Archive for December, 2006

Ads off

By On Sat, Dec 23rd, 2006 In aplus With No Comments Permanent Link to Ads offPermalink

I have removed the graphical ads from my pages, as well as PerformancingPartners ad from ADxMenu and WCH pages.

My little experiment with LinkShare ads proved what I have suspected from the beginning. I have $0 earned. My blog is simply not applicable for such things. Even when one of my posts generated 3x surge in visits, it had not generated any sales. This is not the blog for such things, which I knew – I now simply have a hands-on experience. You need product-oriented web site in order to push people to buy anything. Things like notebookreview.com, where you can read a laptop review and then proceed to shopping if you like it.
Same thing happened with Amazon links, but they have a problem on their own, one of which I already spoke in the original post.

PerformancingPartners never really got off. I first had lots of problems with their weird validation routine, then eventually caved in to its requirements and managed to validate my blog. And then realized that the only way I can be payed is through PayPal. Lovely. They are not working in Serbia yet, thus PP are gone – I gave them enough links from my ADxMenu pages for the last month. No freebies anymore.

The only scheme actually generating any money is Google’s AdSense. Nothing spectacular – ~40$ for a month and a half – but enough to earn their place here. I’m itching to see how it will develop in the future. Currently, my page/visit levels are averaging on 3.000/1.700 a day. Things might get interesting if it rises up to 10x that, because I suspect that visitor / CtR ratio is not 1:1.

By an inch…

By On Fri, Dec 15th, 2006 In CSS With No Comments Permanent Link to By an inch…Permalink

Microsoft redesigns their web site. Visually very nice, follows the “a wide vista” theme as previous one (although I prefer this incarnation).

The gem is under the hood. CSS-based all the way, most obvious by turning CSS off in your browser. Plus, only 5 errors coming from the validator.w3.org, for the HTML 4.0 Transitional. Much can be said on the quality of the code (way too many divs for starters) but really a nice step forward – they missed the validity perfection by only an inch.

The most important aspect – the site looks and works identical in Firefox, as in IE6. Now, that is huge and very welcome step forward for Microsoft.

ADxMenu v4 — flyout (drop-down) menu

By On Tue, Dec 12th, 2006 In ADxMenu With 10 Comments Permanent Link to ADxMenu v4 — flyout (drop-down) menuPermalink

v4 is online for some time now and people have already used it. This version is the result of the months and months of experience implementing previous version on all kinds of web sites.

I have changed the basic CSS, but just a bit, mainly simplified it. Important changes from the v3 are:

  1. Completely clean HTML inside the menu – there are no classes, no IDs
  2. Behavior component (.htc) is not used anymore – it uses plain Javascript
  3. Instant execution of the IE script, thus making the menu usable even before the entire page content is downloaded
  4. WCH is not part of the script, but it uses it if it’s available You must include WCH.js before the ADxMenu.js for this to work
  5. li:hover is not simulated automatically, you must write the CSS yourself, using adxmhover class
  6. Submenu opening now gives you certain degree of freedom – they will not disappear if you move the mouse slightly off the submenu
  7. Much, much quicker in IE than v3

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$1m a week

By On Tue, Dec 5th, 2006 In Sports With 1 Comment Permanent Link to $1m a weekPermalink

I once thought that footballer’s pay of $350k per week is absurd amount of money. I don’t know what to say about Raikkonen getting $1M a week.

I mean, come on…

Move iTunes library between computers

By On Fri, Dec 1st, 2006 In Apple With 4 Comments Permanent Link to Move iTunes library between computersPermalink

I have reinstalled my laptop recently, having previously simply copied entire contents of it to another computer. After reinstalling iTunes, a question came up: how to move all the preferences, files, library settings, album artwork – all of it back into iTunes? On Windows, it consists of three steps:

  1. Copy C:\Documents and Settings\USERNAME\Application Data\Apple Computer\iTunes\ into the identical folder in new install
  2. Copy C:\Documents and Settings\USERNAME\Local Settings\Application Data\Apple Computer\iTunes\ into the identical folder in new install
  3. Copy entire contents of old C:\Documents and Settings\USERNAME\My Documents\My Music\iTunes\ into the identical folder in new install

And that should be it.

Now I have to figure out how to move all the artworks into the files them self, not keeping them into: C:\Documents and Settings\aleck\My Documents\My Music\iTunes\Album Artwork\ where iTunes saves them. I really wish Apple would start to respect MP3 ID tags properly. :(