Archive for November, 2007
Thursday, November 29th, 2007
Why all this fascination with Ruby on Rails?
The success of 37signals...these guys have built some cool stuff in very small teams.
But in general I believe that a lot of the coding developers (as opposed to user interface developers such as myself) like trying new languages like some men like trying fresh girlfriends.
Each time a new language comes along they think this might be the one.
For those of us just trying to produce working applications efficiently for clients, switching languages is a waste of time and money.
i.e. we will switch but only if the incentives are enormous or our current technology has badly dated.
Many developers are choosing to remain in PHP. CakePHP is PHP's answer to the Rails framework on Ruby.
Dominican developer Kevin Lloyd has written a succinct list of the reasons to choose CakePHP over RoR:
- laziness
- speed
- shared host support
- cost
The big debate about Ruby on Rails versus PHP was set off by Alex Payne of Twitter's complaint about the speed of RoR in an interview:
All the convenience methods and syntactical sugar that makes Rails such a pleasure for coders ends up being absolutely punishing, performance-wise....there shouldn’t be doubt in anybody’s mind at this point that Ruby itself is slow. It’s great that people are hard at work on faster implementations of the language, but right now, it’s tough. If you’re looking to deploy a big web application and you’re language-agnostic, realize that the same operation in Ruby will take less time in Python. All of us working on Twitter are big Ruby fans, but I think it’s worth being frank that this isn’t one of those relativistic language issues. Ruby is slow.
Kevin adds:
I don’t do Web Development for my health or for fun. I design web applications for clients. A lot of my work involves redesign of already existing sites. How do I say to a client: Hey, although your current web host that you’ve prepaid a year for is sufficient for 90% or the stuff you can throw at it, I’m using this new technology and you need to shell out some more $$$ for a host that can handle it.
That's our situation as well. We love web development but it is a means to an end. User interface, front end, user convenience. Of course reliability and security are very important to us as well, but that is more a question of coding practice than coding language.
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By Alec
WordPress |
Wednesday, November 7th, 2007
We've been having quite a few issues with speed and server load, something which we'd never had to worry about in the past. We've been building more and more web apps and fewer and fewer simple websites.
We are also facing mod security restrictions on our webhost (the quite brilliant Cartika). Cartika is strapped down pretty tightly, but that makes sense. They also let us know right away if a website of ours is facing security attacks or if it is being scraped every day.
Apparently not all PHP is created equal and it is time to batten down the hatches.
Once we get to functionality we will have to put a full-fledged optimisation phase in the development cycle: the Code Optimization Phase.
In that phase we will specifically target PHP speed and security (as functionality will already be completely in place).
I will start by asking all Foliovision developers to read the article 40 Tips for optimizing your php Code. The top twenty or so are below.
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By Alec
WordPress |
Tuesday, November 6th, 2007
Firefox has a great search feature based on Command-F (Mac) or Control-F (Windows).
You get a cute little text box at the bottom of the screen which allows you to search the whole page.
Firefox Find - Command-F
Subsequently Command-G works just fine to take you down through the page.
Just ' (apostrophe) alone will bring up the Quick Find box. It looks almost the same but isn't. Quick Find only searches URLs (a nice extra almost undocumented feature).
Firefox Quick Find - ' (apostrophe)
If you want to do a Quick Find in all the text you need to use / (forward slash).
Very nice.
Great for Unix geeks. Quite harmless.
Not quite.
You can get caught in an edit box (think Gmail or forums) and be unable to type an apostrophe.
At this point, cut and paste won't work either.
If you press escape it will stop the QuickFind, but as soon as you press apostrophe again back is the Quick Find box.
It looks like either you can't use an apostrophe or you have to throw away your writing (a true story).
Not quite.
There are a few solutions all surprising and undocumented.
- Resize your browser window (the instant and wonderful solution)
- Type about:config in the address bar to access Firefox's hidden preferences and toggle "searchkeys.disable.all" to true
I haven't decided whether to leave the QuickFind on (now that I know how it works). I certainly don't think Quick Find should be on by default.
As iCannonBall writes:
The (') hotkey was activated for me every time I tried at use a contraction in Gmail, as with wberryiii.
How many non-savvy gmail/FF users out there are being forced to abandon contractions?
This is the kind of advanced feature which has less experienced internet users reverting back to Internet Explorer or Safari.
Too dangerous for road use.
Credit to Lifehacker writing up this Firefox feature albeit with a positive spin. The remedies are there in three pages of comments but are rather difficult to suss out. But in the end my long text box entry was saved and I hope yours will be too.
By Alec
IT |
Monday, November 5th, 2007
For this weblog, I am often obliged to escape HTML, i.e. so that you can read my HTML examples like this one:
<h3>WEB AND SEARCH SERVICES</h3> <ul> <li><a href="http://google.ca">Canadian Google</a>: http://google.ca</li> <li><a href="http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/">Yahoo siteexplorer</a>: http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/</li> <li><a href="http://ipinfo.info/netrenderer/">IE Preview</a>: http://ipinfo.info/netrenderer/</li> <li><a href="http://dan.hersam.com/tools/escape-html.html">Escape HTML brackets</a></li> </ul>
From here it's just a matter of copy and paste.
It's reall pain to do by hand, but Dan Hersam's escape HTML tool makes it a piece of cake. Normally I do it with BBEdit (actually with a plugin called TextSoap, but the function is easily created in BBEdit itself). But this looks simpler and is a lot more portable. Highly recommended. There for all Foliovision staff as well.
By Alec
WordPress |
Monday, November 5th, 2007
Switch to Phrase and Exact Match and Bring Down Your Cost Per Click and Cost Per Sale
Yesterday, I got an email from my acquaintance Andrew Goodman over at PageZero (author of the excellent 
Winning Results with Google AdWords) discussing issues with broad match in Google PPC management.
In August one of my clients had a horrible surprise (well we both did) where PPC costs skyrocketed - almost tripling for one week, with only about a 25% improvement in leads.
I got on it right away and called Google. The Google AdWords representative told me that thanks to our great quality score we'd qualified for "expanded broad match". Although Google says that they are against get rich quick schemes and fake sweepstakes in AdWords, this move is straight out of that shady playbook.
Sure, we'd "qualified". Qualified to pay three times as much for just a fraction more business.
"So how do we turn it off?" I asked.
"You can't," she answered.
So what did I do? My clients had been making money on this campaign and they wanted to go back to doing so. So I eliminated all broad match phrases from all our campaigns. That left some holes in the campaigns so I added some additional phrase matches to compensate, i.e.
broad match:
French DVD films
became phrase match:
"French DVD films"
"DVD French films"
"films French DVD"
"DVD films French"
"French films DVD"
As you can see it takes six phrase matches to cover a single three word broad match. With longer phrases, there are clearly phrases which are more likely than others so it's not all that intimidating.
A bit of a pain in the neck, but eminently doable (Splutweb's keyword permutation tool is free and speeds the process).
The result was worth it. Our advertising costs dropped in half (about one quarter or one fifth of what Google was serving us with expanded broad match).
With expanded broad match our CTR went way down. So not only were we getting lots more lousy clicks, we were now paying far more per click. When that CTR went down, advertising costs soared.
How about the sales? Well, they are down about 20% from what we had pre-expanded broad match. They are down about a third from what we had with expanded broad match.
Here's what those numbers might look like with and without expanded broad match.
| Match Type |
Cost |
Sales |
CPS (cost per sale) |
| original Broad Match |
$4600 |
480 |
$9.58 |
| with Expanded Broad Match |
$8400 |
600 |
$14.00 |
| Phrase/Exact Match only |
$3500 |
680 |
$5.47 |
So in the end, Google did us a favour by penalising us for one week with expanded broad match. They weaned us off of broad match altogether.
If you want to make money with AdWords, just don't use broad match.
The two interesting forms are phrase match which is created by putting quotation marks around your phrase "french DVD films" or exact match which is created by putting square brackets on your term [french DVD films].
Anything other kind of match and you are taking money out of your children's education fund and subsidising Google's purchase of YouTube.
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By Alec
Internet Marketing |
