You might have seen ads on this site that deal with stuff like computers, ipods, game consoles, cameras, etc. These are ads by Chitika. Chitika is the latest company to jump on board the whole website advertisement band wagaon, but the difference is they, unlike a lot of others, do it very well.

Here we go: You choose from various sizes of ads and you give it a list of keywords for which the ads will rotate for. They pay every month to your Paypal account as long as you have accumulated more that $10.00. If not, the payment is defered until you make $10.00.

Daren over at Problogger.net says:

I’ve been getting quite a few excited emails from readers who have signed up for the Chitika eMiniMalls that I reviewed last week. There has been a lot of positive feedback so far from those who I’ve referred over to the program with some people earning some significant money from it so far (including ‘Rachel‘). There have also been a few (less) emails from bloggers who have failed to see them as effective.

If you have a website/blog, don’t miss out on this. Check out Chitika ads.

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Here’s a little intro what I’ve been working on at my Job for the past couple months.

AJAX stands for Asynchronous JavaScript And XML for web development. Basically you use a some JavaScript to get down below the browser level and control HTTP “GET”s and “POST”s and stuff like that. It’s used by stuff like Google Maps and Google Suggest and GMail. What it enables is basically background activity without the user’s knowledge. This means that you don’t have to do anything really for things to happen. No need for clicks or form submissions and most importantly, no need to reload the entire page when processing data. You can read more about it here.

Now how does this tie in with my job? For the past couple months I’ve been working at a company which runs a legacy program written in ANSI C. The task I’ve been assigned is to enable web access to this program from a normal web browser. On the server end we’re running FASTCGI. This enables a process (the program) to be constantly running while being accessed from the web. Normal CGI programs and PHP scripts are run only one time and then die. FASTCGI avoids that problem.

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I finally took it upon myself to install WordPress. I mean I’m just been hearing so much about the darn thing, I figure, why not give it a shot. I’ve been using Mambo (now renamed to Joomla) for a while. It’s a complete website CMS. I’ve been using it on a couple sites and realized sooner or later that most of my site simply boiled down to just a blog anyway. So I decided to give the actually blogging software a try.

It does seem rather light. I guess that’s not so much of a bad thing. There are a log of plugins for it though. Not a vast library like Joomla and very little tool integration, such as forums (phpBB, SMF, etc); but I guess that’s just not what it’s meant for. It’s for blogging and it seems to do this well so far.

I do like the fact that the templates are highly CSS based and the Google Sitemap plugin is incredible. It does URL rewrite stock (out of the box) where as for Joomla, you need to jump through a few hoops to get this done right.

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LinuxWorld Q&A with Lead Developer of Joomla!, Andrew Eddie
— In September, core developers of Mambo, the popular open source content management system, announced a fork of the project, called Joomla!, with virtually all active participants following the fork.

This is an interesting article. If any of you were wondering about the Mambo-Joomla split, here you go. One thing I forgot to mention is that Mambo is still in existence. I believe it is at the same version where it left off before the split. For me, it seems that Joomla is the way to go. Joomla is being developed by the same development team. And what makes the decision even easier is that most 3rd party developers have started making their Mambots, Modules and Components specific to Joomla.

This is what Andrew Eddie (Development Leader of Joomla) had to say in response to 3rd party products for Joomla:

I think this is the most powerful area of Mambo and will continue to be for Joomla! Whether you love it or hate it, somehow we have struck on a formula that allows people to easily develop extensions and this is a testament to our growth and popularity. It’s easy to develop for Joomla! and we want to continue this heritage, if not make it even easier.

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A Halloween special edition of phpBB has been released today. The changelog includes, but is not limited to:

[Fix] incorrect handling of password resets if admin activation is enabled (Bug #88)

[Fix] retrieving category rows in index.php (Bug #90)

[Fix] improved index performance by determining the permissions before iterating through all forums (Bug #91)

[Fix] wrong topic redirection after login redirect (Bug #94)

[Fix] improved handling of username lists in admin_ug_auth.php (Bug #98)

[Fix] incorrect removal of bbcode_uid values if bbcode has been turned off (Bug #100)

[Fix] correctly preview signature if editing other users posts (Bug #101)

[Fix] incorrect alt tag on generated search images in groupcp.php, viewtopic.php and usercp_viewprofile.php (Bug #102)

[Fix] consistent forum ordering in all dropdown boxes (Bug #106)

Popularity: 12%

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I first came across AJAX at my job. I was trying to give an application some Web capabilities and I realized that the normal way the browser works was very limited. In an article at News.com, Martin LaMonica has also realized the limits we are at:

At the moment, Web pages are limited, compared with most desktop applications. AJAX frees Web pages from the clunkiness they suffer from by making them more interactive and so more functional, Web developers say.

Ajax stands for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML. In my current application, I’m soft of ignoring the XML portion, but the ability to request information Asynchronously from the server is an insane advantage. Google has been taking advantage of Ajax for a long while now. We see it in GMail and in Google Maps. You can tell when Ajax is at work because a key effect of Ajax is new browser requests without the browser refreshing, sometimes without the user’s knowledge. Take GMail for instance; your inbox is frequently refreshed in the background while the user is on the same page. Or Google Maps; when the user moves around on the map, new map data is requested on the fly. Lately Yahoo has also jumped on the Ajax train with their own map service. A webmessenging service called Meebo also uses Ajax beautifully. Ajax is the way of the future and I am very happy that I’m going to be part of that.

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Ok, we’ve all heard of Mambo CMS (Content Management System). It’s a PHP package which many use to set up and manage websites. I’ve been using Mambo on a couple of my sites in the past and frequently on sites done for customers who wish to perform their own updates to their sites but have little web development skills. Although Mambo has a bit of a learning curve, once you do the workings down, anyone can update the site in a nice WYSIWYG editor straight from the website itself.

From Mambo spawn Joomla!!! In a nutshell, there were some differences between the management team and the development team on the Mambo project, so the development guys decided to leave and create their own product, Joomla

Joomla! is a production of Open Source Matters, the same team that brought you the award winning Mambo Content Management System. OSM has taken their final stable version of Mambo (4.5.2.3), given it a spring clean and named it Joomla! 1.0 In addition, several small features that were going to be released in Joomla! 1.1 have been brought forward and included in this release.

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