Recent Blog Posts
Blogs ยป Archive for April, 2005
Contextual Advertising Takes A Huge Leap Forward
Google recently announced an upcoming change to the Adwords program, which will allow advertisers to target contextual advertising on specific web sites.
Andrew Goodman reported in WebProNews that this means the end of the old PPC keyword bidding model in favor of pricing based on impressions (CPM), but this isn’t quite right. According to Google, the CPM bidding will apply only to the new “site targeted” advertising feature, and CPM advertisers will still have to compete against keyword-targeted PPC bids for placement on sites carrying Adsense.
Google’s ingenious model for selecting ads to display (maximizing revenue per impression) allows them to perform the ‘apples to oranges’ comparison with ease, and allow advertisers to bid on the same inventory in whichever terms they find more comfortable.
For example, let’s say we have an ad with a PPC bid at $1.00 per click, with a 1% click through rate. That translates to 10 clicks per 1000 displays, or a CPM of $10. A CPM bid of $10.01 will outrank that PPC bid. Simple, elegant, and a big improvement for old-school advertisers.
The biggest improvement, though, is that advertisers will be able to run separate site-targeted campaigns. This is important because it will allow advertisers to use …
MSN biased to favor IIS servers?
Ivor Hewitt has done some research which appears to show that a higher proportion of top ranked pages in the MSN search engine are hosted on Microsoft’s own IIS server platform. This work is interesting enough to get slashdotted, but it’s too early to draw conclusions.
I discussed Ivor’s results with him a couple months ago, and there are a lot of variables that need to be ruled out before I’ll buy into conspiracy theories. One very big question is whether the skew is due to a bias against ASP.NET and IIS servers by other search engines.
- As you may know, ASP.NET applications like to insert a form field (VIEWSTATE) into web pages. This is a huge string (usually around 15 kilobytes) of absolute gibberish text. The impact of this on SEO is unknown, but if it does make a difference, you can see why it would tend to push ASP.NET applications running on IIS servers down in the search results on search engines that haven’t made it a priority (as MSN would) to work around it.
- It’s possible that a higher percentage of dynamic sites run on IIS servers vs. Apache. One big reason to run an IIS server …
Safari passes the Acid Test
Blow the trumpets and release the doves!
Safari has won the race to be the first browser to pass the ACID2 browser compliance test. Nice work Dave Hyatt.
In case you’ve missed the talk about Acid2 till now, here’s the exec summary.
Fundamentally, the Acid2 test is a page, designed and made available by the Web Standards Project — but not just any page.
No, in fact, ACID2 is exactly the sort of page yo’ mama told your browser to stay away from. It craftily piles up layer-upon-layer of every kind of new-fangled CSS notation, PNG jiggery and marginal HTML widget the standards allow. Then, for good measure, it heaps in a generous helping of invalid CSS, all of it thoughtfully designed to fail, and fail ‘ugly’.
To pass the test a browser firstly needs to be knowledgable enough to understand all the page notation. If it gets that under control it then just has to be able to handle the errors without exploding in a hail of springs and bolts. A ‘pass’ earns you this slightly disconcerting smiley face.
Perhaps, the best thing about Acid2 is that each ’scan line’ of the face is a standalone test. …
How often do you pitch ideas to prospects and clients?
The more successful professionals do something their less successful counterparts don’t: They pitch ideas to prospects and clients. That way, they create opportunities for work, rather than waiting for opportunities (usually price sensitive and competitively bid) to come to them.
Here is an example:
I just completed a workshop for a university in Oregon. It went well. I thought about who else would benefit from this type of workshop, and called a few old clients and prospects to talk about the workshop, the benefits it created, and how it could help them specifically. I also called an association to talk about creating a similar workshop for them that they could syndicate to members.
It’s important to be proactive.
How about you? Do you pitch ideas to prospects and clients, so that you create opportunities rather than waiting for opportunities to come to you?
IE7 User Agent String published
The IE7 hackers (the ones at Microsoft hacking on the real IE7, that is, not Dean Edwards :) ) have revealed that IE7’s user agent string will be “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0b; Windows NT 6.0)”.
Those of you who are thinking, so? who cares about user agent strings? should give yourselves a pat on the back. We, the web developers of the world, should not care about them. Using the user agent string to sniff for browsers is very bad, and you should not do it; use feature sniffing instead, where you test for the features that you want to use. Don’t test the user agent string. It’s a bit concerning to me that the IE team are releasing details of the user agent string this early on, because that at least implies that they are expecting people to start testing for it, and that makes them surprisingly out of touch with the way we should be doing things. That’s surprising because they are clueful guys over there (yes, they are, stop the snarky comments), and it would be much more useful to know whether, say, CSS hacks that people are currently using to exclude IE will continue to work.
Still, …
Zend Webcast: PHP Rocks!
Today, Zend is hosting a free 45 minute Webcast presented by Django Bayless of the Signatures Network.
From the description:
Signatures Network is the music industry’s premiere entertainment licensing and merchandising company, holding the merchandising and marketing rights to more than 125 top music artists and entertainment properties including Ozzy Osbourne, Madonna, The Beatles, Britney Spears, U2, KISS, Jennifer Lopez, and Shakira among many others.
The presentation takes place in just under 13 hours from now (April 28 at 16:00 GMT), and will include a question and answer session. Its full title is PHP Rocks! How Signatures Network Builds Highly Scalable Web Sites for Major Music Artists . The webcast is free but you need to sign up.
The presentation could be interesting if it goes into some technical detail about the measures they took to ensure scalability.
Via PHPDeveloper.org
More real data from marketing on a shoe string
The non-profit venture I wrote about last week (http://www.actioncorps.org if you are interested) continues to chug forward, and can provide you with some new data about what works and doesn’t. As it turns out, one offer has blown all the others away, easily by a factor of 50-100!
As you may recall, I’ve tried press releases to local and national media, my own network of friends/colleagues, and this Sitepoint blog as ways to get attention.
The only one of the above that has really delivered so far has been a release to a local, obscure online publication, which got me a request to speak at Rotary tomorrow, which will easily get me 50-60 sign ups (when you speak, always have a form that you give to all participants with an offer to get them to sign up).
But the best offer/tactic by far has been my own consulting mailing list plus a special free offer. I sent out a broadcast message asking people to join this venture (which only requires giving an email and name), in exchange for a free leadership ebook valued at $99.
Response has been so overwhelming that I’ve invested in an autoresponder to collect names.
What are lessons here?
1. ALWAYS …
PHP 5 and more for OS X
Marc Liyanage continues to deliver great material to Macintosh developers leveraging open source on their systems. In April - OS X package installers for both PHP 4.3.11 and 5.0.4 were released.
Following some basic tips from Liyanage, which he offers on each of his software packages, one can run both releases on the same system - just not simultaneously.
The site also has an active forum for discussing the specific Mac OS X packages Marc builds and distributes.
For those new to Entropy, Marc uses it primarily to deliver OS X software packages and How-Tos’s for running (compatible with Jaguar and Panther):
- MySQL Database Server
- PostgreSQL Database Server
- vim 6.1 text editor
- nedit 5.2 X11 text editor
- t1utils PostScript Type 1 Font Utilities
- TCP Flow Recorder
- ImageMagick Image Manipulation Tools
Marc has also written several of his own apps or add-ins, including:
- Quartz Extreme Check, an application that checks if Quartz Extreme acceleration is active.
- BBEdit XSLT Language Glossary, a glossary supporting XSLT authors in BBEdit.
- BBEdit Ant Language Glossary, a glossary supporting authors of Apache Ant Java build description files in BBEdit.
- BBEdit JSP Language Glossary, a glossary supporting JSP authors in BBEdit.
- BBEdit Perl Language Glossary, a glossary supporting Perl programmers in BBEdit.
- BBEdit Java Language Glossary, a glossary supporting Java programmers …
Composure
Clients and projects can be incredibly challenging.
A mentor of mine compared professional services to trying to hit five baseballs coming at you simulataneously — a curve ball, a fast ball, a knuckleball, a bean ball, and a slider. You really have to be on your toes, be nimble, and stay calm.
Yet too many professionals lose composure at some point in the sales process and content delivery. I remember the dot com era when I was at a large systems integration firm on a huge project that relied on contracted teams and freelances. Too frequently a freelancer would storm out of the office, screaming and yelling about some frustration or other.
I sometimes suffer from this myself. Just this weekend I was leading a 2-day strategic retreat with a client, going late into the night trying to reach consensus about strategic direction. I was tired of their inability to focus, and sorely tempted to just start yelling at these folks to get their act together and make a decision.
I didn’t, but I’m sure the audience sensed my frustration and impatience, even through small signals like voice tone and facial expression.
It is essential to stay professional, no matter how frustrating …
Java 6 ‘Mustang’ New Desktop Features Announced
A bit slow off the mark on this one, but an Australian long weekend will do that, I guess. Sun has published an article detailing the new desktop features it is working on for the next major release of Java, codenamed “Mustang”.
As with the publicly available snapshot builds, Sun is adopting an “open and honest” policy with this article, explaining what it hopes to include in Java 6.0–not necessarily what it can guarantee will be in it. Some features may be dropped if they are infeasible or will take too long to make the 6.0 release (as the shared VM was for Java 5.0).
Some of the highlights for me:
- True double buffering
No more “grey window” when switching to a Java application/applet that has been in the background for awhile. - Native Windows and GTK Look and Feel rendering
Will use the native operating system’s APIs for rendering user interface components where possible to match perfectly the look of native apps. - Font anti-aliasing (including LCD subpixel rendering)
Will respect the settings of the native OS to produce text rendering on par with ClearType on Windows. - Full support for Firefox
As opposed to simply supporting Mozilla, as is the case now.
Previously: Get your Java 6.0 builds here!, A Shared Virtual …
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