New quit smoking guide

I just started a new quit smoking guide. I'm writing a complete set of steps and experienced focused in the (apparently) difficult task of give up the habit of smoke. I'm an ex-smoker, so I wish to help other people to achieve what I consider one of my best decisions I took ever.

Enjoy. ;-)

Beware of... Adsense Secrets

Overview of Adsense



One of the most remarkable events in the last few years has been the rise of Google as the web number one advertiser. The Adwords and Adsense programs makes thousands of millions of dollars every year. The former Internet advertising kings, it is, companies like Doubleclick, continues in the business but with pretty lower earnings compared to Google.

Adsense advertising program brings the opportunity to every web site, big or small, that matches some simple prerequisites to make some money. The difference of earnings between a classic affiliate program, like Doubleclick or the european Tradedoubler, and Adsense is pretty big, making Google undoubtedly hundreds of times better. There are several keys to this success. Some of them are the non-annoyance of text based ads, variety of advertisers and contextual significance.

The problem of Adsense Scams

Adsense is the best advertising program built today. It's a good revenue source for many honest webmasters. The problem is that many unscrupulous people and companies are trying (and achieving) to became rich with many kinds of fraud. There are several spam pages, spam logs, sites with stolen content, content less pages, and others that tries to attract many traffic and visits deceptively. The only objective of this sites is to make the user click on the ads, not to contribute the web anyway.

But there is another problem that we must be aware of: the Adsense scams. Many of them calls their selfs "Adsense Secrets". Many of them claims that Google is keeping the tips and tricks to make money in secret. My god. This is absurd!!!. Why want Google to do something like this?

So, believe me if I say that the only Adsense secret is that Adsense secrets does not exist. So, don't misuse your credit card buying those ugly PDF online Adsense Guides About How To Be Rich in Less Than An Hour And Buy Your First Yacht. Spend your 70-100 dollars in go dinner in a good restaurant, saving it or do whatever you like to do. 70 dollars wasted in an only screen book!!! This is a madness!!! Please, I love to read paper printed books.

If you are interested in Adsense and you'd like to read a book, buy a printed one in a classic library or in your favorite online store from a real and honest writer. Choose a realistic one, not a surrealistic that explains how to build an Internet Empire in two weeks.

Of course you can find many useful and FREE information in the web. Also the "secret keepers" (hahaha), it is, Google, has some very good pages and animated presentations that shows good ways to get the best from your Adsense ads.

Useful links:

• Google official advanced Adsense guide
  
• http://www.google.com/adsense The official website

Recommended book:

Make Easy Money with Google: Using the AdSense Advertising Program

Web design. Past, present and... future? (III)

Flash intros

One more example of time wasting and a great way to repulse your visitors is to build a heavy, nasty and boring flash presentation. It is a past web relic. Some time ago, it was in vogue to create a big presentation for almost every web site. Why? A way to exhibit web designers capability? Some need of pre-advertising the site? Anyway, flash presentations are annoying and absurd.

I said is a past relic... is it? Luckily, these days is less often to find a web site with a flash presentation but some times some appears. This is an example. A recently published Spanish site, http://www.futsalmaniasport.com, has a horrible presentation. It's very kind that the webmasters added a "skip presentation button". Thanks. But maybe will be more useful that they had put an "Exit this site and remember it for not entering anymore" button.

In other way, the "skip..." button is done in... FLASH. So, if you have not got a flash player, say goodbye. You will not see the site. It's a e-commerce site. So, search engines spiders will not be able to follow the content of the site.

P.S. My first web site included a very annoying presentation. I removed two weeks later. I confess. I'm also guilty.

Web design. Past, present and... future? (II)

Flash navigation bars (continuation)

In my last article I ended with the question: What's wrong with Flash? Short answer is "Nothing". Full answer is... This:

According to Macromedia statistics, near the 98 percent of internet browsers has some version of Flash player installed. If your web site have, let's say, 1.000.000 of visits per day, 2% are non-flash visitors, it is... 20.000 persons who cannot navigate inside your site!!!

The other problem is, how many flash enabled browsers has the version you require to view the navigation menu? If you created it with Flash 2004 and exported with default options, people with Flash 4, 5 or 6 will not be able to see your menu and maybe will be prompted with an alert dialog asking to install the last version. What happens if they don't know how or don't want to update? What if their computer has not enough administrative privileges to install plug-ins? They will see nothing.

Conclusion, if you want your site be accessible for everyone, use HTML links for the navigation. It's easier to implement, you guarantee that every browser will render it correctly and you can customize it many with CSS styles.

My advise is to use Flash movies only in multimedia sections, not in vital parts of your site.

Complete flash sites

This is one of my favorite mistakes. I must confess that I built my first web site ENTIRELY with flash, with annoying animations everywhere and extremely difficult to maintain and add new content.

There are many disadvantages with an only flash site. First, as I said before, management and update it's a lot heavier duty, usually requires a bigger bandwidth (my site was almost one mb) and search engines bots will not be able to record any content.

I still remember Terminator 3 movie official web site (doesn't exist now, even the domain name has expired). Was spectacular but... it took almost one minute to load in my primitive 256kb DSL. I didn't want to test it in my modem. A great example of how to lose part of your audience... BEFORE THEY COULD SEE ANYTHING OF YOUR SITE!!!

So, it's better to use your valuable time in creating HTML (or XHTML, better) pages that everyone will be able to access and then decorate it with the help of that great technology named CSS. Use flash but use it moderately and only when it's necessary. For videos, multimedia and music is perfect.

The evidence: Macromedia/Adobe web site

Even in Macromedia (later acquired by Adobe) changed their flash menus by some cute CSS/DHTML menus. Bravo!!!!

Decision about this site

As I said in and earlier post, I was looking for a good CMS to expand this site and make a full featured portal. Well. I tried more open source CMS's like Mambo and PostNuke. They gave me many problems, so my personal conclusion is that they were making lose my time instead of save it. Difficult administration, lack of documentation and many database problems is what I found.

So my final decision is to maintain the basis of the site as a blog and add some static content (about page and that kind of stuff) and a Forum.

For the forum I'm testing Snitz Forums 2000, that runs on IIS/ASP Classic and can use SQL Server and My Sql databases. I choose Mysql because my shared hosting plan gives me only a SQL Server database (that I plan to use for another project) and FIFTEEN Mysql databases, so the decission is clear to me.

I made some tests and everything looks ok. So, soon I'll publish the forums.

Please, stay tuned.

Web design. Past, present and... future?

Many things has changed in the last years. Let's review some of the last design tendencies and how sites looked in the past and... EVEN today. Many sites lives in the past with obsolete yet annoying tecniques. Let's go:

Java applet menus

Some years ago were very popular the navigational Java Applets, like Anfi Java. Some of them are really spectacular, with beautiful animations and effects. But not everything was cute. Some of us still remember those horrible "hover buttons" applets generated by the not less awful program named Frontpage.

Except for that uninteresting stuff from FP, ¿where was the problem with Java Applets? Some years ago almost every Windows based computer had a built-in Java Virtual Machine and Applets displayed well virtually everywhere.

But since the release of Windows XP, Microsoft was forced to remove its VM, allowing to download it separately. The next year, even that option was forbidden. The main fact is that in one way or another, one must download a JVM if order to display Java Applets. This download, only available today at Sun Microsistems, is up to 16 Mb. A bit large. Huge if you still use a dial-up connection.

In summary, if a user does not see the navigation, can't access to the rest of the site. Even worse, search engine bots cannot index your site.

Flash menus

Another old fashion way to navigate a site was Flash menus. Actually Flash is substituting many of the functions that traditionally were done by Java Applets. What are the keys for this success? Let's talk a little about it:

• Macromedia (now Adobe) Flash redistribution is not as restrictive as Java Virtual Machine. It's far more easy to add a button link to Flash Player download in your web site than a Java VM download. That Sun's incredible commercial mistake inclines the balance a bit more in favor to Flash. If you want to publish a Java Download button, must apply a form speaking about your personal data, your URL to be reviewed and later approved (or rejected, who knows...) by Sun staff , etc, etc. The reward, the privilege to do some free advertising to a Sun product, doesn't compensate the effort of complete that boring procedure.
• Java is undoubtedly one of the best programming languages ever created but it's very complex. It's an all purpose tool and has not visual aids for creating animations. That means that anyone that wants to create multimedia content in an applet must be almost a programming guru, In the other side, Flash is a full visual vector graphics tool relatively easy to use. Advanced users and programmers can also use it's script programming language, it is, ActionScript, very secure and not too difficult to learn.
  
• Many systems administrators have disabled Java Applets int the browsers due to the last security bugs. In theory, Java applets cannot access to any computer resource outside the browser and screen. Cannot access to disk or similar critical resources. This is a good security measure but many bugs overrides this. Although Flash had also some security issue, was less frequent.
• Java VM is about 16 Mb to download. Flash player is LESS than 1 Mb (about 600kb)
• In the last versions, Flash advanced users can use form elements similar to forms used in web or desktop environments like drop down menus, text boxes, submit buttons, etc. This competes directly with applets AWT controls and makes Flash more than a multimedia plug in. From now, you can also build complex applications.

So, what's wrong with flash?

I'll discuss in my next post.

Trying different open source CMS's

Between yesterday and today, I've tried some interesting Content Management Systems (CMS's) because I'm thinking about evolve this site into a more complex portal, not only a blog.

My experience was not very good. Instead of saving work and time, my experiments were just the opposite:

• DotNetNuke: uses the .Net framework plus a SQL Server database. Apparently, looks impressive, it's the most easy to use and has many built-in modules, plus others you can download and install. It has many advanced features like news, forums, polls, users online windows, etc. The problem is that I was configuring and trying and I got many problems. Unexplainable, all my non home pages, started to fail when accessing unlogged. Don`t know what was the problem.
• PHP Nuke, maybe the most famous CMS system in the world. Written for Apache and Mysql, I also tried. The installation was easy and flawless but problems started soon. After logging-in as administrator, I couldn't try any personalization feature because every time I pointed to another admin page, I was logged out. Very discouraging.

Firefox IE Tab extension

As I said in my previous article, a professional design must work fine in every modern browser. So, you must test it on Firefox and IE. But this may become a heavy duty. Must have two browsers running simultaneously... until now.


Just install Firefox IE Tab extension and you'll can test all your pages just in the same browser. Better than that: you can have one tab running Mozilla's Geko engine and the next tab running Internet Explorer, so you can compare extremely fast the screen result.

As you can se at the left image, these are some of my favorite extensions. At the middle, we have a firefox icon. Well, this is IE Tab. If you double click this icon, the rendering engine will swap to IE.

With a little help of Firefox

Let's start talking about Firefox but not as a browser but as a web development tool. Firefox 1.5 was simply fantastic but 2.0 (now in beta development) is impressive.

When you are designing a web site, of course you must test the results in many different browsers. Of course, you may not forgive Firefox.

As web designer, you can also get many advantages by using Firefox, like:

• "View source". A colored interface much more useful that IE's view
• Many extensions that helps many in design and marketing stuff (I'll comment in next post)
• Tab browsing. It's a question of taste but, in my opinion, it's far more comfortable to compare and visit multiple web sites in a tabbed view that filling your desktop with tens of browser windows. Now IE 7 will come with this feature. But, if you don't want to use a beta program or just don't like Internet Explorer, you have nothing to wait for. Start using Firefox NOW.
• It's faster
• It's more CSS compatible

Well. In my next article, I'll talk about my favorite extensions. Believe me. Those makes me save a lot of time.