I want to know who is clicking on the google ads that are placed in the middle of paragraphs, before the answer you need to find, and anywhere else they can be jammed on the web page? Okay, maybe I’m a touch intolerant of ad sense. But I have a good reason why. For example, I too fell prey to the lure of googles billions, thought I could make money and implemented google ad sense into the yellowfish website.

Hard as I would try, I could not get the ad sense placements to stop competing with the content. Now here’s where my tolerance started to go south. We are Yellowfish Technologies, an Information Technology firm. Ad sense decided to pick the word ‘yellowfish’ and proceeded to list out crap ads about water, feeding, fish types, yellow belly fish flounder and you name it. It was ridiculous to see this type of information being offered on our technology home front. The competitors it also advertised was another story. I removed ad sense from the Yellowfish site. I guess now I’m not such a big fan, but the bad news is, it continues to haunt me.

I am a victim. I really am. Bad google advertising makes me lose track of what I was looking for. Usually the rest of something interesting… When I see these odd ad blocks hogging up valuable real estate on the web page where the content suppose to be, I can’t believe they are in such big use. The ads are just plain distracting and side-track you. Honestly, I do not know anyone who would stop to click further on them. The Yellow belly fish flounder incident comes back loud and clear.

I am now convinced most people who use and those who over-use ad sense do not pay attention to what actually shows up on their site under these ads. I was having a victim moment the other day and noticed the link options very strange. I think it was out of irritation and to prove it’s all irrelevant stuff displayed in those ad sense links, but I clicked on a couple as an experiment. All 5 of the links I chose brought me to a page without graphics and that was just a series of more random links, too many choices about the same thing, with an occasional link that made a small amount of sense. It’s just as I thought…useless. Oh, and by-the-way, I never went back to that site and found another that delivered information not ads. I book marked it.

I know people are just trying to make an extra buck off google hoping someone clicks on one of them and earns them extra money, but geeze, good sites are falling prey and putting all google ads above the fold and the important stuff below. I can barely read what’s I came there for. To all you over-users of google ad sense, please evaluate if it’s worth switching out your business content that should be easy to find and read for ads on things generally irrelevant and out of your control. Do you really want visitors leaving your site to go somewhere else anyways?

Ok, I am all for video on a website. It’s interesting, visually stimulating and its fun to watch. EXCEPT when you arrive at a website and the video blasts off and startles you half to death. How dare they scare me like that? A few choice words later, while I try to get my heart rate under control from the sudden fright… I can’t help but find myself irritated at the disturbance as well as wonder why my speakers were set so loud. I think the use of video on a website and on landing pages are great when used appropriately. But you must allow the user to control when it starts, ends and how loud it will be. Set the default volume to a non-invasive level. Let the user adjust it to their liking. Asking how do you get the user to play the video and know it’s there if it doesn’t blast off? Make it interesting! Draw attention to the display, make the user want to push ‘play’. Use a giant ‘Play me button’ if you need to, but just don’t set the video on ‘auto-play’ with a volume level loud enough to wake moon men.

Keeping in philosophy of KISS, nginx is an awesome, simple web server. It does few things and does it extremely well.
It doesn’t do CGI but does proxy’ing and that makes it extremely useful as a front end web server. I recently had to implement an extjs based progress bar for large file uploads with nginx acting as a front end to a Rack/mongrel based application. Here are the steps for ubuntu.

Do not install nginx from the repo. Uninstall if it’s already installed.

apt-get remove nginx

mkdir -p /opt/downloads
cd /opt/downloads

Download nginx sources from nginx.net and unpack (I’m working with nginx-0.6.36):

tar zxf nginx-0.6.36.tar.gz

Download an untar upload progress module from nginx wiki

tar zxf Nginx_uploadprogress_module-0.5.tar.gz
cd nginx-0.6.36
./configure --prefix=/opt/nginx --add-module=/opt/downloads/nginx_uploadprogress_module
make install

This’ll install nginx in /opt/nginx

Configuration

open up /opt/nginx/conf/nginx.conf and add following lines:

http {
     client_max_body_size 30M; # adjust as per your need
     upload_progress proxied 1m;
 
     server {
         server_name my.server.com;
         listen 80;
         root /var/www/nginx-default/my-static-files;
 
         location /ajax {
             proxy_pass http://localhost:2300;
             proxy_redirect default;
             track_uploads proxied 30s;
         }
         location ^~ /report_file_uploads {
              report_uploads proxied;
         }
     }
}

This assumes  ‘/ajax’ is the backend application proxy.

In Javascript, to get progress bar going, send following AJAX message in a loop, after the form with file upload field has been submitted.

Lots of details are omitted since these are dependent upon your javascript library of choice (which, btw, for us is extjs).

var upload_id = 'MyUniqueID'; // upload_id must be unique for each upload session
this.send_ajax_message({
       url: '/report_file_uploads',
       headers: {'X-Progress-ID' : upload_id},
       method:'GET',
       success: function(r) {
              r = this.parse_ajax_response(r);
             if(r.state == 'uploading' || r.state == 'starting') {
                var percent = (Number(r.received)/Number(r.size));
                if(percent > 1.0)
                    percent = 1.0;
                 //show percent as you wish on your progress meter
                 // sleep for few seconds and send this ajax message again
             } else if(r.state == 'done' || r.state == 'error') {
                // kill your loop timer
                // finish your progress meter
             }
        }
});

Let me know if you’d like javascript fragment for extjs and I’ll post it but it’s relatively straightforward.

At Yellowfish, we specialize in web2.0 Ajax web application development using open source tools and modern software trends.