Archive for 'Internet'

As a webdeveloper, albeit a hobbyist one, I’ve found Firefox standards-compliance to be a valuable asset when writing HTML, CSS and javascript. Adding a few extensions makes Firefox even more useful to a webdeveloper/webmaster. My three favourite extensions are:

Firebug - a great way for analysing a page and all the parts that make it up; javascript, images, CSS, HTML, page load times, file sizes and even edit a page in real-time. It will even find errors in your code. It’s absolutely essential, even for the webmaster who outsource their webdevelopment so they can analyse pages and determine if there are too many "hits" per page (e.g. 10 javascript files and 60 images, when it could be a lot less) which will cause slow loading speed or to easily change the colour of a page themselves and see in real time how it will look.

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Sadly, my experiment with Bidvertiser failed. I’ve removed it and won’t be bringing Adsense back for now either. Currently, I have other projects I’m working on which are far more important. I like Bidvertiser’s reporting and control over advert appearance, I just think my blog was not the right place for it. For now, I’ll stick with just Kontera as this seems to work well on a blog.

Hopefully, my pages will now be more readable and load quicker for my visitors.

Recently, I need to check for an empty value in an array. While empty() is good for checking a specific value it does not allow the checking of a whole array. I didn’t want to do multiple if statements/empty checks and also empty was not always accurate, i.e. if a variable has a value of 0 (zero) then empty considers it empty - but for my purposes this was not empty. How to solve this problem?

Well, I decide to create my own function. It’s a fairly simple one - returns FALSE if no empty array item is detected, otherwise TRUE if one is. For my purposes, I did not need to know in the check which one specifically is empty as the error message for individual items would always be reported by another function (it was for a HTML form, so the error is displayed next to each field based upon a conditional check for that specific field).

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After spending a lot of time reading mixed reviews, I have finally decided to test out Bidvertiser and see how it compares first-hand to other services I have used. Overall, Bidvertiser perhaps had as many reviews for as it has against. I am first going to test it out on my blog and only on the post page for the first few days (I will later add it everywhere on my blog).

What I did notice at first is some problems with how the ads are displayed, although this seemed to go away after a few page refreshes (and it was not caching issues as I cleared my cache a few times). Aside from this small niggle, the control panel is easy enough to use and Bidvertiser allows for a greater control over advertisement sizes (a custom size can be specified) than many other services.

Bidvertiser allows better filtering of unwanted adverts. I have not tested it yet, but you can select for pre-approval of an advert before it will be featured on your site. They also display if the ad is geo-targeted and to which country (or countries).

I’ll report back on the progress (if any) within 7 days of The Bidvertiser Experiment.

Perhaps you too can Make money from your Website or Blog with BidVertiser?

Happily, it appears, at least for now, the duplicate content generated by totalunlock.co.uk’s proxy has been de-indexed…

Not so happily for many, the supplemental tag has been removed from search results. This means we will no longer be able to identify which pages Google considers of less importance.. and subsequently optimise those problem pages.

This is especially annoying as often the pages in supplemental results are the most relevant ones; it will now be a trickier and more blind effort to optimise.

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