Introduction

OK, now I did promise you some information about my new job, so here goes. First off we need a little background information.

How It All Started

Sometime back in October of 2006, during my last semester of school, a Software company came to my school to recruit programmers. They are situated in Texas and they provide a Software Package for companies in Texas. They have about 85% of the market cornered, so business is really good. Business is so good that they got a new client in the state of Washington. For this client, however, they were doing a complete rewrite of their software from Visual C++ 6.0 (with all that MFC stuff) to a .NET product written in C#. So they were looking for programmers to work on the new stuff. So they were going from university to university looking for some programmers to handle the new contract.

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Introduction

Ever wanted to clock your website’s speed? Of course you have. If you’re any sort of Web Developer you’ve used Web Page Analyzer in the past and you’ve probably gotten by with it. There’s a new AJAX tool called WebWait, which does a similar job except much, much cooler. I mean, after all it’s AJAX right?

WebWait is unique is many ways.

• One of the nicest features is that you can set it to perform multiple runs at specified intervals and take an average of all of them.
• It is, of course, browser independent since it doesn’t exactly run on your system.
• It handles cookies and authentication from within your browser. If you log into a page and copy a URL from an authenticated session, then you can track these load times. This is one option that I’ve never seen before.

Why I Still Use Web Page Analyzer

Although there are these cool features of WebWait I still rely on Web Page Analyzer for a lot of things. My first problem is that WebWait does not give an estimated speed.

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For most of my real quick image editing I usually use Paint.NET. That’s for when Photoshop is overkill and I’m not really a Gimp man, sorry. And of course MS Paint, or whatever it’s called now, it’s going to cut it, ever. But what do you do when you’re not home and away from your normal tools? Well I just use Paint.NET on my flash disk, but that’s another story.

Here is what normal people do: Snipshot. Here are some of the greatest features:

• Import from any website or upload your own pictures
• No need to download anything. Runs totally in a browser
• Save files as GIF, JPG, PDF, PNG, or TIF
• Crop, rotate, resize
• Contrast, brightness, saturation, sharpness and hue
• Files up to 10 MB

One feature which deserves a little more explanation is the Bookmarklet they provide. Save this bookmark to your browser’s favorites and anytime you’re browsing on a website and see a picture you’d like to edit, click the Bookmarklet. It brings up the Snipshot website with a list of all images on the page. Just click one and edit away.

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First off, let me apologize for the many weeks of no posts. I’ll give you some more information later, but basically I got a new job (yaaaaay) and I had to move about 150 miles to search for apartments and all the stuff that goes with it. That, coupled with no internet connection and being dead broke didn’t leave much time to get on the internet.

Popularity: 3%

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For those of you just wiping the remnants of 2006 out of your eyes welcome to 2007. If it’s January 1st and it’s before daylight I hope you’re just reading this before you go to bed or something, because if you aren’t out with friends partying, I truly feel your pain. lol.

To the rest of you stumbling upon this post at a reasonable hour I have a great way to start out 2007 with some AJAX. The Register - RegDeveloper.co.uk has a nice step by step tutorial on Developing Web Applications with AJAX - Part 1. The topics include:

1. Overview of XMLHttpRequest
2. Installing Software
3. Configuring JBoss with MySQL Database
4. Creating an Eclipse Project

They use JBoss here as a Java backend. You can try this to begin with however as soon as you understand the tutorial, it should be clear how we can replace the Java backend with something normal like ASP or PHP. Or if you really like Java then go right ahead.

Enjoy the tutorial and once again: Welcome to 2007. Jah Guidance.

Popularity: 2%

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Introduction

I must say, JavaScript and I have had our love-hate relationship. Sometimes the reason I love it are the same reasons that I hate it:

• Variable Declarations are not necessary
• It does not compile

But officially, does JavaScript suck?

Why JavaScript Sucks

Fabien at Chase The Devil uses The Google Web Toolkit as his basis for claiming that it does suck:

Why would GWT be so well acclaimed if JavaScript was a good language. When you talk about GWT to someone (a developer preferably), the first reaction is often

Why JavaScript Doesn’t Suck

Now the guys over at Think Out Loud has a different idea about JavaScript. They claim that it doesn’t suck:

1. Just because some vendors are building tools to generate javascript code doesn’t mean the language sucks. If the language really sucked these tools wouldn’t even exist. …
2. If JavaScript was so horrible then you wouldn’t find libraries like the Yahoo UI kit, Mochi, Dojo, Scriptaculous, Prototype, and the many others out there. …

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Introduction

SEO Inc offers, guess what, Search Engine Optimization for your website. Their services include:

• Natural Search Engine Optimization
• PPC Advertising Management
• Web Analytics
• SEO Copywriting
• Optimized Press Releases

They also have interesting products like an SEO Toolbar, which analyzes SEO of a given website and an Engine Tracker, which tracks the progress of website over time. The toolbar is free and is pretty cool. It gives nice basic information in a convenient toolbar in your browser.

Credentials

They seem to have an impressive client list, including the Marriot Hotel and Microsoft. Not bad.

Judge a Book By Its Cover

Now you know I need to touch on the design of this site. First off, it’s pretty. It’s real pretty. Nice layout, some basic Flash in the upper right, nice and simple. A simple fixed-width design with a shadow. Just one problem though (you know I always find one), to me (and a lot of other designers) good SEO = Tableless Designs. So I don’t know exactly how much you should penalize these guys for the ugly mess of tables they have on their website. I feel that if you offer a service to webmasters your website should be a prime example of that service. After doing a Google Search for seo “search engine optimization” I got tired when I didn’t find them after 300 sites. Is this a reflection of their service, who knows. I mean after all Microsoft did use them.

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Introduction

Dclick Ads is another program, similar to Text Link Ads, where advertisers can buy links on different websites and publishers can sell space on their websites. Right now, since they’ve just launched, there are a number of very small and new websites that you can buy links on, but as time progresses, I’m sure this will pick up.

First Impressions

What can I say? It’s another link share program. Their main features include:

• Buy and Sell all Ad Types of advertising classic banner ads, standard text link ads or premium embedded links directly within the text content of web pages.
• DirectLink Technology for advertisers. Ads placed on publisher websites are directly linked to your website for maxium traffic and click thru performance.
• SmartCache Ad Serving Technology for publishers utilizing xml ad serving distribution. Maximum uptime and lowest system resources. No system downtime or delayed page loads.

Dclick Ads offers both Pay-Per-Click and Pay Per Impression system. Checks are mailed out every month and their appears to be no set minimum earning for mailing out checks.

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