David Carrington

Tapping away on the Nokia N97 wondering whether this WordPress mobile client is any good.

Seems OK.

Update: seems to work reasonably well on Android too (G1).

I’m a big fan of Modern Warfare 2 (on the Xbox 360) and here’s typically how I play.

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I just had a frustrating little SQL Server problem earlier today and would like to share the handy solution I found via Experts Exchange.

SELECT ResponseXml.value('(//Reference)[1]', 'varchar(50)')
FROM Transaction

A fairly simple XQuery request of an XML column but annoyingly it didn’t work, and it turned out to to be because the ResponseXml had an unnamed XML namespace, which SQL Server doesn’t handle too nicely.

<Message xmlns="http://www.example.com/">
<Reference>123</Reference>
</Message>

It’s the xmlns attribute (XML namespace) that causes the problem apparently, and the simplest solution I found was this snippet:

SELECT ResponseXml.value('declare default element namespace "http://www.example.com/"; (//Reference)[1]', 'varchar(50)')
FROM Transaction

I just had to tell XQuery to use a different default namespace – a lot simpler than other suggested solutions such as removing the namespace from the XML.

It took me three hours to drive the 25 minute journey home last night through the extreme weather conditions (2 inches of snow). Luckily I was allowed to leave early so it actually averaged out ok in the end.

So above is my little setup.

• Dell Mini 9 netbook
• hooked up to my 24″ monitor
• with my N97 providing my music for the day
• and Modern Warfare 2 on the Xbox providing lunch time pressure release

Completely different to my usual remote working setup where I take my 17″ laptop to my girlfriend’s and work from there. Now I just wish that work’s VPN had Windows 7 support.

Google Analytics is one of those great Google products that I’ve used from the start. It provides very useful statistics, graphs and alerts about site usage. I use it for all of my sites and have recently modified Dabr to work with it too – with only a handful of minor obstacles along the way.

First up was the fact that Google Analytics historically never had very good mobile support. Even once that was in place, I had to mess about with Google’s PHP code to add support for Opera Mini’s proxy servers.

Then, once I had the tracking code in place and was starting to get some nice stats – I noticed a piece of text that I should have seen before I started anything:

5M pageview cap per month for non AdWords advertisers.

Whoops – Dabr has a lot more pageviews than that!

AdWords is their service where you pay Google to show adverts that point to your site. Of course I’ve had to sign up to this (at an initial setup cost of £10) and there should begin to be a few Dabr adverts appearing on websites around the web. I’ve even started getting a few clicks.

Google charges me with every click of those adverts, which is a little annoying, so I’ve set up AdSense too.

AdSense is the opposite of AdWords. It’s where I get to add other people’s adverts to my sites and I get a trickle of cash for doing so. Typically I’ve seen clicks earning me about 10p to £1 each, but clicks are fairly rare. I don’t (yet) know enough about CPM and those kind of fancy buzzwords to tell you any real figures. I’m sure I’ll blog something in the new year.

So now I’ve got the three A’s working nicely for Dabr:

• AdWords to bring in potential new users,
• AdSense to bring in a little cash,
• and Analytics to track site usage.

Thanks Google :)