It’s almost impossible to visit a website without seeing some sort of advertising. Whether you yourself click it or not, there is somebody in this world that does. I have seen some very impressive ads that definitely catch my attention.
If you want the ads you create to come out decent (and more importantly have people click on it), there are a few considerations that you must take:
Keep it light: not everyone has a fast connection (yet). Try and keep the file under 30kb.
Keep it short: If you are going to animate your ad, don’t make the animation to long. You have about 5 seconds to capture a uses attention. If you make some dramatic animation before showing the call to action (logo, URL, etc), no one will care and continue to do whatever they intended to in the first place.
Stay away from loops: If you are going to animate it, don’t use loops. This will only drive your casual browser insane. Plus, it’s kinda tacky.
Pay attention to standards:Yes, there are standards. All the ads you see on sites have to be a specific size. Check out the Internet Advertising Board (IAB) for the standards and stick to them.
If any of you are into Search Engine Optimization (SEO), then you have to do yourself a favor and get John Reese’s new Traffic Secrets 2.0 package. I bought the first one when it came out awhile ago and I have to tell you, it was very enlightening. He knows his stuff.
He gives real world examples of how to find a niche, produce a product, and sell it to millions. If you know nothing of John, check out his blog income.com/blog. This man is a genius and knows the web like nobody’s business.
The new Traffic Secrets package is going to be released TODAY at noon.
Check out his videos, read the blog, get the new Traffic Secrets, implement his techniques, make money. Very simple.
For those of you who got ripped off of the first generation iphone, Apple introduces the new (and super cheaper) iphone 3g. Big deal. I think the iphone is great and all, but I see no reason why we should all rush to the stores and wait in long ass lines for a phone. Remember the first generation of this phone? The craze that it caused was just too funny. [If you were one of these people, prepare to be offended].
I remember watching the news and seeing a bunch of losers people waiting HOURS for they’re new iphone. And if memory serves me correct, it looked like the people waiting were socially challenged super geeks who want so desperately to become a part of culture.
The new phone is introducing Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync. This basically means that the folks at Apple have succumbed to the reign that Microsoft has created.
The new iphone goes on sale tomorrow [7/11/08] at 8am. I can already hear people preparing for their long night of waiting; getting bottles of water, making sure they fed they’re pets, packing they’re bags with food, thinking of excuses to call in sick…
If you were lucky enough, there are a few stores who jumped the gun and are selling it. You could of course always check out ebay and trade in your children for this new precious phone.
The other day something very terrible happened to me. As I was kicking ass on Call of Duty 4 on XBOX Live, the screen started flickering.
I haven’t played COD4 in a few weeks so I thought I’d get back into the groove and do a free for all. Taking some time off did me good; I got back in the game and got 1st place with 22 kills. For those of you who haven’t played this game, when you get shot up, the screen produces a red pulsating spherical shape indicating that you are bleeding to death. I took a closer look at the graphics and noticed that it looked like a cheap gif. Because I haven’t played in a long time, I thought they added some new effect that I didn’t know about.
After playing on a few other maps, I noticed the color degradation on the textures of the objects in the maps. This is when I started to panic. I took the game out of the tray, gave it a good wipe down and tired it again. No luck; it was still choppy.
After I picked up my heart, which at this point was falling out of my ass, I made sure all of my physical connections where secure; you never know, it could have been a loose wire, right?
I turned my 360 on and then it happened; sound with NO PICTURE! I was devastated. How was I supposed to spend my free time, reading?!
I called XBOX Live support to see if they can assist me in this terrible time. I went through all of their procedures:
This is madness. Coming from the nightmare of Classic ASP, many VB programmers seamlessly moved to VB.NET. If you have done the switch, you know that it is bitter sweet.
On one hand, you now have the rich environment of Visual Studio to create powerful applications that meet today’s standards. On the other, you have to get used to vast amount of libraries and namespaces available within the .NET Framework. The differences between Classic ASP and .NET are immense.
That sucks. Here I thought I was big stuff with my Classic ASP; then I make the upgrade to .NET and inherit a butt-load of new things that I have to learn. Of course, I am always up to the challenge; however, now that everyone is going crazy about C#, where do all the VB programmers go? Will this madness ever end?
Don’t get me wrong, I am all for learning about new technologies and languages; being in this field, you have to be or you’re out of work. What I don’t like, and think is pointless to do, is learn something you are never going to apply. What is the point of reading a manual of a product if you don’t even own it or intend on using it? The same goes (for me) with C#. If I only intend on developing and crafting my talent in VB, why bother with C#? Both libraries are so rich that it takes time and dedication to truly “master” your programming ability.
Yeah, I know they have a lot of similarities, however when you are brainstorming for solutions to a web app, you usually visualize it in the language you feel most comfortable with.
Joe Stagner at Microsoft recently wrote about this crisis. I personally think it sucks. I mean, I know that in the end, it’s all about personal programming preference, but if employersprefer that you develop in C#, who are we to say anything?
And what does this mean for our future with Microsoft languages? OK, so now VB is going out of style, who is to say that someday C# won’t go out of style too?! What are geeks supposed to do?
I’ll tell you what we should do: cut the crap and pick up a book on both languages. If you don’t, the geek next to you will and take your salary right out of your pocket without even buying you a drink.
As you may already know, Firefox 3 has launched TODAY. You know the drill: download it, install it, and test your webpages to see if they still look the way you wanted.
When brainstorming a web project, everyone has theories (and everyone thinks their theories will work). When trying to figure out how to develop an intense complex application, try and isolate your them by creating prototypes. As it progresses, start slowly piecing them together so they’ll all get along.
There have been plenty of times where I swore something would come out the way I intended. I roll around an idea in my head for hours, confident that once I start my code it will all work out perfectly. I usually get most of the best work when I’m trying to go to sleep. I visualize how I want something to run and see what I can do to improve on what I already (physically; in my code) have.
By trying to create your version of what you think may work, isolate your theory by creating simplified prototype. This can be fairly simple if you break apart your ideas carefully.
Once all is said and done, stitch your code together and watch your ideas come to life.
People often have to search within to find me. However, it’s not that simple. Although I have few values, a decision can determine very different occurrences.
Did anyone notice that now the youtube search box has suggestions? Ever since Google introduced way back when, web developers are jumping at the opportunity to put it to good use. I commend youtube for adding the suggest feature to their site. Don’t you think they could have done it a lot earlier? Better late than never I guess. Big-up to AJAX beeotch!
UPDATE: Apparently this works on Firefox (if you have Google suggest added to your toolbar). Now I’m not really sure if it’s youtube or if the Google suggest is taking over their input box. Either way, youtube should take notice and add this feature to their site. That’d be sweet.
Nothing is a very important concept in programming.
Nothing is just as important as something because it is the absence of something. When something is equal to nothing, would you still consider it as something? When writing a program, you may have to write a typical if-else logical block that checks for nothing. For example:
If thisPostText = “” Then
Read = True
Else
Read = False
End If
The interesting thing about nothing, is that it can be described in many ways.
For example:
null
Nothing
“”
False
0
The best thing about nothing is that it doesn’t really exist. However, logically, it’s always there; just like this post.
A few people out there think that if they add some simple JavaScript to disable right clicking, their code will be safe. For those of you wondering, yes, this can be done. And yes, it is totally pointless.
Web developers dream of the day when there (client-side) code would be completely invisible to visitors. Why, you might ask? Because, it takes time to develop sweet scripts to make a website functional; who wants some script kiddie stealing borrowing there precious scripts. Not only that, Mac users could care less about right clicking, they only have a single click!
Normally by right-clicking (in Windows) on a web page, you have access to such great features like: properties, view page info, exporting options (depending on your browser), and the infamous view page source. The thing is, you could also view a page’s source (and other exciting options) by clicking on your browsers tool bar and finding the same option. And if you think that you might be protecting your images by disabling this function, just remember that there is a little thing called cache.
With this in mind, why would someone want to disable right clicking? Is there any functional reason that someone would do so? Please, someone tell my why you would want to do this, I just don’t get it.
Mac users, this won’t work for you. (Actually this would only work with Windows. Oh well.)
There are tons of folders all over your computer with all sorts of crap in them; movies, music, word docs, pictures, etc. At some point, you realize that you don’t have enough space for all of your precious files and you are also to cheap to buy more hard drive space. What is a person to do?! It’s a pain in the ass to clean up your machine, so when you finally get around to it, you do the basics (in no particular order):
clear your web history; cookies, cache, etc.
delete any programs/files you are no longer using
run a disk cleanup
defrag your PC
empty your recycling bin
burn some of your important files on a CD/DVD
So you are all done and give your PC a fresh restart and WHAM!!!, you freed up less than a gig of space. Great, that sucks. You could have spent your time being lazy. You sit there with mouse in hand and wonder: What is responsible for taking so much space? Who is the space-hog culprit?
Here is a nifty little tool that I came across that can tell you how much space is being occupied per folder/drive: http://foldersize.sourceforge.net/. Now this is one bad bitch. You might say,”I could just right click and choose properties to find out how much space is being taken up.” You are right, this is possible. However if you have a lot of folders to go through, this could be a painstakingly long process.
Using the foldersize app, you can view the sizes of all of your folders at the same time. When you look into a folder using “details view”, you’ll see some sorting options such as Name, Type, date Modified, all boring crap.
You could even right click on the bar (with those names) and tick a few other useless options. But what you can’t get is how big a folder is. You would think that Microsoft would have thought about this, but no, they didn’t. Bastards. Lucky for us, there is a little application that can tell us what we want.
Now you can finally see what is taking up so much space on your PC and delete what is necessary.
Get it here: http://foldersize.sourceforge.net/.
So I haven’t posted an article in a long time, bite me.
For the three of you who read this blog, you should know that I post when I have something to say. Another thing I do is post a video on Fridays because damn it, Fridays are just happy.
This video is kinda long, so I suggest you schedule sometime to watch it. Please watch it. You are totally missing out if you don’t.
