Techniques Behind Modern Web
21 Feb
A few days ago I wrote about how to use Spottt and adGridWork for free advertising. Here is the latest update on performance of these networks.
It’s really interesting to see a variety of ad banners appearing on my blog, some are very creative and appealing. Spottt exposed the best performed ad after 2 days was for pud.com, simply with a squirrel (see picture below). It gained 129 clicked over 1,237 impressions (> 10% CTR, surprised).

Stats for my ad have been far from the best, just 27 clicks over 3,844 impressions (0.7% CTR). However, for 5,283 impressions my blog gave, others got only 25 clicks (0.47% CTR) so I don’t think performance of my ad is the worst
. Anyway, I may ask our designer to revise the ad for better CTR. How do you think?
Spottt network is growing fast these days and they had some system and scaling issues. Hope they can solve all soon.
I don’t expect much from adGridWork because I can only put it at lower fold on my blog. I’ve gained 3,996 impressions and 5 clicked (0.13% CTR) while given 2,308 impressions and 3 clicks.

Of course, text ad is much less attractive than 125×125 banner ad and site owners don’t often put adGridWork’s ads to high-priced real estate of their blog for many reasons.
Well, although adGridWork don’t work as well as Spottt it’s still OK. I understand that number of impressions gained is important too.
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20 Feb
For a heavy JavaScript web application, one of the most important things you should do before making it public is to obfuscate and compress JavaScript and CSS. The reason to do that is obvious: your app will be faster and safer.
When the web code is not optimized, it makes your visitors waste bandwidth and wait longer for the page to load. Besides, it makes your hard work easy to steal and reverse engineer.
I’ve tried some solutions for obfuscating and compressing…
19 Feb
Kontera — in case you haven’t heard of it yet — offers advertisers and publishers in-text advertising solutions. After placing Kontera’s JavaScript in your code, their system will automatically create in-text ads all through your site (I know the network after reading this post by John Chow).
Ideally, the in-text ads should be created in post content instead of sidebar content or other places in my blog. In Wordpress blog, Kontera’s system does pretty good job in detecting where main contents are…
18 Feb
I’ve joined two ad exchange programs served by Spottt and adGridWork because I like the idea of letting the blog adverts by itself rather than via paid reviews or Adwords campaigns.
I got Spottt’s service via a post by Mike Arrington of TechCrunch. The service is part of the Adbrite advertising network, but is being run as a separate brand.
Despite not-so-good reputation of Adbrite, I think this is really a smart idea. You place the Spottt 125×125 ad unit on your…
14 Feb

Recently, I’ve talked about a new kind of social worm and useless/annoying Facebook apps, all are about built-in rival marketing functionality and unclear policies on responsibility of Facebook applications.
In an effort to strengthen Facebook Platform policies, the Facebook Platform team has created two new pages on the Developer Wiki which are a must-read for those who want to succeed on creating Facebook apps.
First, the Platform Policy page that expresses Facebook’s philosophy on user experience, spells out the rules developers must follow, and…
13 Feb
Webnode.com is a newly-launched (web 2.0) service by a Czech startup which gained $1.2 M investment recently. WebNode’s service competes with what of well-known Google Page Creator and a number of other online website builders like Weebly, Jimdo, Synthasite, Sampa and RealEditor. After playing with it for a while, I know why WebNode has confidence to join so crowded market.
11 Feb
If Firebug is only reason to prevent you from upgrading to Firefox 3 (beta) you can do that right now because the latest version (1.1, beta too) of Firebug works nicely with it.
Among a lot of bug fixes, some great features of this version are:
Firebug is one…
8 Feb
Didier Girard releases 61 slides introducing why GWT is better solution for developing modern web apps.
Benefits to be highlighted are:
4 Feb
Well, you don’t need to be a Photoshop pro to create glossy text that seems very trendy today (Web 2.0 styles? hmm).

Here is a simple CSS trick to show you how to create gradient text effect with a PNG image (pure CSS, no Javascript or Flash). Just put an empty <span> tag in the heading and apply the background image overlay using the CSS position:absolute property. This trick works on most browsers: Firefox, Safari, Opera, and even Internet Explorer 6 (with a…
3 Feb
Everyone talks about Microsoft’s $45 billion offer for Yahoo these days and, on the other hand, it is seen by many here as just what is needed to repel another monopolist in the making: Google.

“We would prefer to see a healthy Microsoft and Yahoo,” says Geoff Yang, a venture capitalist with Redpoint Ventures and an early investor in Internet-based companies. “But I am starting to get worried about Google’s dominance, and in the absence of three healthy companies, I’ll take…