nerdcereal.com

It was one year ago when I first installed WordPress and started blogging. Since then, I’ve written 58 posts and have gotten a total of 3 comments.

I still don’t have any readers and there are only a couple of pages that link here. I am getting a fair amount of search engine traffic and I’ve made a total of $1.13 in advertising revenue since May.

I’ve accomplished what I set out to do by this blog, which is to use it as an aid to learn web application development, that way, when it comes, stardom will just be a by-product. I’ve come a long way in my programming skills including PHP, MySQL and Javascript (with and without prototype.js). I’ve also got a full time job at a legitimate dot-com.

Nerdcereal still has no cohesive theme and probably won’t in the near future. But I’m still going to blog about anything, audience or not.

Photo-sharing website, Ringo, is one of AdBrite’s big publishers. I decided to give them a try because I want to be a pro-sumer and to see how it compares to Flickr, which I’ve been using previously.

The uploading process was easy. It lets you upload 4 at a time on the same page and as soon as one’s done, you can start another.

There’s no drag-n-drop organizer, instead you have to create albums and add pictures to them by selecting the appropriate album from a drop-down menu in the edit picture page.

I was a little creeped out when after I logged in again, it had somehow gotten a list of all the people I’ve ever emailed with my gmail account, asking if I wanted to invite them. There were random people on that list that I’ve only emailed once ever. I sent them a message to see what was up with that.

This product seems so backwards but it’s brilliant. With Stenographr, you write a letter online, it gets printed and mailed to an address. It’s meant for people who hate hand-writing letters to be able to send them to people who hate (or don’t know how) to check email (their example: grandmas).

A stamp alone will cost you roughly 32¢ (I don’t know—I never use them) and it’s annoying to buy a box of envelopes when all you really want is one.

Sending snail mail can show a touch of class by surprising your addressee with something tangible in her mailbox. It shows extra thought and it increases the odds that they’ll read it. It’s not perfect, though, because it loses the personal touch of distinguishable hand writing. And it still shows you’re lazy (and thoughtful).
I’d like to see more products, like cards and invitations and perhaps some way to include your handwriting.

The video pretty much says it all. Get started here or read the discussion at Techcrunch.

This is an open source set of free icons, licensed under the creative commons attribution 2.5. They’re downright sexy, if you’re into that sort of thing. (Did I just call icons sexy?) Don’t waste your time trying to make your own, because it will take too long and won’t look as good as these puppies.

Silk icons are perfect for any web app and make your site look professional and more usable. I haven’t seen them anywhere else but would wager that they will become a staple on most open source web applications.

I never wrote a post about this, but back in November, AdBrite began offering banner ads in addition to a whole gamut of other improvements for advertisers (dubbed AdBrite 2.0). It’s significant to me now because this has finally trickled down to this blog. Note the IAB-sized ad zone to the right, sometimes it has 5 text links, but if there’s matching image inventory, it will show a banner ad instead.

I came across www.ajaxload.info while searching for a spiral loading gif online. It lets you create a custom color gif to use while your page is working. It has all sorts of loading bars, similar to the Firefox and Internet Explorer page loading images. Unfortunately, I was looking for a larger one; perhaps there’ll be one in the future.

On a side note, check out Google’s horrible job at contextually serving its AdSense ad. It’s for: Loading Dock Levelers / Full line of loading dock leveler with load capacities of 160,000 lbs. Yeah… that’s a product that all web developers want.

I don’t know anything about this software, just wanted to log it for the future for whenever I need an open source ad-serving software. (I’ll have to get people to start reading this blog first).

Also, the “online advertising” section was a little lonely with only one post.

phpadsnew

Are you getting paid the market rate for your job? Find out at SalaryScout.com where you can search voluntarily and anonymously submitted profiles of employees’ skills, job requirements and compensation.

The site’s great idea but very basic (as it should be for a first release). It only allows you to search profiles by job title and view an employee’s location, experience, degree, company info and, of course, salary and benefits. The site is as anonymous as it can be and when asking for company info it asks for non-distinguishing features like company size, age, and annual income. But there’s nothing to stop the user from making a distinguishable username or submitting identification information on one of the various inputs.

My suggestion for the site would be to add better sorting and data analysis. Viewing each profile piecemeal is a relevant, but the information would be more powerful and compelling, from a statistical standpoint, if it were consolidated. This, however, is not an easy task and one with which HR departments struggle. Just the mere classification of jobs seems like a useless exercise, especially in a quickly changing world. SalaryScout offers the kind of qualitative salary information that you would get from asking a friend.

The founder’s goal was to prevent “corporate politics, experience, and age [from being] important factors in determining compensation,” which I think is noble. Compensation should be 100% skill based, but I doubt much will change. And even if those factors are made to be not important, negotiating will still be a large determiner of what you get paid. And since an employee’s value is ruled by supply and demand, which can fluctuate, SalaryScout is an invaluable resource to check from time to time, when you want to find out what your market value is.

You can type anything in a search engine and get results these days. For a long time I’ve had the habit of typing in phone numbers from calls I don’t recognize. Sometimes I get results, sometimes I just find the random string of numbers that appear in some other context. But the number would only show up if it appeared on a website somewhere in the internet cloud.

Apparently I wasn’t the only person doing these searches. Yesterday I came upon the site whocalled.us, which I dub “the Web 2.0 Phonebook,” (complete with the .us domain for “us”). It’s basically a database where you can comment about certain phone numbers and when they call you. Used ideally to combat telemarketing, stalking and all those ills.

The site is SEO’ed for success, especially since it’s the only web 2.0 phonebook of sorts. If a number’s on here, it will eventually show up in a search. And the more posts about a number, the better it will do.

Whocalled.us is great for numbers you don’t know, but it has the potential to be a breeding ground for vandalism of the numbers do know. Write posts about your friends’ and enemies’ phone numbers! Once the dirt is dished, this site will be just another method for stalking people online; all you need is a phone number. I’m going to go add mine right now…