just moved out of beta and into its first release version. A number of bug fixes have been done, but the major change is the ability to control the caching options, i.e. Whether to use the cache and where to put it. See the ‘General Options’ section on the plugin’s page for more details.

I’m currently playing with a new plugin in pre-pre-alpha stage that will help manage statistics services (hence this earlier post, yes I had an ulterior motive). Anyone who’s interested in testing, please contact me.

As with the earlier post about this plugin (and all posts from now on about my plugins) comments are disabled to keep all comments on the plugin page. Thankyou.

[tags]WordPress, WordPress Plugins, Graphics[/tags]

I’m interested in hearing what stats programs people use for their blogs (assuming of course that you have one). I’m using Measure Map & Google Analytics, which is working quite nicely, but I know that there’s heaps of other systems out there. Do you use a JavaScript-based external tool like Measure Map and StatCounter, or do you use a log file analyser like Webalizer and AWStats. Or are you so hard-core you just read apache log files straight?

Enquiring minds (well mine anyway) want to know, because we all know that bloggers are all really self-obsessed narcissists who watch their log files all day long

[tags]Statistics, Log Files[/tags]

Begg-Smith wins first Aussie gold at Turin Winter Olympics

Australia’s first gold medal winner at the Turin Winter Olympics is not only an outstanding moguls skier but a hugely successful entrepreneur as well. And he’s only 21.

Dale Begg-Smith is originally from Canada, but he came to Australia seven years ago to pursue his sport.

He left Canada because his coaches weren’t happy when he started missing training camps to work on the internet business he began as a 13-year-old.

That enterprise is now worth $40-million.

Interesting. When the commentator on Channel 7 mentioned that Dale had said that his company has no name and no website, I started getting curious. Call me cynical, but I immediately suspected that he was a porn marketer or a spammer. Unfortunately, the truth is that I wasn’t actually too far off the mark. A bit of digging found that his company is called AdsCPM, and it in fact doesn’t have a website. Any more.

Google has a bunch of hits and the Google cache has some of the pages without images, but the wayback machine was more helpful, showing that the site existed until at least March 06 2005. So why didn’t he want to talk about it? Because his company is in the pop-up & pop-under business. On this geekvillage thread you can see Dale (or at least someone claiming to be Dale) discussing CPM rates and ad structures.

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Dean Peters has finally revived Heal Your Church Website in the form of a Wordpress blog. Time to get back into teaching, rebuking, correcting & training in righteous web design.

Welcome back Dean (not that you really went anywhere with all the blogs4God stuff you’ve been doing!)

[tags]Christian, Church Websites[/tags]