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Blogs ยป Archive for April, 2006
Making the Most out of the Amazon Affiliate Program
Here’s a company that has managed to create some real value, and at the same time, make some large Amazon commissions for themselves.
Pricenoia.com is a shopping comparison engine across all the International Amazon sites that allows savvy shoppers to exploit price differences on books, music, games and DVD’s across different countries.
Not only does it automatically calculate shipping to *any* country in the world for all amazon sites and automatically converts the prices, but it also shows price histories for any product on across all Amazon sites.
The revenue model? Amazon Affiliate Links (for each of the international Amazon sites) plus Google AdSense. Since the service is so damn useful, I’m sure they are doing well by providing real value to their users.
Think: How can you deliver real value to your users, while at the same time promoting affiliate programs that you’re a member of?
Google Calendar: All Your Appointments Are Belong To Us
Google launched their much-anticipated Google Calendar today, dubbed CL2 (in beta, of course) and I gave it a quick spin this afternoon.
There have been many cries for a decent online calendaring solution — so the question is: does Google Calendar deliver? Well, there’s certainly plenty to like about it. It has a slick interface and it’s fast (at switching between pages, anyway). But while it contains many features we would come to expect from the Big G, in this instance beta really does mean beta.
There are those features that I would consider stock standard in a calendaring app these days, just because they have been implemented in so many other online calendars (some better than others). Google Calendar has all of them, plus some other nice-to-haves:
- layering of local and remote (iCal) calendars, and colour-coding of these calendars
- sharing calendars publicly or privately (ala CalendarHub)
- inviting people to events, publicly or privately (ala evite)
- notifications via cell phone or email (US-only from what I can tell)
- nice AJAX-y drag and drop of events
- calendars being made available in iCal/RSS (credit to Google for providing this, as many apps only offer import or export rather than a hosted feed, in an attempt to further segregate our connectedness)
- predictably, …
W3C works to standardize XMLHttpRequest
The World Wide Web Consortium’s (W3C) new Web API Working Group has released a working draft of the official specification for the XMLHttpRequest object, which is at the heart of AJAX.
The XMLHttpRequest object, which enables JavaScript code to make requests to the server and process the responses, is supported in most current browsers, including Mozilla/Firefox, Safari, Opera, and the upcoming Internet Explorer 7. Internet Explorer 5/6 offers the functionality of XMLHttpRequest through an ActiveX control of the same name.
According to the draft, the first version of the specification aims to document the cross-browser functionality that is currently available only. Features that only exist in one browser will not be included in the specification, nor will any new features. In the few cases where the various browsers disagree on how a given feature should work, the specification will describe the “most correct” behaviour, as determined by the spec’s authors. What should result is useful documentation for web developers of just what they can rely on and use today. At the same time, the document will provide a target that will enable new implementations to ensure interoperability.
Prior to this W3C spec, the only vendor-neutral specification for just what XMLHttpRequest should do was …
Sun Developer Days 2006: Day Two
The second day of Sun’s Developer Days 2006 conference in Melbourne last week was a similar mixed bag to the first. Be sure to read my coverage of day one if you missed it.
Before the day’s sessions began in earnest, Sun organiser David Coldrick got up to plug two useful resources for Java developers to keep up with the latest developments between Developer Days conferences: The Java Posse podcast (which I highly recommend as well!), and javapassion.com, which I have covered in this blog before.
Building Great Games for the Mobile World, Chuk Munn Lee (Sun)
Having done some work on mobile games already, I was hoping for some insight into the technical issues that face game developers on this platform: device-specific API fragmentation, application size and processing speed limits, inconsistent control methods, and more. What we got instead was a non-technical overview about the pros and cons of developing games for mobile handsets as compared to the PC- and console-based game platforms.
In brief, Java Micro Edition (ME) is a lightweight platform that can let you produce a fully-realized game for millions of potential users with as little as one man-month of development time. Successful games for this platform should take into …
Clean your sessions
By default, Rails doesn’t nuke expired sessions from your app’s storage of choice (either PStores/files or rows in a database table, usually). On my personal site, there’s just under a million entries in the session table alone - somewhat of a waste as it keeps building over time.
To counter this, you can implement this handy code snippet via a Cron job (or run it manually if you don’t have access to Cron or similar tools, you poor poor bastich).
SEM Kit 2006 Progress Report
Since I lost my best friend and business partner in December, I haven’t been the most productive man in SEO… but I am back at it, and thought readers might like to know what I’ve been up to.
First, the 2006 edition (update) of the SitePoint Search Engine Marketing Kit is well underway, and will probably be published towards the end of this year, with an upgrade option available to those smart enough to already have the first edition.
The 2006 edition will of course reflect some of the changes that have taken place in the past year, highlighted by movement in the pay-per-click marketplace, unpaid inclusion (Google Site Maps), and link building. We’re adding a separate chapter on link building, new interviews, and another new chapter with an end-to-end case study.
What will we do in 2007? Assuming that SitePoint doesn’t fire me for missing 3 deadlines already on this project, we’ll probably have plenty more to talk about.
Besides writing, I have been very busy with my online training and coaching programs. I’ve already completed one link building workshop this year, and the second is about halfway complete. I love to teach.
If any readers would like to work “hands on” with …
SmartLoader Reloaded
A few months ago I proposed a way to efficiently use __autoload() together with a class indexer. To my surprise, quite some people started using it and provided me with bug reports. I rewrote most of the original code, eliminated all known bugs and have been testing it for the last month. So here’s a new version with some improvements:
- Added ability to scan include directories, too
- Using SPL RecursiveDirectoryIterator for the indexer/scanner
- Optimized SmartLoader::load(). It now takes < 1 ms to complete (with inclusion) on my machine
- Windows support through DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR constant
- More information in index file headers, like:
- Fixed various bugs
* Created by: /usr/local/php5/lib/php/SmartLoader/SmartLoader.class.php
* Created at: Thu, 06 Apr 2006 23:54:48 +0200
* Scanned: 134 directories and 402 files in 1.15 seconds.
Backwards compatibility?
Robert Schmelzer dug up the most remarkable bug. As of PHP 5.1.2 this piece of code won’t work anymore:
preg_match_all(’/hand/’, ‘Talk to the hand!’, $result = array()));
The $result variable will be empty unless I remove the “= array()”. Why?
Of course, one could argue about how much sense initializing the result as array makes. From my point of view it’s about …
digg: anti-social software?
It seems that digg, the popular tech news site that relies on its community to promote links to its front page, is somewhat ruthless in its tolerance for other types of communities, in particular forums.
Forum administrators beware! Apparently if someone on a forum starts a thread that says “digg my link and I’ll digg yours”, the domain for that forum is likely to be banned by digg. That’s right: no warning, no request to remove the thread. Just banned. And without any warning that this might happen in their Terms of Service.
Is this reasonable in your view? Or should the domain being dugg be the one that is banned? Should forum moderators perhaps be given a grace period to remove the thread? And if so, how long should that grace period be?
Thoughts?
Sun Developer Days 2006: Day One
Sun Microsystems is winding up a tour of Australia and New Zealand with the final stop of its Sun Developer Days 2006 conference today and tomorrow in Melbourne. Fellow SitePointer Lachlan Donald and I were there today to take in the Java vibes, and as with most free conferences there was a great deal of variation in the quality of the sessions we attended.
Sun Developer Tools, Bob Brewin (Sun)
In his keynote, Mr. Brewin spoke chiefly about the push Sun is making towards Ease of Development (EoD) across the entire Java platform and the set of Sun developer tools. Key examples of this included the new language features in Java SE 5.0, the release as a free download of Java Studio Creator, and the Java Persistence API, which is set to replace entity beans in EJB 3.0. This is all old news, however, and Brewin looked like he’d delivered this keynote fifty times before. Though some of the improvements being made to the Java landscape may be inspiring, this session was not.
Changing the Landscape of Software Development, Simon Ritter (Sun)
Mr. Ritter’s keynote essentially covered all of the ways Sun is fostering open source development with Java. Again, there was very little …
You’ve Come A Long Way, Baby… Not.
As fun as it is to pontificate about microformats, structured markup and the semantic web, in the past week two item have brought home to me how far the leading edge of web thinking is ahead of ‘Joe in the street’.
The first was an article by Dave Siegel at XML.com.
The Web Is Ruined and I ruined it. Some people say I’ve ruined the Web, and to them it’s true. Web pages can’t be seen as easily by search engines and those with low-end machines have a hard time getting much out of my site. On my personal site, I don’t even put ALT tags just to send a message to those surfing without images. My life is visual. I love museums. How would you like to visit the Louvre with images turned off?
Dave is one of the web design’s true pioneers and his ‘Creating Killer Web Sites’ was one of the early bibles of web technique. To relate him to the current web landscape, if Tantek Celik is ‘Mr. Box Model Hack’, then Dave Siegel was ‘Sir. Table & Spacer Gif’.
The article is a very interesting but slightly depressing read, not because Dave is championing spacer GIFs, but …
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