I ran in to a situation at work today where an advertiser, wanting to place a tracking pixel on a sponsored piece of Web content, only wanting to know about visitors who have been on the page containing the content for at least one minute. The advertising system we use doesn’t offer a solution for this out of the box and I didn’t think it would be terribly difficult to make happen, but was surprised to not find any quick how-to guides anywhere.

The code snippet below outputs markup to a visitors browser 60 seconds after the page they are viewing loads. It was tested in Doubleclick’s Dart for Publishers as a piece of custom creative targeted to a ad zone used exclusively by the piece of sponsored content:

<script languagage="Javascript">
/* %u - keep Dart from complaining about no url */
setTimeout("firePixels()", 60000); //60 second delay
function firePixels(){
	var tStage = document.getElementById('trackerstage');
	if (tStage){
		tStage.innerHTML = "<img src=\"http://www.100781.org/happles.jpg\">";
	}
}
</script>
<div id="trackerstage"></div>

This solution worked perfectly, after replacing my test image with the advertiser’s tracking pixel, of course. This is also simple enough that it should be able to work just as well when delivered by any advertising system. Have a similar solution or tip? Share!

I got the opportunity to write a tech post for latina.com last week. It was about the 2 new Palm phones set to launch on Verizon Wireless tomorrow, which weren’t even mentioned by most media outlets until a couple of days later. Most tech sites had information on the phones as well, but it was pretty sweet  for people to come up to me and say “I just read about these in the Times, didn’t this go up on our site a couple of days ago?”

The post was edited by a member of the Digital team, to make it better match the tone of the website. This makes a lot of sense since it was originally pretty dry and factual, more along the lines of what you’d see on Gizmodo or Engadget. It was nice to be able to contribute in a way outside of the norm for me, and I’m hoping I get the chance to do it again soon.

latina.com

Latina.com underwent a bit of a refresh earlier this month. Cameron Moore, Latina’s Web Developer and I, along with the guys at Limachips put a ton of work in to the project over the past few months, and it was great seeing the newly refreshed layout go up smoothly.

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A good friend of mine recently took over frigginrandom.com. It’s a great site for all of the odd photos, videos and other random stuff on the Web. The site is updated on a daily basis, so be sure to check it out for a good laugh (or chill) now and then!

frigginrandom.com

GiFEED is a small PHP script that takes titles from an RSS feed and uses them to build an animated Gif file for use in email signatures, forum posts, and just about anything else that you can think of.

I originally put this together back in 2007 and completely forgot it even existed, but recently found it while going through some old files. I think this is the very first script I wrote in PHP, not too long after beginning at Latina. Beforehand, virtually everything I had been working on was based on Microsoft languages and tools. This was a way to start working with something new and now that I look at it a few years later, I think it’s still pretty sweet.

Granted, it isn’t the cleanest script in the world, but it does work and I think I’m going to rewrite it in the near future. Anyway, check it out and let me know if you use it for something.

Ryan Johnson, a friend for over a decade, passed away in a fire last Thursday.

Ryan, better known on the Internet as RJ2, originally gained notoriety after releasing a AoHack program called FireToolz. We first met in one of the aol private rooms that a lot of other young programmers spent time in. I don’t remember which of the series of rooms it was; teel, ipa, deadend, who knows, but we had some good folks in there. RJ2, Eraser, Propal, Chronos, Sinister, MKB, Stealth, Pimpshiz, Gerbil, myself and a bunch of others were regulars, constantly critiquing and helping improve each others work.

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