Archive for category Web Development
Make Twitter Better
Posted by Randy in Applications, Tips, Web Development on May 26, 2009
One of the things I like about Twitter, believe it or not, is the simplistic design. There's not a lot of useless options. There not many things to click on at all really, compared to other sites. There are a few missing items that should be on the site, however. I just recently installed a Firefox extension that accomplishes everything I need.
I've found that a lot of the twitter "clients" are lacking. For instance, I can't easily search and follow people from TweetDeck. I really like to just use the web client. I only thing that I could use on the web interface is a notification of @ replies. Every other option that I found useful in the clients is now available on the web client via Power Twitter Firefox extension. There's also a few features I wasn't expecting. For instance, Song.ly is now integrated. I had never tried Song.ly until I installed this extension. I love it.
Check out the extension. It's worth it if you Tweet much at all.
International Whats-hot-weekly.com
Posted by Randy in Web Development on May 12, 2009
I finished up modifications to whats-hot-weekly.com. There is now a drop-down list which lets the users choose their country. This is all handled with eBay site IDs. Categories are still being stored in a MySQL database locally on the server. This make the menus function much better. I've already noticed many people in the UK, Canada, Spain, France, and Australia are using the site. Currently the site is averaging over 100 unique visitors per day. This isn't great but it's nice to have even that many people interested in your work.
Really cool online auction idea
Posted by Randy in Internet, Web Development on May 4, 2009
At this point, most people have heard of eBay. A high percentage of them have probably signed up for an eBay account and have made a purchase on the online auction site. EBay has been the defacto online auction site for years. Through those years many other auction sites have tried to get some of that market share with little luck. Most just didn't have the right marketing. After all marketing is a major factor in whether a site succeeds or not. One can have the best site on the internet, and if no one knows anything about it, it'll never rank well on search engines or become a high traffic site.
Sometimes there are ideas that just can't be ignored, even if they have suffered from poor marketing. This is especially true for one of the coolest sites I've come across recently. It is a great idea and already there are many sites trying to copy the idea. The idea is simple really, but it is ingenious. This site is an auction site that works slightly different. It is possible to win items and end up paying pennies on the dollar for the item's worth. As an example, a Macbook which normally sells for around $1300 could sale for $200 bucks.
What's the catch?
Well, the catch is all in the way you bid on the items. It's more of a competition. It's actually pretty addictive. Bids are incremented by a certain amount. There are regular auctions and penny auctions. The regular auctions increment by a larger amount, while penny auctions go up a penny every time someone bids. Any time a person bids, it costs them a certain amount of money. I believe the current going rate is around 75 cents per bid. When they bid, the current bid price goes up a certain amount and they become the high bidder. These auctions are also timed, but every time a person bids, it adds a little more time to the auction. So if one waits till the last second to place a bid, hoping to be the last bidder, the time goes up and a bunch of other people jump on board.
Now it doesn't go on like this indefinitely. There is a permanent end time for auctions as well. This is pretty easy when you understand what's going on.
It is very possible to get a great deal on something on this site. I've seen items go for 10% of the retail cost with the bidder only spending about ten bucks for bids. There are TV's, game systems, laptops, and many other things that get auctioned there at amazing prices. Check it out here!!
Updating Whats-hot-weekly
Posted by Randy in Web Development on May 3, 2009
My task for this morning is to add additional site codes to whats-hot-weekly.com. It's not an easy task. At least, it isn't as easy as I thought it would be. All of the categories are pulled from a database that I refresh every so often. The database only contains the categories for the US eBay site. This is where it gets hairy because I wasn't aware before now that the other countries used didn't categories. So, now my task is to add all the categories so I can implement the additional sites.
This is going to take a while. The US along takes around half an hour. There are many other sites. I've recreated the database adding a field to record the site_id. Next I'll run my scripts to populate the database with API calls. After I populate the database for the US, I'll switch the site codes manually and add the next site. I would automate this but I would rather monitor it anyway so I thought I may as well do it manually.
The big issue that will come up later is currencies. I'll have to adjust for that. I'll also have to recreate the same code on the static version of the site.
While I wait for the database to refresh, the old site is still running as normal. I have a development environment that is a working copy of the production environment. I'll make the switch there, then simply move it over to production from there. There should be exactly no downtime to the site. I hope.
Just How Relevant is Google
Posted by Randy in Internet, SEO, Tips, Web Development on May 1, 2009
We have all come to expect good things from Google. In fact, many of us have come to believe that Google is the best at everything they do. This is especially true with their original application, their search. For the past few years Google has ruled the search market. It got there by making the most relevant search results appear every time a user executed a search.
Those days may be over. Recently, I've noticed a trend that Google isn't giving very relevant content. I don't think I'm alone, and I have a pretty good idea why we are getting such bad results. It's not entirely Google's fault. There are many "white hat" and "black hat" search engine optimizations that are being used to manipulate the results. Marketers are trying to draw content to their sites. That's how they make money after all. SEO has been used ever since the first search engine. Google just seems to be lagging behind in making their algorithms detect unwanted SEO.
This isn't to say that those marketers are doing something wrong exactly. It's just that most of them are concentrating on Google. Google is, after all, the most popular search engine. They know what works to get ranked on Google, so they do it. They do a lot of it. This skews Google's search results, but doesn't necessarily effect Yahoo search results because Yahoo uses different algorithms to determine where a result ranks.
Google also is notorious for de-indexing RELEVANT sites by mistake. For instance, this site seems to have been de-indexed, and I've not been attempting to SEO this site much at all. It could be due to my use of a WordPress plugin called All-in-one SEO pack, though that really shouldn't have anything to do with it either.
Here is my single example that has been perplexing me for a month or so:
Once upon a time, there was a script for the XChat IRC client, called "XLack". This script is my favorite system information script for XChat. I've used it for probably 4 or 5 years. The home site for the script used to be xlack.tk. This was where everyone would go to download it. That site is now a parked domain. It has been that way for close to a year. If you search google for "Xlack", xlack.tk is still the number one site. It is no longer relevant at all. It's a parked domain. In fact, if one tries to find a site from which to download the xlack script, one finds that there are none listed on Google.com.
Now take that same search over to yahoo.com. A simple search for "xlack download" gives you this site, which has the relevant download link of the actual script. Yahoo.com provides more relevant results. Try it on any of your search and see if you don't get better results from Yahoo or even Live.com. I guarantee you'll have more success from them these days than you do Google.
Programming ideas
Posted by Randy in Applications, Open Source, Programming, Web Development on April 17, 2009
I'm not a very good programmer. I think the biggest reason for that is that I've not had enough practice at it. I've written plenty of apps and web sites but most were very simple. My latest app, whats-hot-weekly.com is actually a simplified version of another app I wrote that is located at givemeaniche.com. There are many differences between the two apps even though they basically do the same thing. The exception to this being that givemeaniche actually shows the most searched for terms as well as the most watched items.
The hardest part of it all is coming up with new ideas for serious work projects. I have a few but being a solo developer, designer, etc means that I'll have to put some time into them. Any ideas for apps and websites would be much appreciated.
Twitter and me
Posted by Randy in Internet, Web Development on April 16, 2009
I first tried twitter about a month ago. I wasn't very impressed, at the time. I have this theory that we are actually going backward in usefulness on the web. Back in the 90's we had web apps that did a lot more than twitter, yet twitter is supposed to be sooooo amazing.
Well it is. Here's the thing. As the internet get more and more crowded, certain things become more and more popular. Marketing is getting extremely popular on the internet. That's not to say that marketing hasn't been popular on the internet for many years. It's just getting exponentially more popular. Twitter is a marketers dream. Facebook is another that works great for marketers.
You see, these apps are just less robust versions of old forum software. They are also meant to grab a larger audience where forums are meant for a smaller niche. This broad audience and simplistic design make these apps extremely useful for advertising. Unfortunately, the normal user will see less functionality from these apps than software from 15 years ago. Those users won't understand this, however, because they have never been exposed to that older technology. They just know that all of their family is on facebook or myspace. So they join the sites and start getting bombarded with new advertisements.
If you are smart, you'll jump on the marketing bandwagon soon. There's a lot of money in it.
responseXML.documentElement is null or not an object
Posted by Randy in Programming, Web Development on April 5, 2009
Ok I have yet another reason to loath IE7. I had an error on Whats-hot-weekly.com earlier in regard to this error message on my ajax XML object:
responsexml.documentElement is null or not an object
Everything worked in Firefox, Chrome, and even my Nokia N810's browser, but IE7 just wasn't going to cooperate. I knew that it was working last night, but I made a few changes before going to bed.
Two of the changes I made was in relation to the meta tags in the HTML of the main index page. I added keywords and description for search engine optimization. Little did I know that one of these was the culprit.
After much Googling, I came upon this article. In it I immediately found the reason for the error. It should have been a little obvious but I had overlooked something simple. My search box for entering in keywords had an id(and name) of "keywords". The new meta tag for keywords also used the "name=keywords" attribute.
In the article, it was the "description" meta tag that had caused the conflict. Upon evaluating that, I realized my mistake. This effected IE only because IE checks the name attribute when you call document.getElementById. It was grabbing the meta element instead of the search box.
I hope this helps someone else, in the event that all the variables fall into place for this to happen again.
eBay Most Watched Items
Posted by Randy in Programming, Web Development on April 4, 2009
Well, after a few days of serious development, I'm releasing the beta of my site. It's called whats-hot-weekly.com. It is basically a "most watched items on ebay" site. With it users can find what everyone else is looking at.
One can search by keyword/keyphrase, by category, or by both. The interface may need a little polishing, but it's functional. There is at least one minor bug that I'm working on. The site will continue to improve, and I'll be adding forums soon, so that people can report bugs and discuss what they find.
Don't forget to let me know what you think by commenting here or by emailing me at the address listed on the site's home page.
AJAX Cross Domain Work-around
Posted by Randy in Programming, Web Development on April 4, 2009
Any of you that are AJAX developers can skip this post. I've just recently started concentrating on AJAX for a project I'm working on. In the past, I've used PHP to parse XML returned from various web services and it goes off without a hitch. I also wrote my own web service in PHP for this project.
The project is basically a site that works with the eBay API to pull the most watched items for any keyword search phrase and by category. I've pulled all the categories to a local database. This will allow me to avoid using an API call every time someone clicks through different categories. All the categories are in an AJAX menu system I wrote. The menu is completely dynamic and loads the categories and subcategories using calls to my web service. This part was fun because it gave me the opportunity to create a web service and this in itself was worth the time I've spent on the whole project.
I ran into a road block however, because I wasn't aware that AJAX doesn't allow cross-domain calls. At least from what I see, it doesn't. I started getting an error 1012 "Access to restricted URI denied'." This means that the actually calls I would like to make to the eBay API won't work through AJAX. I wrote the code to try to do so and kept getting this error. That's when I found out that it wasn't possible to do this using AJAX. It's fine in PHP, however. So, here is the work-around I'm brain-storming. I know it'll work. It's just a matter of doing it.
The work-around is simply to write another web service in php that makes the calls for me. Then use AJAX to pull the info dynamically from the localhost. The up side to this is I can also log various stats about the calls within the web service as well. I could create a table in my database to log the searches, time of day, IP address of user, and so on. This will allow me to understand how the app is being used, who's using it, when they are using it, and what they are using it for.
This is also known as using AJAX through a proxy. Where the proxy is the web service on the localhost from which one can make an AJAX call to.
So, I'm off to code another web service.