Friday, June 02, 2006

Jeteye should Jetpak it up, not ready for primetime

Here we go again with another new web service JetEye that allows you to pack up your links and things you find in some nonsense called a Jetpak and share it with people.

71.5.15.254 [firewall.jeteye.com.] "jeteyebot/0.1; http://www.jeteye.com/bot.html"
I'll give them this much credit, at least they looked in robots.txt before hitting the website.

But I think I'm giving them too much credit for robots.txt, you'll find out at the bottom...

I don't even know what to say about Jeteye as they appear just to be passing around a bunch of links to stuff, except somewhere down the road when a page is moved or changed there will be a flood of 404's with outdated Jetpaks, oh joy.

Who am I kidding, it won't be down the road, I got some 404s with their current Jetpaks, let the bullshit begin!

We give Jeteye a try!

Maybe because it was late Friday afternoon and I was bored shitless, who knows, but I downloaded and installed the damn thing just for shits and giggles.

When I first open Jeteye and click the "sign up here" link the first thing it does is overwrite the current tab in Firefox with their stupid sign-up page.

Opening a new tab must've been too hard for them but I digress...

I fill out the form like the wannabe bleeding-edge netizen that I am and click SUBMIT and it kicks back telling me my verification code failed. OK, would it fucking kill you to tell us in the text above the verification box that the code is case sensitve? Some captchas are sensitive, some aren't, but it's fucking nice to know which is which.

Submit with the new verification code and it kicks back again with something about defining a fucking password. Listen assholes, I typed in a password the FIRST time I filled out the form and you discarded it when you bounced my verification code because I didn't capitalize the fucking "Q". You're starting to get me pissed off already with this bullshit form but I'm trying to remain calm and open minded.

Luckily for them the email validation was swift and went off without a hitch or I'd be going off on a rant about now, so we save the ranting for later.

Jeteye is starting to get on my nerves as clicking on anything in Jeteye keeps zapping my current window. Almost 20 tabs open and which tab is currently being viewed gets blasted when I click on something in Jeteye. They better work on that as I'm about to scream with that behavior, they need some options or some shit, maybe just look and reuse the tab already opened labelled "Jeteye" but that would make too much sense wouldn't it?

Figured this mess out, usability can be a bit challenging and I have a few more complaints but I'm bored writing about this as it's just not quite ready for primetime yet and they aren't paying me to QA the goddamn product. However, I've managed to build my first little Jetpak while watching the request for robots.txt from their site hit my server at almost every action which is pissing me off immensely. Cache the robots.txt for a while, geez, give me a break.

Now the fun stuff:

Just for fun I drop them in the robots.txt file like they say to do to see what happens.

User-agent: jeteyebot
Disallow: /

Well, it did FUCKING NOTHING!

Every link I drop into a Jetpak from my site still shows up in the Jetpak so I assume it means they won't crawl my site but I'm still forced to be an unwilling participant in these goddamn Jetpaks. They still hit the server reading the robots.txt file for every stinking link and it looks like maybe the page I linked as well. It certainly doesn't tell the end user "piss off, this site doesn't want to play with Jetpak" - it just keeps on accessing my site like nothing changed.

Let get this straight, it's MY FUCKING WEBSITE and if I don't want MY LINKS to be in JETPAKS you better give me a way to STOP THIS SHIT!

Guess what else?

It saves direct links to GOOGLESYNDICATION!

Holy Shit! You can save AdSense links in a Jetpak?!?

What a concept, load up a Jetpak full of CPC and Affiliate links and start your click ring Jetpak!

You can drop in some images from any old page that show up stand alone in a Jetpak without attribution to the author. Oh sure, it shows the page of origin but we're not naive and we know that even with copyright notices on a page staring people in the face they steal shit anyway. However, with images in a Jetpak taken out of context they are more prone to get the right mouse "save as..." without even a second thought, especially without any warning about the image being copyrighted or anything.

Taking a little liberty with a phrase from some movie critics I'm giving Jeteye "2 thumbs up"

.... "2 thumbs up the ass" that is, as this shit sucks!

Time to whip up a couple of rewrite rules to block their IP 71.5.15.254 and referer "http://www.jeteye.com/jetpak/" in .htaccess before this gets out of control.

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