Archive for January, 2007
Its amazing how frustrating Windows can be. No wonder my wife says she does not deal well with “computers”.
Today while my 2 year old played with my laptop (Dell Lattitude 420), she pulled an amazing feat: She succeeded turning the display completely sideways. I am talking about the whole Windows desktop and apps were 90 degrees sideways. Now this leads to 3 frustrations:
- The touch-pad is now physically rotated to the screen; Up on the pad moves the cursor left. Now try to navigate like this!
- I had no clue how the hell she managed to do that.
- I had no clue how the hell I am getting the machine to function back again.
A quick search and I got to this page on //engtech. This was a real sanity saver! Thanks to this Canadian dude. Oh, and the best part in the page design is that the answer is written sideways! You have to check it out. Thats a very clever things to do.
It turns out that there is a stupid hot key combination (ctrl-alt-left / right / up / down) that triggers this behavior on certain graphic cards. This should definitely be turned off, and also be clearly accessible as a main tab on the display control-panel.
Conclusions
- Turn off this silly feature on the OS level. (Yeah, right, like this will ever happen).
- Google is a worthy asset - but you have to know how to search.
- Common bloggers can be your friends
- Take the laptop out of reach of your two year old.
It still beats the hell out of me how she succeeded pressing ctrl-alt-arrow. Kids can be extremely resourceful.
Everyone has an opinion on the new iPhone by Apple. As a long time admirer of Apple (heck, I still have the first PDA ever, Apple’s Newton), I have an opinion as well.
First off, its an amazing device - but marketing it as a phone does not work for me. I would almost say that if you consider it as a phone, it is an overly expensive and fragile piece of hardware (although very cool). Just think about the horror of dropping it accidentally and cracking the display - how many times did you drop your phone to see it bouncing off the floor, sliding face down across the room or just forgetting it somewhere? Try doing that with a $500 phone with a huge LCD.
In addition, I guess I am not so excited about this as a phone also because personally my phone life does not involve browsing the web, or playing music. I am OK with separating my music (iPod 4G, quite old nowadays) from my phone (those get smaller by the day). I just need to be able to call or receive calls.
However…
The most exciting thing about this device is its amazing user interface. I is almost an alien technology: Its so much more advanced then anything on the market today, that it would take years for anyone to duplicate the UI with any degree of success. This is the main reason I am still considering buying this adorable device: To be able to scroll stuff, view photos and resize things all day long.
For me, the killer feature is actually text entry and retrieval. I tried for years all sorts of devices: Starting from the Apple Newton, which was a very ambitious effort, but due to high cost ($800), too slow CPU, imperfect hand-writing recognition software and too big form factor did not make it. It was a huge idea, but they needed hardware that was only appearing years after.
I used Palm V for a year or two - its quite convenient to read and retrieve, but for me the experience of writing using the stylus did not work, handwriting recognition sucks, and portable keyboard is too bulky.
Consider the iPhone, now: Having a device that allows you to write text, send it as email and view it in the best UI ever (which only Apple can deliver) might be the winning solution. It still seems to be proven how easy it is to enter text through the thumb-based interface. Even it is quite expensive as a content writing and retrieval gadget, it might be still a winner.
The next OS?
Which leads me to the revelation: I am predicting that a few months after this gadget hits production, Apple would reveal the new iMac that has the same user interface (UI). Imagine a desktop OS that behaves with the same elegance and flow - dragging windows, arranging images, smart context-sensitive dialogs, tactile scrolling, etc. Apple did the unbelievable and put OS-X on a slim portable gadget - now, once the UI technology matures, the next big thing would be to complete the full loop and bring this innovative UI to the desktop.
Obviously this is not an easy feat: I can think easily of many challenges. How would you “right click” without a mouse? How would you make all buttons and widgets finger friendly? What would you do with all the applications out there? All in all, quite challenging. But Apple had already demonstrated that they can deliver. They can do this again.
Wouldn’t that be something? What do you think?
Monday, Jan 22nd, 2007
Categories: Webby
Wednesday, January 17, 2007
If you want to start an AdSense-based site, and you are wondering which subject it should be about, here are three rules for choosing the site’s subject.
Choose a subject that interests you
You are going to invest tons of hours in building your site. This is going to involve a lot of research, thinking and writing. If this is a subject that you don’t find interesting, you will not have the required energies to put into it.
In addition, if it is interesting to you, that also means that you might know more then other people about this, and that you might be able to contribute original ideas, commentary and opinions about this subject - this is exactly what the readers (and the search engines) are after.
Last, as this is an interesting subject for you, you might be researching and reading about it anyway - this means you just need to put that into your site.
Choose a subject that has enough advertisers
Lets suppose you invested all your energy at your favorite subject, and built a solid and interesting site. Can it be profitable? That depends on lots of things, but surely if there are very few advertisers in this area, or the ads have low value, you will not be able to monetize it.
Obviously, you need to beware of choosing a subject that has fierce competition (most are…). The highest paying keywords are the playground of the pros. If you are just starting, stay away from those.
Choose a subject that is aimed at non-technical people
Ahh, this is the most elusive secret of all: The more technical savvy your users are, and the more web experienced they are, the less likely will they be to see your ads. This is called ad-blindness.
On the other hand, if your site is aimed at low-tech users, the more likely they are to click on your ads.
Here is a short review of my chosen Firefox extensions, which without them my web life would have been extremely miserable. All of them are recommended, and most of them are completely essential.
Ad Blocking
This extension is a must to save you many precious seconds of your life. In essence, in every page that contains a Flash animation, you will find a small (F) instead. Clicking on it will start the original Flash - but most of the time you are not interested in that (Thats because most of them are just ads). You would not believe how faster your pages load with it.
Tabbed Browsing
This small extension allows you to assign keyboard shortcuts to switching tabs. I use ctrl-left and ctrl-right, but you can choose your favorite shortcuts. Essential for speed.
This adds a new preferences tab in your control panel, regarding tab behavior. It adds tons of customizable options to tabbing - and if you are a tabbing freak, like me, it allows you complete control.
A simple and cute add-on, that allows you to shrink the tab header to the icon only (favicon). This helps a lot when you have lots of known tabs open, which you can navigate to using the icon only.
Bookmarks Synchronization
With Foxmarks you can synchronize two PCs to share the same bookmarks. It works like magic.
Download
Now all your downloads appear as small and clean progress bar down on your status bar. Go away the download window!
With this extension, all PDFs that you click on will prompt you as to what you want to do - you can safe directly, or open in Firefox, or other options. As the PDF within Firefox is quite limited in functionality, this is a great helper.
A nice extension to download some types of video to Hard Disk. I started to see more and more sites that this extension is not working for.
Firefox Application
This cute extension adds a splash screen to Firefox, Thunderbird and Sunbird. This makes the application seem so much more professional. Why the Firefox developers did not place this feature (still) officially is beyond me.
A great addition to Firefox - notifies you when your add-ons or Firefox have updates, downloads them for you, and let you decide on when to restart. Complete!
Web-Dev
Adds a small eyedropper icon on the lower-left corner, and allows you to sample the color from any pixel on the current web page - and in addition, has tons of other color-oriented features. Superb tool for web developers!
This advanced add-on allows you to examine forms data before transmission, and change it at will. With it, you can capture what is really going on between a web-application client to its server - weather yours or not…
Tuesday, Jan 16th, 2007
Categories: Webby
When I decided to add AdSense ads to my blog, I made some research (as usual), and came up with a set of guidelines to the whole spooky SEO subject.Here is a set of of tips to improve your site and blog rating, and drive more performance out of your Google AdSense campaign.
Choose and Create Content
- Make sure you have high quality, rich, interesting, useful and original content
- Its good to have a niche site - but with sufficient advertisers
- If possible, concentrate on content with high paying ads
- One page per topic
- Cover all missing subtopics
- Update and add constantly
Optimize Site Flow
- Natural site flow
- Make sure all links work
- Add About page
- Add Sitemap page
Optimize AdSense Keywords
- Mine for the best keywords
- Pay attention to keyword density
- Fine-tune before turning on AdSense
Keywords Fine Tuning
- Important tags: Title, Headings, Bold, Italics, Alt
- Choose the right keywords in title
- Choose the right keywords in headings
- Links: Wrap the link around keywords (text in links is valued higher by Google). Use the title attribute like so: actual text
- Put the best keywords into the links
- Pay attention to the meta tags
- Actively block ads that are wrong
- Ask AdSense
Optimize Images
- Always use ALT with relevant keywords
- Position images near relevant text
- Images around the ad edges are helpful in getting attention
Improve Your Layout and Positioning
- For short articles, place ads above the content
- For long articles, place ads in the middle of content
- Blend ad colors
- Above the fold
Improve Relevancy
- Avoid Non-English characters
- Include specific sections with <!– google_ad_section_start–> and <!– google_ad_section_end–>
- Exclude poison-words/sections using <!– google_ad_section_start(weight=ignore) –> and <!– google_ad_section_end –>
- In case of bad relevancy, rename the page to trigger immediate re-crawl
Bring More Traffic To Your Site
- Link from outside as possible
- Promote the site: Submit to digg, reddit, sumbleupon
- Add signature to your emails
Enjoy!