Real quick post, but yesterday I got a lively email from Google telling me that my adsense account had been banned because of click fraud. The strange thing is that i have adsense code on only one site and that site has been down for at least two weeks.

I used the please-be-nice-and-let-me-back-on-adsense form and tried to explain that something must be amiss because I havent had any code up on the site for ages. However Google wouldn’t budge and reminded me of this…

My account was disabled and my appeal was denied. Is there any way I can rejoin the programme? Can I open a new account?

We understand your concern about the actions taken against your account. Please know that our actions are the result of careful investigation by our team of dedicated specialists, taking into account the interests of our advertisers, publishers and users. Though you may be disappointed with our decision, we are unable to reinstate your account.

Please also note that publishers disabled for invalid click activity are not allowed any further participation in AdSense. For this reason, these publishers may not open new accounts.

Lastly, please bear in mind that Google does reserve the right to disable an account for any reason, including invalid click activity from any source.

So just remember, even though Google is this really cool company that helps us find what we need on a daily basis, they are also a bunch of bastards who can close down your account without actually giving you any real reason why!

I was chatting away with EvilGreenDonkey and he told me about a Firefox script that he found called speed dial, so i installed away and now i am loving it.

What is speed dial?
Speed dial allows you to open thumbnails of your favourite sites in one tab or window. You basically add the sites that you want to keep updated on and then whenever you open a new tab they are all their to be easily clicked.
There is more though, you can tell speed dial to keep checking these sites every x minutes, hours, or days. So you can check the update status of all your favourite sites from one window.

I find it really handy to keep up to date on whats happening on Digg, Reddit etc, you can also add your Gmail or Hotmail accounts in to the mix and you have a handy way of seeing when you get new mail etc.

Below is a screenshot of speed dial.

Get it from Mozilla addons 

Good old Google, always helping out the little guy when they can, and as such today see’s the realeae of Google Doctype. You would be forgiven in thinking that in their quest for world domination that they have now created their own doctypes to rival the W3 standards, but that hasn’t happened…. yet.

Instead Google Doctype is an online, open source encyclopedia for web developers, and going to the homepage gives you the following info…

Google Doctype is an open encyclopedia and reference library. Written by web developers, for web developers. It includes articles on web security, JavaScript DOM manipulation, CSS tips and tricks, and more. The reference section includes a growing library of test cases for checking cross-browser and cross-platform compatibility.

Google Doctype is 100% open.

• Open source
• Open content
• Open to contributions from anyone

I have had a look around at some of the docs and they are very well written, and just like wiki people can edit them also. I would suspect that you wont get as many errors as you do with Wiki since people in the web development world wont really get much out of wrecking articles for amusement.

So if you want to brush up on HTML, DOM and CSS then go check out Google Doctype

Not sure if this still works, but if you want to have a bit of fun/really piss people off then tell them (say it gives their name cool colours or something) to set their name or status (in some cases just get them to type it into the chat window) to this string… n—a_Á—ay±m—aÁÇáç±Çáß±Çá§ÁaÇáDZOÇá—±Ç᧱Çár×ÁÇá+NÇáLáÇá

It buffer overflows messenger causing the user to crash out and not be able to sign back in. Apparently in older versions of MSN it can also crash other chat users who are initiated in a chat session.

Just something random i saw ages ago and see it has started to do the rounds again. Use a third party messenger service such as Adium etc to sign back in and remove offending code.

So i stumbled upon a rather interesting project this morning which allows you to drive a tiny little car around Google Maps using a flash applet.

It really is so cool, you use the arrow keys to accelerate and you can drive around. Here is a screenshot of my motor parked outside the Ayima office.

It really is so cute so try it out…

GoogleDrive
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