We all have a computer at home that we paid for, we all have our ISP account that we monthly pay for, with the router we paid for, and cables our society paid for from our taxes, and satellites our governments decided to put up there. “We” as global community paid for and developed and built a global digital network, that makes everything easier and faster and cheaper because there is no truck or airplane or shop-shelf, Sony and pals get to use all that free of charge, that makes their promotion and distribution also cheaper, faster, easier.

Sony and pals do use the digital distribution network but continued to charge shop-shelf prices. The abuse of the digital network as such is largely on the part of the music and movie industry.

To put it in perspective : if I sit outside a bar and some waiter comes and asks what i want to drink and gets my drinks and keeps an eye to see when my glass is empty and asks if i want something else or offers the daily lunch, i give the man a tip, 15% or more.

If the bar has no waiter, i dont pay a tip.

If companies charge shop-shelf price in a digital market, you can expect a wave of ‘hacking’ and illegal versions flooding the market, mainly due to dissatisfaction with the perceived overcharging by the suppliers. P2P-networks were the chosen platform for a while, or sites like YouTube. It continues until the market reaches a new price level agreement between supply and demand, or a new business model.

Steve Jobs finally introduced iTunes, 12 songs for 12 dollars, a completely legal digital distribution network. That is for music close to the old price level, just without the cost for the case, transport, and shop shelf (we are going to miss Steve Jobs).

This seems interesting as a conflict between the old and new business model. This was the first verdict, I suspect there might be some appeals as the verdict could serve as precedent to force any dutch webshop to rent commercial retail real estate, that nullifies their main competitive advantage and increases the threshold to set up shop. Online retailers from other countries don’t have the problem, so it would also weaken our competitive position in the international online retail market.

I think a lot pf people will want the court to add some nuances :)

contact us google

I really wonder how Matt and company figure that one in terms of relevance to the query.

Horses for courses, where MySql, PHP and HTML are native to the web, PHP/HTML suck as table GUI,no offense, I just got extremely frustrated with it today. Another way to get the data off the web onto my desktop is using FTP/ODBC and enclosing MySql tables in my MsAccess desktop database. It has it perks but it works. If you want to try it check with your host (if you are not self hosting) if your host allows external access to your mysql server. For local servers it works flawless.

Download the odbc connector

Over at Dev.MySql they muist have heard my screams of agony an programmed an ODBC (open database connectivity) driver. Windows supports the ODBC standards hence in Office you can use external databases if you install an odbc driver for the database type.

Create the system datasource

Once the driver is installed you can add the MySql database as open database to Windows (odbc works via the operating system) and link the tables in MsAccess. Start by opening the Windows configuration screen and open System manager, where you can access the ODBC Datasources and open the ODBC Administrator screen :

Pick the tab System DSN and choose Add… to select a driver : the new MySql ODBC Driver.

Then comes the magic bit : when you click Finish, the MySql driver pops up its own configuration screen :

The data you fill in is the same login data used in WordPress wp-config.php : the mysql database host, login and password, and what database to select. When you are done, you can make more than one ODBC Sources so you can add every WordPress install you have on the web to it, provided you have access to the mysql server. A lot of hosts do not actually allow it, but mine do.

So far so good, the Datasource is now known in the Windows operating system, now we go to MsAccess.

Enclose the tables in MsAccess

Under External Data pick ODBC Database :

In the screen that opens, pick the Link data option :

And in the next screen pick the tab with machine data sources : this picture shows both my new localhost database and the juust.org database so I will pick that one (it is in Rotterdam somewhere on a server)

When I pick that one the driver kicks in and connects to the remote database, retrieving a list with tables for me to link into the database, for the occasion I will link the Ak_Twitter table of the WordPress Twitter Tools plugin that has my most recent Tweets :

And click okay and Voila :

The tables are linked

Note: if you get an error “server has gone away, ( ask your host to) set the connection timeout to 300 or more

How to set Word up as WordPress editor ?

Make a document and pick from the File menu “Save and Send”, and you get an extra option to publish as blog post.

Once you pick that it opens an editor for blog posts, that pn the background uses the XML-RPC interface. Word starts a wizard the first time, that you can also access by “manage accounts” in the editor menu :

But let’s start by clicking Save and Send : Word will ask you to register an account, iow your wordpress blog website.

When registering you can pick from a whole list of blog types, of course I picked WordPress

In the dialog ‘new wordpress account’ you enter your XML-RPC end point, the directory of your blog with /xmlrpc.php, that is where you can post to your blog. Username and Password can be your normal username and password, you can also register separately at the blog. That would be my choice.

Of course these days blog posts all have pictures, and in the account dialog in the lower left corner there is a button “picture options” where you can specify how you want uploaded. You can use an FTP upload but in my case picking the blog provider (iow let WordPress handle it itself) works out of the box.

Once you click OK you also get a warning about the visibility of your login and password, XML-RPC posts are text files and your account user name and password are not encrypted when sent to the blog XML-RPC endpoint. There is little risk in it but it is a point that has to be made.

When you agree to continue you can edit your post. And when done, publish.

…and out came this post. In the WordPress editor you can add some tags and categories if you publish as draft, but you can also specify a category in the  Word editor..

Word offers a lot of picture effects yet it outputs the result as  .png images so it works without css3 dependencies, and outputs very clean html markup. Just for the picture effects and total ease of editing it gets a 5 out of 5.

Working with the BING API requires an Application Id you can get at the Bing website.

Accessing the Bing Api in MsAccess VBA

In the the VBA Ide, through the menu Tools References I add a reference to the XML object library that contains the XMLHTTPRequest object, enabling me to make HTTP requests from VBA in the MsAccess database.

The simple part is the http request string :

Then comes the working part, sending the actual request and receiving the XML response (objSvrHTTP.responseText) containing the search data. I use a DomDocument object and XPath to get at the XML data.

First sending the request

then creating a domdocument and receiving the response in it

The response uses two namespaces and the data we actually want is in the “web” namespace, so before we start selecting nodes in the xml-tree we first indicate what namespace we want to access :

The total search result pages is a top level node in the namespace :

…but the good stuff is in the “WebResult” nodes in the xml tree, I can use an XPath reference //web:Webresult to access that node-collection and with a simple for-next iterate through the collection, selecting the single nodes containing the actual data.

I output to the Immediate window aka Debug (under View, Immediate Window or Ctrl+G)

What can we do with it ? Let’s make a table for date, keyword, url, title, description, position

and add some code to store the results we retrieve

There now that scratches the seo itch :

MsAccess stuff is a bit hard to put on the web as sample, so I’ll make a quick one in Excel and put it up for download.

Accessing the Bing Api in Excel VBA

there you go : on sheet 1 you can fill in your AppID and keyword, click the butt(on…

…and on sheet 2 you get the top 10 search results

It uses the cells B1 and B2 as named ranges for MyKeyword and AppID, and has the code in the enclosed module. It also contains one of my AppId’s so no querying nasty shit, please.

I just noticed Google have a billion result pages indexed for the keyword SEO. Incredible. Merry Christmas, Frankenstein.