Aplus on A+ programming moments

Contact form fixed

Fri, 17 Apr 2009 01:57:56 +0000

If you have tried to contact me through the contact form in last month or so – please accept my apologies. When .yu TLD went dead, I forgot to change the form code and emails went to the old domain.

Fixed now, things are back in order.

Protected posts?

Sat, 27 Sep 2008 21:23:12 +0000

As I’m baby stepping through the iPhone SDK development, I encounter some strange stuff. Given the unfortunate (to say the least) circumstance of the NDA still in place as of this writing, I can’t post publicly about it. I can’t ask on forums nor would anyone be allowed to answer. That’s how NDA stuff works.

In order not to lose these stuff and to keep note of problem and solution (if I find one) for future benefit, I’m doing this password-protected posts that I will reveal once NDA is lifted.

Which hopefully will happen’ at some point.

update: it did not take long - just days after I did this, Apple killed the NDA.

Moved to new domain

Wed, 23 Jul 2008 14:28:18 +0000

This domain used to reside on the aplus.co.yu domain. .yu domain belonged to former Yugoslavia, which has died, despite the futile attempts to keep whatever is left of it under the same name.

With it, the TLD is on its way out and the new Serbian domain is .rs

Thus this blog and all its auxiliary content is now under aplus.rs web address. All the links pointing to old web site will get R=301 message and will hopefully soon be pointing to new addresses.

Upgrading Wordpress, the *nix way

Wed, 16 Jul 2008 11:08:34 +0000

I always forget the set of command line stuff I need to do when new version of WP is out. And always waste time figuring out what to do and which switches tar and cp needs. So, this is a reminder for the future.

    wget http://wordpress.org/latest.tar.gz
    gzip -d latest.tar.gz
    tar -xvf latest.tar
    cp -r wordpress/* SITE/wordpress

That should do it. Now off to upgrade rest of the blogs.

Replace SITE/wordpress with correct path for your installation.

Photography section updated

Sat, 05 Apr 2008 23:20:03 +0000

I have upgraded the My photography section to ZenPhoto 1.1.5, which brings along several long awaited features:

SPAM-protected comments - most notably Akismet integration
EXIF info extraction
Ratings, per album and per phot```objectivec

There’s also bunch of new developments, all very welcome and which shows that this project is in good hands. Introduction of Akismet allows me to re-enable the comments, which I had to turn off due to massive SPAMfection after just a week of the original gallery being online. I have good experience with Akismet in blog comments - I expect it to work the same here.

If you havent looked recently, there’s bunch of new photos of my little kid, as well as nice gallery of my last visit to London.

I also corrected some of the display issues with IE7 in the overall site layout.

Return

Thu, 27 Sep 2007 20:45:15 +0000

Entire site is revamped.

New stuff - services (still a lot to do here). Goodies moved there.

Pages designed to fit the content, not the other way around. See About and Photos. Posts will have specific design, when appropriate.

Things might break, go haywire. Usually it will look just good.

More soon; now off to 10 days of grapes, vineyard and wine making.

Photographs

Fri, 03 Aug 2007 21:54:59 +0000

I have added a new link under About section in the navigation - ‘My photographs’. I have used Flickr in the past (and still visit frequently) but never could get myself to pay for a Pro account. I’m just not into this social networking stuff.

I prefer to keep the photos on my own server. I will be slowly adding more and more photos there. Currently Aleksa rules that space and probably always will :)

Aside from his shots, I uploaded 233 images from our Paris trip in April - hope you like them.

Realigned

Wed, 04 Jul 2007 22:06:31 +0000

I got tired of the old design and changed it a bit. A bit. :)

Apart from really small font (Calibri, if you have it), graphic-pen tones and narcissistic bit on the right, I changed how the ads are presented. Now, all of you visiting this site more than 5 times, will not see any ads, at all. This is of course due to Howie’s post on how ads really work.

Adsense, TextLinkAds and AuctionAds is the trio I’m using at the moment. Will see how it goes.

I have a feeling that design will be tweaked in the following weeks…

Donations. Custom work

Tue, 13 Feb 2007 10:29:44 +0000

I actually had the donations page for few months now, but only recently added the PayPal option. As the page says, scripts and techniques are free to use. If however, any of the stuff here saved you a day’s work, made the sun shine stronger or generally made your day - consider donating; for a Guinness pint or two or bottle of fine rose wine - it would suffice. :)

There are two options: PayPal, the usual favourite and 2checkout.com. If you have a PayPal account - and it’s getting really hard to find anyone without one - that’s the most convenient option.

Work hire

Those two are also equally usable for payments. If you need some specific variation of the code featured on this site or some other small and specific work done - feel free to contact me.

In the past, when I had more free time, I was happy to code-in anything. Lately - even though still happy to accept any challenge - I picked up some old interests: drawing, book reading (Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time will keep me busy for a long while :)) along with other personal developments which I might write about soon.

Whatever the case, it’s much harder to justify spending few hours a day tweaking CSS code versus a nice tea or coffee and a book.

You send your requirement and I will quickly return with time-frame and quote. At the moment, being fully employed on a demanding job, I’m able to take only rather small stuff. As small is variable matter :) best would be to contact me and we will discuss it.

Ads off

Sat, 23 Dec 2006 11:13:23 +0000

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.

ReviewMe review

Wed, 15 Nov 2006 13:00:06 +0000

ReviewMe.com is service which got me thinking a lot. And not only me, as the buzz is rather large on my part of the blogosphere… I have seen a lot of online and even more paper “reviews” that are nothing more than a copy/pasted PR material received from the manufacturer. Sometimes it’s easy to sense that just from reading, and sneakier ones are written better - you sign-up/order and then realize that the reviewer did not even try the product otherwise you would not be asking yourself “how in the hell he did not notice this”.

However, this actually boils down to the reviewer. Such reviews would quickly diminish his credibility, which in turn will render the money advertisers give him a wasted money, as it has no desired effect at all. I have written quite a few reviews / thoughts here, with little care for politically correct speaking. If I like something I say it blatantly, if I dislike it I say it even more and if it really goes on my nerves I’m throwing stones.

In here lies the biggest potential issue for the ReviewMe. Will authors keep their self-respect or will they bend and soften the style in order not to scare off potential advertisers? Only time will tell that, but it’s an issue I believe ReviewMe should be aware of.

I damn well know I won’t change.

How it works

As future reviewer, you open an account first, during which you are telling them a minimum of information about yourself. The next step is to submit your blog URLs. You can submit up to 6 blogs, which is more than a reasonable number. Anyone actually running more than 6 blogs at once probably has “XX network” written next to each of them. Any of those sites can publish unlimited number of reviews.

The payment options are cheque or PayPal. I don’t know, maybe there are more for US people, but these were presented to me, as I’m from Serbia although ReviewMe country list still lists Yugoslavia, which stopped existing several years ago.

Quick and easy, as it should be.

The interface

For the lack of actual name, I will call the main page you get to, after login, a dashboard. That page, as well as entire interface, is clean, with crisp colours and nice large font size. AJaX is implemented at any possible place it could be, but with a lot of common sense - it loads entire page when it needs to, loads bits when it’s appropriate. Exactly as I would do it, so full marks here.

Depending on whether you click “Open account” on Bloggers or Advertisers page, you are probably flagged as such, since the link contains account type parameter (just look at your status bar). And since I signed up from bloggers page, I’m wondering what this large thing is doing on my dashboard:

Other than pure curiosity which is satisfied after one try, I do not see why would I, as blogger, be interested in the list of blogs. “Order reviews” is meaningless on this page. If I want to see the blogs and/or order review, I would click on the Advertisers toolkit - this is the place this box should be. On Bloggers page is just cluttering up the interface. One could argue that this box is not part of the toolkit, but the argument is mute - this feature should not be here.

The reverse search would be more interesting to me, the list of advertisers. However, such thing does not exists. Advertisers are the one that search and offer you to write a review of their product. While this sounds just fine on first thought, I believe it would kill the smaller bloggers. Advertisers would naturally want to target high profile bloggers and with ReviewMe ordering the search results per rating, the less known bloggers would hardly ever be paged-through to.

For instance, under Technology tag, there are 36 pages of blogs listed so far, 15 on each page. Just imagine yourself as an advertiser - would you really go beyond first page, checking each of the blogs and figuring out which one to send an offer? Yap, me too [would not].

Thus, the feature request: add internal messaging system (no actual email spamming) where bloggers can ping the advertisers. For instance, if I’m using/liking a certain web service and would like to review it, I can send a message to the advertiser and tell him about that. Possible message spammers would quickly be subdued by ReviewMe who could easily control this; any idiot actually pinging all possible advertisers, even those not remotely connected to what he writes about, can be easily put on hold, 3-6 months, if not ejected.

There are also some questionable icon decisions. Take a look at this screenshot, which shows alerts:

Tell me, what do you think clicking on the red X icon does? I thought it means delete (as I’m certain most if not all would think that too), but it actually means “mark it as read and file in old alerts”. A folder icon or checkmark would maybe be more appropriate for that action.

It’s even more confusing and inconsistent because that same icon is used on the My sites screen:

And here it actually does delete the site.

Navigation is slightly confusing at moments. When you are not logged in, you naturally check out the site, click on Advertisers, Bloggers, etc. Then, when you login you get to the dashboard, but if you wonder off to some other page, like FAQ, there is no obvious link back to the dashboard. There is Logout at the top, but not My account or similar. You actually need to click on Bloggers again, which is the last thing I tried because I was there previously and I know that it has different content. Again, consistency problem - a certain link should always lead to the same page.

As you see, there are not too much to complain about. En general, the interface is really nice, web2.0ish. :)

Thoughts

How are rankings calculated? ReviewMe says it’s based on Alexa, Technorati and “Est. RSS” (have no idea what this is). My blog has a ranking of 3/5, which means (for ReviewMe) that my reviews are worth 100$ each, out of which ReviewMe keeps 50% and the rest goes to me. Ranking is not the only factor that influence the price, but it’s an important one, I’m certain. The tooltop says that price, as well as rank, is recalculated each month. Excellent feature, as it follows your blog progress.

Err…50%?! This is waaaay too big commission value and ReviewMe should really consider lowering this down. Note: this 50% is based on the only review I have enlisted so far, this one I’m writing. Maybe it’s a different value for other non-ReviewMe stuff. Don’t get me wrong - 50$ for this post is nicer than 0$ - but along the way will not prove incentive to write long, detailed reviews, especially in combination with the next point.

You see, the price of the review is known up-front - it does not depend on the quality of the review. The only thing I must do is to write at least 200 words. If I write a whole essay, with screenshots, analysis, offer feature requests, point to functional problems and suggest solutions - this is payed the same as if I simply mention the product, jumble in few sentences from the hands-on usage and submit. I’m not sure, but I think that advertisers can also refuse the review. Will have to check that.

Hence another feature request: implement a bonus system, so advertiser can reward the reviewer for the time invested. Or maybe implement a variable scope for the payment, where particular review will be payed, for instance, $50-150, depending on its quality. The actual value would naturally be decided by advertiser.

The most important issue, especially for small bloggers who do not get too much requests is the payment schedule. An absolute must is possibility to suspend payments until a certain amount is reached. I do not know how it is in USA, but here in Serbia PayPal does not operate and the cheque cash-in is often combined with not so insignificant fees, which are not always percentage-based. I would much rather receive one cheque on $500 than 10 on $50. This is the most important feature request, by a large margin.

In the end, it’s a service worth trying out. They are just starting, they have the buzz, they just expanded they $25k give-away to $50k. If ReviewMe proves to also listen to the feedback and implement requests, I think they will succeed.

[This review was sponsored through ReviewMe.com]

Ads and affiliates

Sat, 11 Nov 2006 23:33:00 +0000

As you the select few regular visitors :) have no doubt noticed, I started experimenting with various affiliate links and ads. There are way too many ads at the moment, but bear with me - I’m conducting an experiment.

Google’s AdSense is well known and it’s been running for years. Their contextual ads made them famous because they are precise and actually offer ads related to the page content. Yet, during the last week I noticed that, on my english-written blog, it places ads in japanese. I have no idea what they are :) but can hardly be called appropriate for exactly that reason.

Still, they are the best and easiest to use.

Amazon

Amazon has beta program running for the same type of ads. Funny thing about this new service is that it’s called Omakase (?!) on US Amazon, but Self-optimizing links on UK Amazon. The ads it delivers are hit and miss mostly - I have rarely seen that it loads just the right thing for the page. I’m giving it a bit more time to see will it improve. The worst part of this deal is that each Amazon web site is a world of its own, with no connections at all.

That’s problematic, because there is no sense for an American to buy something from UK Amazon (unless the item in question exists only there) and vice-versa. Not to mention other Europeans. I implemented a feature that allows easy switch between the two, but it’s hardly useful. If I, as potential buyer from UK, see an ad on US tab about something that interests me, I would click on the flag to load my tab and…see something completely different. Amazon lost a potential sell.

There is no way to force the same links, as the affiliate programs are entirely separated and they obviously come up with different offers to send. Further, UK program seem to be lagging in development, as like 30% of times it loads nothing but the general link to Amazon home page.

The only way I can offer the same thing is to manually find the correct links and build them into the page. Very tiresome.

Linkshare

Linkshare is the heavy weight - the one place to maintain huge amount of affiliate deals and have central payment maintenance. I was surprised to find that Apple Store is there, along with iTunes, .Mac etc. It adds credibility for the network, at least for me. It’s a good concept, because the fees on small payments would kill you. This way, you aggregate them and fees become insignificant.

There’s one problem I still figure out how to attack. If I’m associated with dozen of companies, for each of them I need to place separate links. And that’s way way too much ads. A script that randomly picks an ad out of all the possible ones I have picked would be a great thing. Seems I’ll need to write it.

Experiment continues…

Ascending

Sun, 15 Oct 2006 12:08:09 +0000

I never intended it to be six months.

This journal is springing back to life, with many changes. The entire site now uses UTF-8 as charset, thus you can freely use your prefered language. I have tried to find most of the cyrillic and serbian latin characters that were saved as HTML entities and replace them with proper letters. Derek Sivers’s experience helped me a great deal.

Entire website now shares the same look & feel, because I have finally figured out how to integrate my non-blog content with WordPress (without using Pages). As you can see, the layout is very clean and will stay like this until I get inspired enough to do something visually strong.

All the “side” content is reorganized - I’d like to think it is made better - and some are recoded. Among other things, ADxMenu is upgraded to v4, something I promised to do…long time ago. I really think it was worth the wait - I’m very happy with how it turned out. There will be a separate post about it. All the other examples will be redone, in time.

I have changed the way I use categories - they are now more like tags. WP makes it easy to do that, with on-the-fly category add. I have shuffled posts into various categories and I’m bound to have a bunch of dead links throughout the old posts. In time, I will probably get all that in order.

Oh, one last note: if you are testing out IE7 RC1, then load this site. Look at the top, hover mouse over Lab or WCH or ADxMenu. Where have all the items in the submenu gone..? We (web devs) are in for an unpleasantly hot winter.

No comments

Mon, 24 Apr 2006 20:51:54 +0000

Commenting is disabled on all posts on this blog. All themes apart from default aplus moments theme are removed. No writings will be posted here for some indefinite time.

Akismet is ON

Tue, 29 Nov 2005 12:34:20 +0000

I installed Akismet.

WordPress has pretty good spam-defense options included by default and since 1.2 I did not have any spam comment slipping through my gates. However, the number of spam getting in was getting on my nerves - I still had to go to moderation queue and clean the mess up.

Thus I’m trying out this. It’s looking good so far, with only one false positive; which btw, really looked like spam - it took me good 30s to realize it is not a spam. I’ll give it a daily look in the next few weeks and if keeps working nicely as it is now, I will relax and not care about spam comments anymore.

WordPress theme: aplus Lady

Sun, 06 Nov 2005 21:00:34 +0000

If you read this in browser, you are most likely looking at the new theme. If not, use the delicacies at the bottom of the home page to change to aplus Lady theme.

This theme is technically identical to aplus theme: it has integrated time since and time of day plugins, support for gravatars, recent comments and blogroll display.

What’s new is that I changed the way design assets are loaded. Instead of pulling images from CSS, I used good old img tag and placed in inside of heading tags, where needed. Feels…strange. :)

Another thing is that Yasmeen’s photo is also simple img which makes it very easy to block. If that image is office-unfriendly for you, but you like the colours and would like to use the theme, then simply add the image to ad-block (whichever you use).

This also makes it very easy to change the image with something truly yours (when I actually offer it as download). The image can be 200px wide and unlimited in height, so you will have fun playing around.

This theme was a really long way in making. I started with something quite different and eventually changed everything but the main image.

The space at the top is perfect for ad placement, but I have not bothered to set any placeholders for it, so that would be your part to do.

Way forward

I do not offer this theme for the download yet, nor I have any idea when I would. To be easily customizable, I’m thinking of implementing sIFR, but that will have to wait some time.

Knowing me, that would either be 1-2 days or several months. Hey - even in the state like this, it waited a good year or something…

Backslashes gone

Sun, 10 Jul 2005 23:34:38 +0000

The WP bug that waxed me so much in the past months is finally gone. At least here. Wherever I had " (double-quote) inside of pre tag, it would be outputted as \" - always prefixed with backslash.

Tonight I dug in into WP core and found that the problematic part is line 76 in file wp-includes/functions-formating.php. When you remove that line, all is displaying nice.

$pee = preg_replace('!(</pre><pre .*?>)(.*?)</pre>!ise',

" stripslashes('$1') .  clean_pre('$2')  . '' ", $pee);

Since wpautop function is not really required in my case (I write entire HTML for my posts), I instead opted to comment out this filter - it’s line 64 in wp-includes/default-filters.php:

// add_filter('the_content', 'wpautop');

Blog in serbian

Thu, 02 Jun 2005 19:25:30 +0000

I started a blog in Serbian. Pretty much unfinished, but it gives you a sneak peek into the new WP theme I’m preparing. Once it’s done, you’ll be able to download it from here.

WP 1.5.1.2

Tue, 31 May 2005 17:24:42 +0000

Hehe…I did a live upgrade to WP 1.5.1.2, simply by copying files and running upgrade.php. Apart from the hack required to remove /category/ cruft from category permalinks, everything else worked. Nice.

Upgrade to 1.5. Theme update.

Sat, 28 May 2005 22:44:52 +0000

I finally upgraded to WP 1.5 branch. There were several things I was hoping it would solve. First, there was annoying problem with 1.2 that under certain circumstances it would not show you a list of posts. No matter what you do in the admin, no post list. I was glad to see that after the upgrade this is resolved.

Second, more serious problem is that WP still keeps spiting out escaping backslashes inside of the PRE tags. I have no idea why this happens. I tried all the things people advice on WP support forums, without luck. Shit.

Theme update

Mon, May 30th

My appologies to everyone who downloaded new version, as it contained some of my own content, as well as affiliate links. I have updated the zip with clean files.

I had to change the theme I use. In the previous instance, I hacked the category output directly in 1.2 core files, so that post count for categories do not freaks out. Well, to avoid doing this with each upgrade, I updated the theme code so that it calls its own function. I took the opportunity to correct some colours too. As some nice people told me, my a:visited colour blended with regular text colour too much and it was hard to find the links, once you have them clicked. Now it is hopefully better.

I have updated the downloadable theme as well, so if you are using it, download and upgrade so you can have better display. I also changed one line in the Theme Switcher code, so the current theme no longer goes out of the submenu.

Please report if you encounter any issue with all this.