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Using statcounter.com concurrently with Google Analytics

These two days I got really puzzled with Google Adsense. My page impressions were really high but apparently no clicks were registered on my page for the adsense. I wonder what went wrong. So ended up I started researching over the internet about Google Adsense click not registered. This was when I chanced upon this new tool called statcounter.com

This is a real time tool that shows you where visitors came into the site from and where they exited the site to. One of the really useful things about this is the fact that they could help track if someone actually clicked on the links in your adsense. This does provide a counter as to whether Google Adsense if just simply faking your click rates.

I would not have changed upon this site had I not found my adsense revenue to be suspiciously non-existant

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Alternatives to Google Adsense

I came across this very goood and informative article on online advertising revenue streams and hence copied and paste the whole thing here for personal references

Google AdSense is the most popular contextual advertising network currently available on the internet. Many webmasters and bloggers earn money through this service. It’s available for anyone completely for free, AdSense is supported internationally – wherever you are!

Six Good Google AdSense Alternatives and Replacements

But, unfortunately, many users simply can’t join this service – since Google don’t want to approve their requests. Also, many bloggers and webmasters are banned from Google AdSense, because they have broke Google’s terms. Once you get banned from Google AdSense – it’s very hard to re-enable your request!

Fortunately, there are many similar contextual advertising networks available for free. Of course, all of them allows you to earn money per click, like Google AdSense do.

6 Google AdSense Alternatives

1.) Clicksor – Clicksor is very good and quality Google AdSense alternative. Allowing you many advertisement types at good click-through-rate. Allowing you to use Contextual and many other ad types that are not supported by Google. (read review)

2.) AdBrite – One of the oldest and most popular advertising networks on the net. Advertising through AdBrite gives your visitors opportunity to buy advertisements on your sites easily. In other way, giving you related contextual ads to earn money through. (read review)

3.) Bidvertiser – Bidvertiser is professional contextual advertising network. Offers you only contextual and feed advertisements. Very similar to Google AdSense. Giving you opportunity to earn money by displaying related textual ads on your site. (read review)

4.) Chitika – Chitika is founded in 2003. It is the leading blog advertising company with a network of thousands of blogs and websites and hundreds of name brand advertisers and merchants. Offers you to earn money by using many ad techniques and options. (read review)

5.) Text Link Ads – This service is not actually contextual advertising service. TLA allows you to earn money by selling text and inline text advertisements on your site or blog. Choose price and sell textual advertisements on your site with this service. (read review)

6.) Yahoo! Publisher Network – Yahoo are currently playing catch up to Google and are trying to release their own context sensitive advertising service. This promises to be an excellent alternative to Google Adsense but in reality is likely to be a simple copy with the same restrictive terms and conditions as Google, including $100 minimums on payouts. Right now it’s not available internationally.

Related posts:

  1. Ways to Make Money through Google AdSense
  2. Chitika vs. Google AdSense
  3. Clicksor – Online Contextual Ad Network
  4. Google AdSense for Domains is Available
  5. Where to Place Google AdSense Ads
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Improving the performance of Ajax on ThingsToDoSingapore.com

Recently I started working on Things To Do Singapore again.

Apparently the javascript libraries were getting quite thick and this was affecting the loading of the interface.

There is the use of the following :

  1. Xajax Library
  2. Jquery Library
  3. Google friends Connect Api
  4. Facebook Connect Api
  5. SWFUpload Library

After much observation I realised the SWFUpload Library sometimes takes too long to load and fails as well causing the whole interface to fail loading at time seriously affecting usability of the site. Perhaps this might be to cause of the high bounce rate I observer from my Google Analytics of 80%.

I spent this morning thinking how to go about solving this problem and this was the method I came to

Javascript library should be classify into two groups as critical and non-critical to user experience.

The Xajax Library, jQuery library are considered critical to user experience

The Google Friends Connect library as well as the Facebook Connect library are not often employed. though these two library are too tightly integrated with the core achitecture. Perhaps it was a bad design choice.

SWFUpload is not often used by other users and hence rarely employed.

Having done the proper classification, I next work  on loading the SWFUpload asynchronously after the other library and interface has loaded. This in face drastically reduced improved useer experience. It reduced user waiting time as well as at the same time reduced the error rate of the loading interface.

This was how I did it.

jQuery(document).ready(function() {

loadScript(“http://thingstodosingapore.com/swfupload/swfupload.js”);
loadScript(“http://thingstodosingapore.com/swfupload/swfupload.queue.js”);
loadScript(“http://thingstodosingapore.com/swfupload/fileprogress.js”);
loadScript(“http://thingstodosingapore.com/swfupload/handlers.js”);
//alert(“swf loaded”);
});

function loadScript(sScriptSrc) {
var oHead = document.getElementById(‘head’);
var oScript = document.createElement(‘script’);
oScript.type = ‘text/javascript’;
oScript.src = sScriptSrc;
oHead.appendChild(oScript);
}

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Picking up Photoshop on the Run – YouTube

Recently I started using Photoshop intensively. More and more a need is there to do so in order to keep cost low.

Thankfully one night while having supper with Pasha, he unknowingly commented on how photoshop tutorials were so easily available over YouTube. What he said was totally true. You could just pretty much go about learning any aspects of a software you want to pick up over YouTube nowadays. No longer do you have to read through lines of ambiguous written instructions to understand what the hell is going on.

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inexplicable bug with cooliris

Recently I did an extension for ThingsToDoSingapore.com by getting it to display images on Cooliris.

All is going well on Firefox until I attempted to do the following on Internet Explorer

A php script basically redirects the browser to this location

http://www.cooliris.com/tab/#cs=11&url=http%3A%2F%2Fthingstodosingapore.com%2Fcooliris.rss&guid=288f5cc75ef1fbabd4e8bc27a3de59ab.jpg

Where one particular image is zoomed in on.

Apparently when cooliris loads up this URL gets redirected automatically to

http://www.cooliris.com/tab/#cs=11&url=http%3A%2F%2Fthingstodosingapore.com%2Fcooliris.rss instead.

This is a most puzzling scenario. I will over the next few days go about understanding this issue to see if there might be a possible solution to it.

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PHP set to further penetrate Enterprise solutions arena

What is Enterprise Application?
Enterprise Applications are software which provides business logic support functionality for an enterprise, typically in commercial organizations, which aims to improve the enterprise’s productivity and efficiency.

Characteristics of enterprise software:
Characteristics of enterprise software are performance, scalability, and robustness. Enterprise software typically has interfaces to other enterprise software.

Services provided by enterprise software are typically business-oriented tools such as online shopping and online payment processing, interactive product catalogue, automated billing systems, security, content management, CRM, ERP, Business Intelligence, HR Management, Manufacturing, EAI etc.

What is Scalability?
There are a number of different aspects of scalability. It always starts with performance, code maintainability, fault tolerance, and the availability of programming staff.

Why people has negative impression that PHP is only for small scale web-sites?
PHP is a language for the rapid development of dynamic Websites. It also has many features that are friendly to beginning programmers, such as the fact that it doesn’t require variable declarations. However, many of these features can lead a programmer inadvertently to allow security holes to creep into a Web application. The popular security mailing lists teem with notes of flaws identified in PHP applications, but PHP can be as secure as any other language once you understand the basic types of flaws PHP applications tend to exhibit.

PHP is an open source programming language that is widely popular on the web. However because PHP so popular in shared hosting environments, many people have an impression that PHP is only for small scale web-sites. This is patently untrue, and PHP is in use in many large scale web sites such as Yahoo, wikipedia and Lufthansa Online Ticketing for the creation of large web applications such as IMP.

Enterprises want to have specific assurances about a web technology they use in the following areas:

  • performance and fast development
  • reliability and security
  • extensibility – able to use industry standards to communicate with other software systems.
  • scalability – able to add additional servers as the load increases.
  • load balancing – ability to distribute the load so no single server is overloaded
  • high availability – ability to survive failure of server components transparently.

Conclusion:
To achieve high performance and scalability – it not only depend on language, it also depend on the developers.

Cited from Why not PHP for enterprise applications?

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Problems integrating SWFupload with Joomla

I am currently working on integrating the SWFUpload library with Joomla 1.5. All seems to be working well except till the portion whereby the file is uploaded.

I get the response by the system to do a login and this response is returned to me via uploadSuccess(file, serverData) method in the SWFupload handlers.js file. The session is not maintained apparently when I do the post.

I am currently referencing http://docs.joomla.org/Creating_a_file_uploader_in_your_component for possible resolutions to this bug.

Now I am heading off to work as the Dancing Christmas tree. Hopefully I would solve it when I get back in the evening.

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Extending Joomla to use Jquery

Recently there seems to be a lot of libraries that are being created using Jquery.

Joomla has been traditionally used with the  mootools library. Instead of using this library, I have opted to instead use the Jquery library.

I created a component for myself and  loaded the jQuery library into one of the sub folders of this Joomla component. I further instructed Joomla to load the javascript file.

Keeping my fingers crossed I wrote this syntex in the template file

<script>

jQuery(document).ready(function(){alert(‘hello world’)});

</script>

And Eureka!! It worked. Now I will go on further extending Joomla to create a very user friendly component for my clients which have been facing lots of problems with the counter-intuitive Joomla Administration interface.

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Working on WinterInVenice

Apparently it seems Winter In Venice has been assigned a page rank of 0 by google and has been delisted from all search results on google. Interestingly this happened after we solved the session problem on fatcow hosting service.

So the thing we are attempting to do now is to get some really good quality linkages in from good sites. Fingers crossed. It is time to go site hunting.