Mental notes to myself

I was trying not to write about facebook but it came to a point that it’s a good example for my post.

Classic web advertising for banners (in some cases text links) are still paid by impressions. Like the banners on the left column of Facebook pages, everytime user changes a page, an ad is shown, and the advertiser is charged per 1000 impressions. Everybody knows that there is nothing interesting with this.

Facebook, some weeks ago has changed their photo gallery to an ajax photo gallery.
Everytime you see a photo and start browsing to the other photos, without refreshing the page, an Ajax call was done and new photo was shown on the very same page. There was no refresh, therefore the rest of the page -as well as the banner on the left- were not changed.

Facebook recently switched back to their old way. One photo is 1 page view again. I wondered why? It was really obvious. They’ve lost major page views with just this change. On the old system, people were rapidly viewing photos spending (in most cases) no more than 15 seconds per photo. For an album of 20 photos, it was an easily generated 20 page views for them. New system, slowed down the page views but now the users were spending more time on the same page with the same banner. Still with the old metric, 1 page view for 20 photos.
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Nobody denies the benefits of testing and especially unit testing.
However I’m still having hard time understanding the baised testing methodology of phpunit or other automated unit testing frameworks.

In test driven development, programmer writes a test then fills in the code to make the test pass. I find this extremely baised.
Alternatively, I find coding baised test cases that can cover the code 100% gives the developers a false sense of safety. This is rather a phylosophycal discussion than practical.

For complex scenarios of testing, can unit testing cover everything efficiently? How efficient is to find and write the correct test cases that test everything throughly? Does any company have the time and money for this (or they are willing to pay for their testers to write code for 100% coverage) ?

I really like the idea of php unit and automated tests. However for web, I’m still for the black box testing, if there is a good way of analysing the efficiency of blackbox tests.
Feel free to comment.

Updated: typos

I was reviewing the formula 4C + V + P = Web 3.0

This is what I think:
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I’m trying to understand how google handles the duplicate contents and wondering why some sites are luckier than others, almost having an immunity for duplicate content issues.
Some collective sites like answers.com is seems to be immune to the duplicate content penalties.
See this page about smokey bear(PR4). Correct me if I’m wrong but all I’m seeing is a rip of wikipedia page(PR6) along with lots and lots of advertisements.
Who can really say that this page benefits surfers when wikipedia page is exactly the same thing. I guess answers.com is taking this duplication tactics to the roof. Google is also helping them to drive traffic by hardlinking to their content as the “definition” reference.
I’m expecting no comments from Matt Cutts :), just thinking laudly.

I’ve just read the Google Webmaster’s blog about the news on ask.com supporting Sitemaps.org’s sitemap format.
This is really a great news for all the people that like to be crawled faster and acurately.
For me the more interesting part about this news is that sitemaps.org’s proposal to include sitemaps into the robots.txt.

Simply you add a line into your robots.txt saying

Sitemap: <sitemap_location></sitemap_location>

This part is really cool but for site harvesters it’s an unbelivable tool. So you can handover the key to your site and web harvesters can crawl your site really easily because probably you’ve put all your site’s pages into your sitemap.

Sounds like a good plan in an ideal world. With all the cloakers and content scrapers you must be really smart not to be ripped apart.

My suggestion is to know who you’re serving the sitemap. Currently Google, Yahoo and Ask is supporting this sitemaps.xml and no other site has anything to do with it.
Here is a simple check you can add in the begining of your sitemap thing:

< ?php
    function botIsAllowed($ip){
        //get the reverse dns of the ip.
        $host = strtolower(gethostbyaddr($ip));
        $botDomains = array('.inktomisearch.com',
                                     '.googlebot.com',
                                     '.ask.com',
                             );

        //search for the reverse dns matches the white list
        foreach($botDomains as $bot){
            if (strpos(strrev($host),strrev($bot))===0){
                $qip= gethostbyname($host);
                return ($qip==$ip);
            }
        }
        return false;
}

if (!botIsAllowed($_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'])){
    echo "Banned!";
    exit;
}
?>

I’m sure everyone can get the idea of reverse dns and forward dns checking.
If I missed any decent site that uses the sitemaps let me know.

Note: If you’re still using static sitemaps (!) you can just include the xml after the code.

I started submitting some items to google base using the API.
It was all going fine until I realized some keywords were banned from the description, title or URL.
I was posting the free articles I have, about various subjects and my purpose was not spamming.
It’s kind of weird if you want to post a news about anti-online gambling and to get banned.

It’s a stupid keyword match, not a context match. This means you can’t really post anything about those keywords even if you’re writing against or for.

Here is the list I’ve found that is banned. Maybe there are more.

Update: I’ve found this one which is really weird: iraqi dinar

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I’ve found this interesting article on why the web2.0 applications fail (or will fail)

1. Focus on social instead of personal.
2. They solve too many problems, or try to.
3. They’re about making someone other than the user happy.
4. They sell it the wrong way.
5. Not in it for the long haul.
6. They show too much of what’s going on, and get gamed.
7. They don’t have an underlying business strategy of improving people’s lives.

nicely pointed out by Joshua Porter
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A Texas jury has awarded $133 million in damages to David Colvin, after finding Microsoft and Autodesk guilty of infringing upon Colvin’s two software patents for software antipiracy protection. Colvin’s company, z4 Technologies Inc., filed patents for ‘passwords and codes assigned to individual software copies to prevent unauthorized copies.’ Microsoft was ordered to pay $115 million, and Autodesk $18 million for infringement of the product-activation schemes. A spokesman from Microsoft contends that ‘Microsoft developed its own product-activation technologies well before z4 Technologies filed for its patent.’ Appeals are expected.

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I was digging for free images to use and found some site that you can grab some images for you blog for free.

here is my list:
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There is an interesting article about Web site development workflow at smileycat.

Worths checking:

• Concept
• Discovery
• Content development
• Design
• Development
• Launch
• Post-launch