Peter's Useful Crap

Link exchange networks are nothing new. You post links to other sites, and your “ad” gets displayed on other sites.

However, adgridwork has added the Google AdSense / Google AdWords contextual, targeted ads concept and… made it free! If you’re just not into paying for ads or placing pay-for-click ads on your site, you can 1) automatically give your site visitors relevant links and 2) automatically get relevant exposure for your site for free!

I just signed up for adgridwork and am experimenting with it on my 7-Eleven Speak Out Wireless Canada consumer forum. I’ve set it up to display Google ads half the time and adgridwork ads the rest of the time (although you can supposedly display both sets of ads on the same page). It might be a refreshing change for some site visitors to see “Free ads” instead of “Ads by Google” at times! They also have a free “review me, review you” service — a refreshing change from the “get reviewed by me for $400″ ads that I see sometimes.

The adgridwork management interface is quite easy, especially if you are familiar with either AdSense or AdWords. First, you create an about your site; then, you create a profile of your site with targeted keywords; finally, you paste some code to your site to display other people’s ads. Voilà — free contextual ad exchange, with all the legwork done for you You can even blacklist specific sites’ ads from appearing on your site. The one thing I’d like to see is regional targeting, as some of my sites are very Canadian-focused.

Novell NetDrive is a handy WebDAV client for Windows (well, except for Windows Vista, which seems to have WebDAV programs overall). WebDAV is an extension to the HTTP protocol that allows you to drag and drop files to a server, similar to FTP but more powerful. It has some pretty cool uses, such as auto-generating image galleries and managing files in eZ Publish.

Anyway, I had a hard time finding this program and will now share it with others!

Download Novell NetDrive

July 2008 update: also check out http://www.netdrive.net, free for personal use.

Just as for your custom MSN emoticons, you can access your custom MSN avatars.

You can find them here (well, I know they’re here on Windows XP):

C:\Documents and Settings\yourusername\Application Data\Microsoft\MSN Messenger\yourmsnaccountnumber\UserTile

They have the extension .dat, so just copy them elsewhere and rename them to either .png, .gif or .jpg and you’re good to go.

If you are using Adium on a Mac, you can simply drag the avatar to the desktop while you’re in a chat window.

Is ICICI Bank legit? Offering the highest non-promotional interest rate (4.5% as of July 2007) of the Canadian high interest savings account banks, they are certainly an intriguing option. But they don’t get nearly the amount of attention as the other banks…

I’ve spun off a site dedicated to high interest savings accounts at highinterestsavings.ca and have kicked it off with the first part of my ICICI Bank review. I’m going to open an account with them and document my experience. I’ve also moved my previous reviews on ING Direct, Citizens Bank, and PC Financial over to the new site.

Growing up using Windows computers, typing French accents was a confusing memorization exercise of combinations such as “alt+0224″ and “alt+138″. I recently discovered that the process on the Mac OS X is much more intuitive. Typing the common French letters typically involves two steps: 1) Pressing “option” and a logical character representing the accent at the same time, then 2) Pressing the letter you want to apply the accent to.

Here’s a list of how to type the common French accents:

Here’s a more detailed list of how to type non-English characters on a Mac.