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17.01.12
Posted in Blogroll, News, Photos, Random Thoughts, Tech at 10:52 pm by Liv 
This goes out to all you ad skeptics out there who bang on about how useless the internet advertising is and how it should be banned / destroyed / 101′d etc: it is sad that not often advertising is delivered as a complement to the content being viewed, and as such it doesn’t come across as an intrusive piece on the page. However, when it happens, it creates something useful!
I have just experienced something like this just now, looking at some technical article online — and even though I worked for Vibrant Media before, there’s no hidden agenda in highlighting this ad unit I spotted as one such piece of great advertising. (I know I slagged them off in the past as well, hope they don’t take it personally : guys, I’ve slagged off Google more than you, so don’t read too much into it! 
)
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29.10.11
Posted in Blogroll, Tech at 12:59 pm by Liv
Since I’m going through the old website and resurrecting pages which seem to be still sought after by visitors to my website (I can tell this based on search engines terms they use and what they search for then on my website), I’ve come across this old one, talking about optimizing the loading speed of a web page. I think it’s worth dusting this one off, as I am still seeing this sort of “mistakes” applied to tons of sites out there. This touches also a bit on the bandwidth optimization I wrote about ages ago, so even though it’s an old post I thought worthwhile re-posting this again.
If you have ever used any of the online optimization tools (www.websiteoptimization.com springs to mind) then you must have noticed that the recommended size for a CSS file is 4080 bytes! That’s not too much you would argue, and indeed, on some big sites you might need more than that. The reason for that is so it fits into fewer “higher speed” (basically 3 x 1k TCP/IP packets) which means the browser will finish loading the CSS before it finishes loading the page itself, thus by the time the whole contents of the page becomes available (or even parts of it), the browser will know how to render it already. If the CSS takes longer to load, you will notice that the page might be rendered first with the “default” (read “browser built-in” stylesheet) and then once the CSS is loaded the styles would be applied to the page thus triggering an annoying flickering and possibly a few screen refreshes — not the most pleasant experience for your visitors!
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10.10.11
Posted in Blogroll, Random Thoughts, Tech at 6:11 pm by Liv
Mike Nolet of AppNexus started a 2-part webinar on scaling their advertising business and I am glad I followed the first part (and I will definitely be there for the 2nd part!) as some interesting things came out of that. (As a note, for those who are interested, Mike has more details on internet advertising in general on his blog mikeonads.com and you can find more details about these webinars here.) I spoke with Mike after the webinars and he was kind enough to let me publish some of the slides on my blog together of course with my personal opinions on some of them. As I said, you will find the full slides (and not just my screenshots) for free here: https://student.gototraining.com/…2416 or from Mike’s blog.
There is no question that the AppNexus platform is nothing short of complex — at around 14 billion ads transacted a day (Mike will have the precise figures) this is nothing to be sniffed at! But when building something like this, one has to understand from the beginning the challenge ahead. Your project managers will show you the basic equations which tell us that more people in your tech team means more man-hours; and also that more features/complexity means more man-hours too; and just as well more customers mean more man-hours (you have to develop and adapt for customer needs, support the customer and all these technical issues cost you man-hours too!). But what they miss out quite often is that when you bring all these coordinates together, the man-hours spiral out of control! That’s why I was pleased to see that it’s not just me who observes that, as Mike included this into his slides:
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20.01.11
Posted in Photos, Random Thoughts, Tech at 12:36 pm by Liv
Just came across this from Kontera — another one of the ahem “in-text advertising leaders” alongside Vibrant Media and others — can these ads get more in your face than this?
I mean, it’s bad enough for the in-text solutions the fact that they exploit the accidental hovers over their keywords, which I find quite annoying (and it was one of the areas in Vibrant Media we tried to address constantly in order to improve the user experience) — but this one goes further: first of all the ad unit is huuuuuuge! I didn’t take a screenshot of my whole screen as I use quite a high resolution and as such you would have to scroll the image to see my whole screen, however, I can assure you that we’re missing only about 10-20% at the browser window at max — so you can judge for yourself how big the ad unit is! Secondly, they showed the very same ad twice in the same paragraph! That’s always a bad idea from a user perspective as it develops a user fatigue very quickly, so even users that might have been tempted by the ad on the first view, seeing the second one (probably by accidently hovering over the keyword) will just annoy the user and in most cases cancel the initial intention to click on it. And on top of it the Kontera ads have the bad “habit” of remaining on page for a while after user has moved the mouse — so you can see for yourself straight away that the outcome is user fatigue (same ad), user annoyance (takes over a large “realty” of the page — even more so when there’s 2 of them open at the same time! — and also the ad units remain on the page for a long period of time) and ultimately decreased CTR (each such page will generate 0 clicks per 2 adviews so your CTR will be decreasing rapidly for this campaign!). Not to mention that it would have been a fair chunk of bandwidth to serve that campaign that costs Kontera money. Seriously, have these guys have a product manager who approved this? If that’s the case and I was them I’d fire his bad ass right away … but that’s just me! :p
And here’s the big boo-boo
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09.09.10
Posted in Tech at 9:36 am by Liv
One of the common tasks of setting up a production environment in your datacentre is setting up monitoring of your servers. This is quite often overlooked (“our application doesn’t have bugs and doesn’t crash!”) until hell breaks loose. At this point the damage is done and 9 times out of 10 is irreparable. (If you get a call from a client telling you your app has been messing up their website and as such their traffic for the last 24 hours its unlikely you’ll see them again!)
The thing is I am yet to find a monitoring system that works really “out of the box” and is easy to configure – and I think that has a lot to answer for the occasional lack of monitoring nowadays. I totally symphatise with sysadmins who are lumped with the task of setting up a monitoring system – because what makes sense to chose? The “best of breed”? Open source? Cobble together some scripts in a scripting language of your choice? Ask developers to change or implement some code in order to provide JMX hooks or SNMP traps? What about historic data? And the list of questions goes on.
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