Category: Code Comments

Adding Sense

Monday October 6th 2008

For about a year and a half I’ve had Google Adsense adverts up on WipEoutZone to try and generate some revenue. Not a killing, of course, just enough to help pay for the forums and hosting.

The traffic for the site ebbs and flows. If there’s a new WipEout game on the way or one just launched, then it swells and there’s an influx of new visitors. At other times the virtual tumbleweeds have been rolling down the virtual streets of what becomes a ghost town.

So, with that in mind it didn’t really bother me what the adverts made – every little helps and I was hardly going to retire on the profit. So, Google Adsense was trucking away for most of 2007, and then in early 2008 I get an email from some company who want to “put our ads on your site.”

Say wha’?

wipeoutzone

2 Comments

At Last

Tuesday July 22nd 2008

Just having a quick look at the CSS for the new Last FM design to see they’ve made great use of min-width, max-width and an inline css expression to create their pseudo-fluid layout. Those techniques have been in the toolkit for a long time, of course, but it’s only recently that browsers with reliable support have allowed web developers to wield them effectively.

Another excellent point of note is that their submit buttons are proper submit buttons, not some captured usability train wreck in the name of Web 2.0 that fails to work outside of the big three or four browsers. (Yes, Twitter, I’m looking at you.)

It’s good to see a small-ish company like Last FM create clean and usable site with intelligent code, whilst the likes of Yahoo! stumble about making their My Yahoo! pages increasingly unusable on anything other than a PC. Well done to them. 🙂

Linkage: Internationalisation with PHP, Apache & MySQL

Tuesday July 15th 2008

This article posted by Florian Eibeck on setting up php, Apache, and MySQL for dealing with international character sets is a good overview of the groundwork required to support a UTF-8 compliant web app.

As Florian rightly points out, there are non-UTF-8 safe functions lurking in php to upset the apple cart if you’re not aware of them. Although strlen() may not return the right result with double-byte characters, it doesn’t do your content any harm – there are plenty of others that do mangle double-byte content.

From my own experience, once the environment (Apache, MySQL) was set up correctly it’s those unsafe php functions that cause the most grief, both in tracking down the culprits and finding a work around. It is rewarding when it finally comes together, though – there’s something quite cool about seeing all manner of Scandinavian languages sitting on screen alongside Japanese and English in a web app created by your own hand. 🙂

apache, mysql, php, utf-8