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Blogs » Archive for May, 2007
Google Shuts Down Arbitrage and MFA Publishers
I talked about Making Money With Arbitrage in my last post and I touched on the fact that some people may see it as “shady”. Like it or not, arbitrage has a negative stigma. Based on the comments on my last post we have people on both sides of it. But it looks like the most important opinion is out in the open: Google’s opinion.
Unless you’ve been in a cave the last day or so, you’ve probably noticed the amount of talk on Google’s decision to disable publisher accounts of those who are engaged in arbitrage and MFA (made for Adsense). They seem to be going after the bigger fish in this market and accounts have already been shut down and given notice that by June 1st their accounts till be terminated. Though they are going to pay these publishers as per their agreement this sends a loud and clear message: Adsense Arbitrage and MFA sites are not ok according to Google. So if it wasn’t clear before, it is now.
If other PPC providers don’t follow suit it could mean more money for them as these sites shift to using those providers. On the Google Asense side it …
Unix Tools on Your Desktop – Not Just For Mac Users
One of the main reasons I switched to Mac was for the underlying Unix-like kernel and command line. I’ve always had a local Linux server for development, and the ability to roll this functionality into my desktop machine was a great selling point.
As it turns out, while I love Mac OS, I don’t use it as my development server environment – I use a solution which would have worked just as well on a Windows machine.
Virtualization
If you haven’t come across it yet, virtualization software such as VMware and Parallels allows you to create virtual machines within your existing computer, onto which you can install just about any operating system, and run it as an application on your existing OS. From the perspective of the “guest OS” running on the virtual machine, it appears to be running on its very own hardware, and has no access to the “host OS”, except through specially set up sharing tools.
Lucas, our system and network administrator, recently wrote about using virtualization to set up multiple development and staging environments on a spare machine, which is something that saves us a lot of electricity, rack space and money at the …
Social Bookmarking vs. Visual Clutter
Some of our recent blog posts have ended up on the front page of Digg and del.icio.us, garnering a massive influx of traffic. Traffic spikes to webmasters are like the first taste of candy to a child — once you’ve had that taste, you want more, more, MORE!. Ahem. You get the picture.
Following this, we had some extensive discussions about whether we should add the oft-seen “Digg This” and “Post to Del.icio.us” buttons to all our blog posts. One side of the debate is that it makes it easier for people to post the content to these services, the other being that people who use these services will already have a familiar method of posting items of interest; eg: bookmarklets/favelets.
As you can see from the bottom of this post, we decided to go with the buttons. The one thing we could all agree on is that this collection of buttons would not be allowed to grow into the frequently spotted and just as frequently ridiculed mass of buttons representing every social bookmarking service in that crowded corner of the web. If you do decide you want to offer your readers 40,001 ways to bookmark your content, please, consider …
Easy Database Schema Diagrams with DBVisualizer
I’ve never particularly liked databases.
Don’t get me wrong–I love using them. You know, filling them with data, watching my users fill them with data, deleting my users’ data* … but as long as it’s all from the safety of a server-side programming language–I’ve never been a big fan of interacting with them directly. All that SQL just gives me a headache.
Sure, we’ve come a long way from the SQL command line. We have web-based tools, like phpmyadmin and phpPgAdmin. And if you don’t fancy doing your heavy lifting over http, there are desktop tools like MySQL Query Browser and TOAD. And frameworks like Rails have migrations now, so we’ve got all the tools we need, right?
Well, if your brain works anything like mine does, then you’ll agree that sometimes it’s nice to have a “big picture” view of things–a diagram of your data goes a long way to helping understand how it fits together. If your application only consists of three or four tables, then you may already have one of these sketched out on a bit of paper. But none of the tools I mentioned above can provide us a picture of what …
Six Months Later: The New HTML Working Group
The following is republished from the Tech Times #164.
Because I just wasn’t getting enough email (ha!), I joined the W3C’s new HTML Working Group last month.
Nearly six months ago, now, Tim Berners-Lee announced that the W3C would form a new working group to develop the next version of the HTML specification, alongside renewed efforts towards finalizing XHTML 2.0.
With the new working group now well underway, this blog post will look at what progress has been made, what issues have arisen, and just what we should expect from the next version of HTML.
The New Working Group
Unlike most W3C working groups, the new HTML working group’s charter welcomes the scrutiny and participation of the general public. Anyone can join the working group, post to the mailing list, chime in on teleconferences, and vote on what goes into the final spec.
Better yet, there is no minimum level of participation, so if all you have time to do is monitor the mailing list and vote on issues of interest to you, that’s fine too.
The working group is currently led with good humor by its co-chairs, Chris Wilson (Microsoft/Internet Explorer) and the Dan Connolly (W3C), who do their …
Markup Musings #1: How should you mark up dialog?
Semantic markup. Almost every developer who understands the concept, agrees with it, so why are so many people (myself included) often having trouble applying the principles?
While no doubt sometimes it’s garden-variety laziness, I know that personally there have been times that I’ve wanted to make the right decision but ended up scratching my head. While the HTML standards have done a fairly decent job of mimicking the basic forms and structures we all understand from traditional books (i.e. pages, paragraphs, headings, tables and lists), more and more often I’m finding myself faced with marking up a document that doesn’t fit so neatly into those structures — for instance restaurant menus, screenplays and comic strips. Each has a well-established format that doesn’t necessarily transfer seamlessly to the web.
While I can’t say I have the definitive answers to all these questions, I think it’s useful to at least throw the question out there and get a few alternative views — myself included.
Marking up dialog is the first conundrum we’ll look at.
Let’s start with a piece from a classic — what is the most sensible way to go about marking up the …
SitePoint Books now in PDF format!
This just in from the marketing department (also known as Shayne, the marketing guy):
SitePoint goes mobile
I wonder how many people don’t know what PDF stands for. Portable Document Format, that’s what! Well, we’ve got a whole collection of them and they’re all online ready to be sold as a package or on their own. Friends of SitePoint, your wish is our command: SitePoint books have gone mobile.
That’s right—the entire SitePoint book library* is now available in the pocket-sized, instant-gratification-compatible PDF format, in addition to the popular dead tree format. For the first time, all our black-and-white titles can now be viewed with full color screenshots!
Now whenever you buy a book direct from SitePoint you get to choose
- the hardcopy version delivered to your door,
- the PDF version delivered to your inbox ($10 off the cover price!), or
- both formats (only $10 extra!).
Oh, and if you want to upgrade to the PDF version of a book (or books) that you already own, just drop our sales team a line and they’ll gladly hook you up with our special $10 upgrade price.
* “The CSS Anthology” is an exception right now, as we’re busy clearing an overstock of the …
What to Expect With SilverLight 1.1 Alpha
Over the past few weeks, Microsoft has been making a lot of announcements about SilverLight (formerly WPF/E). At NAB, they showcased some of its video abilities and at MIX, they announced that it would have CLR support within browsers. After talking to some of the people that developed SilverLight at MIX and working with the beta and alpha tools over the past week, I’ve come to a few conclusions about SilverLight.
Besiege Your Web Application – Load Testing over HTTP
When performance tuning a system, it’s vital that you continually monitor the effect of any changes that you make. Instrumentation should be put in place to provide continual access to consistent metrics.
Web applications are no different. They can be complex beasts, however, so you may benefit from many different layers of instrumentation. If you’re building on a feature-rich framework, you probably have access to timers and counters within your code. These are very useful for telling you how long different stages of your application take to execute, and can count and time calls to external systems, such as SQL queries.
Sometimes, however, you need a view of the bigger picture – a benchmark that more accurately represents the performance your users experience, and encompasses all aspects of servicing their request, including network latency and HTTP server overhead.
Siege is a free UNIX (Linux / Mac OS etc) tool from JoeDog Software which provides just that.
Siege is an http regression testing and benchmarking utility. It was designed to let web developers measure the performance of their code under duress, to see how it will stand up to load on the internet. Siege supports basic authentication, cookies, HTTP …
Making Money With Arbitrage
When I first heard about arbitrage I thought someone was getting a divorce. I’d never heard of arbitrage to describe a market condition. The basic idea of arbitrage is simple: take advantage of a disparity between the cost of one item and selling it a higher price in another market where it fetches a higher price. A very contemporary example of arbitrage is when the XBOX 360 hit stores at retail price and were selling for 3-6 times that on eBay.
But that’s not what people mean when they talk arbitrage on the web. The most common example is Contextual Ad (CPC) Arbitrage in which you buy traffic at a low price and direct it to a page with contextual ads, optimized to convert, where the ads pay a higher price per click. Lets run through an example:
You do some digging on the popular Contextual Ad networks like Google Adsense, Yahoo, MSN etc. and find that “Firstime Home Loan” is paying pretty well. Say around $0.75 per click. Lets say you found this through Google Adsense. Looking on Yahoo or MSN you find that they are going for $0.55 per click. While most examples may not be this obvious or …
