Earlier last month I was investigating downloading ringtones on my phone, just because I'd never tried it before. I found a 'free' ringtone and downloaded it. Not having entered any payment information I thought this was a fairly safe thing to do. How wrong could I be; nothing is ever free.

Every Friday over the past three weeks I've received three spam text messages. I thought they were just advertising messages or even links to paid-for-ringtones, which I promply deleted without reading. I can normally handle being sent spam in various forms but when I received my bill this week I noticed that each message was costing me £1.28 and I was getting three of them a week! I don't remember authorising this. How can they get away with this?

On contacting my operator it turns out you can stop this by texting 'STOP' or 'STOP ALL' to the number from which these messages are originating. Seems to have worked so far. If you find yourself in the same situation check out GrumbleText for more information.

Don't think I'll be downloading any more free ringtones and it certainly pays to keep an eye on your bill.

One ManCave project I spend a lot of time working on is providing consultancy, development and support for a family business. A task that has been ongoing over the past week or so has been to provide a Froogle data feed. Yesterday after passing the Froogle review process and after having sorted a few teething problems that feed went live, the results of which can be seen here

Froogle data feeds are more accurately FTP'd batch data files containing information on each product a retailer offers. Froogle gives instructions on how to generate these using a basic text editor or via Microsoft Excel but this can be a laborious task especially when you want to generate them on a regular basis; generating them nightly is probably more appropriate for a regularly-changing online store (you must generate them at least once-monthly to avoid dropping off Froogle altogether).

If anyone else is thinking of submitting Froogle feeds I urge you to check your feed carefully. Initial submissions can take up to 7 working days to be checked by Froogle so relying on Froogle to report errors in your feed can seriously delay your feed going live.

For my client the process is achieved using a Perl script run nightly from a cron job. The Perl script extracts the product list from the database and forms the data feed file according to the Froogle specification. The cron job then automatically connects to Froogle and uploads the file via FTP.

Responses[2]

Posted by Jonathan on 05 May 2005 09:05:49 BST #

Anyone who has visited this blog recently will notice that it has been very quiet of late. This is mostly down to lack of time on my part (I'm spending most of my spare time on ManCave projects).

The time of my day that is least utilised is the time spent on the train commuting back and forth to London on a daily basis so I plan to use this for blogging. Having come across mo:blog for Palm this is now viable and the blog you are reading now is the first post direct from my palm. Hopefully it will be the first of many.