I got the following fault message periodically when running selenium tests.
“in place before new command open could be added”
This was happening because I was running java -jar selenium-server.jar -singlewindowmode
Some of the sites I was testing had breakout of frames code which ruins the single window programme. Run normally i.e. java -jar selenium-server.jar and everything will work ok.
Ok so this is a bit off topic but I received a new HTC Desire running on the latest Android software and wanted to get some scripting set up on it. It was really simple to get it up and running just go to the Android marketplace and download sl4a or download it from the google codes website.
Once you have SL4A is up and running open the app and click menu > Then go to View > Then go to Interpreters > Download whatever you want in regard to java, Jruby, php, perl etc. Once the interpreters are downloaded install each individually.
Running your first program
Go back into SL4A and click menu and then add script.
Select ruby and type in a filename at the top such as test.rb
type the following in the main page:-
puts ‘hello world’
press menu again and select save and run. You have a fully working ruby installation on your phone and a classic “Hello World” script to boot.
The power of the Android software has amazed me. I think it is only a matter of time before the Android completely takes over from the iPhone. It is in a different league and the open source software is exceptionally good.
The run up to Xmas is approaching and it is well known that 50% revenue is made in the last quarter. With this in mind we are helping authors set up their own PPC campaigns with Google Adwords. Google adwords is basically a service by Google in which you pay to have your advert and link displayed in the top two search results. The paid ads section and the next five or so down the right hand side. By bidding on keywords you can generate a great deal of traffic and develop a good return on investment.
We have enabled some calculation tools which takes reports from Google analytics, Google Adwords and Amazon and works out the target cost per click on key terms. It takes your orders and commissions and calculates how much you should be bidding on key phrases related to the product.
We will be developing the PPC side of the business a great deal in the next two months hoping to drive maximum traffic to the sites over the Xmas period.
If you have any questions or queries please do not hesitate to contact the dev team.
We have noticed a lot of the files in the /include folders are getting indexed in the search engines despite them being disallowed in robots.txt.
At first this seemed strange but it appears Google is not crawling the urls, the googlebot has never visited the pages but they are indexing them because they have links from elsewhere on the web. So basically Google can index a page without ever having crawled it. This seems strange and I don’t understand why they would want to index a page if they:
Having said that we have received hits from people searching for very unique strings which can be found in the URLs. People are actually searching Google and clicking through to these pages that Google has no idea what is on them. This all seems rather peculiar and I can’t really see the point of why Googles algorithm would do this. There must be a reason but I can’t get my head round it. If you think about the flow of PageRank, TrustRank, GoogleJuice or whatever you want to call it these pages must be like little black holes, sucking the juice in and it disappearing for ever more as Google can’t reference any outbound links. Perhaps that has something to do with it.
To completely disallow indexing you can use the meta noindex tag which we will be implementing in the near future.
We have added the facebook like button to the product pages. We’ve only added them to the product pages because it slows the page load time down quite a bit and we don’t want to incur an Google penalty.
The code we used to insert the social networking buttons is as follows:
<iframe src=”http://www.facebook.com/plugins/like.php?href=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.’ + $site + ‘%2F’ + $filename2 + ‘&layout=standard&show_faces=true&width=450&action=like&colorscheme=light&height=80″ scrolling=”no” frameborder=”0″ style=”border:none; overflow:hidden; width:450px; height:80px;” allowTransparency=”true”></iframe>
<a href=”http://twitter.com/share” data-count=”horizontal”>Tweet</a><script type=”text/javascript” src=”http://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js”></script>
Note. The variables are coded in ruby as this is inserted into the MYSQL back end before being published.
This will be rolling out to all new product pages with immediate affect and older pages will be updated gradually over the next three to four months.
Hopefully this is a step in the right direction towards integration with the big two social networks. This will be of particular benefit to sites that are promoting products which are seen as objects of desire. The fender stratocaster is a prime example of a product that a lot of people are going to ‘like’
We are looking for new ideas on content development. Something along the lines of the pdf creation and swf video tools we have added. I would like to find something that would be easy to implement across the range of sites that would add to the end user experience. If you have any ideas let me know.
The automatic generation of flash videos has now been developed to a testing stage. The first example has been rolled out and can be viewed here: rayzor ski goggles
The animation itself still needs a bit of work but as a proof of concept it is pretty powerful.
We are looking to develop a swf2avi converter so we can tie in the videos with youtube and other video sharing sites. We have looked at ffmpeg for this and haven’t got very far. If anyone has a solution which is open source and runs on linux please let us know.
We are currently developing software to create a range of swf and avi files automatically when adding products. An example of what can be done is below. This project is still at an early stage and we expect the final videos to be a little more polished.
The main aim of this setup is to create unique content that only our sites have and more importantly to encourage users to stay on the sites for longer thanks to the increased attractiveness of project pages. Our aim is to develop a unique selling point within the industries we operate and with developments like this we are taking one small step at a time towards this goal.
After three years of running the old static website we have set up a new blog which will act as a central resource for developers and content writers working on the BuyNetwork. We hope everyone likes new layout. If you have any feedback let us know.
The blog runs on the latest version of wordpress with some custom plugins for seo and publishing. It makes a nice change working with wordpress as opposed to hand coding everything. It seems the majority of things are so simple with wordpress while anything that needs digging into the source code is inherently complicated because the code is so messy and obfuscated.
Setting up the blog really was a five minute job. Setup a mysql database add the dbname, username and password to a config file and log on to the site to start customising it. Six hours later and you have a custom theme, pretty logo and some pretty impressive plugins installed. All round quite impressed with the latest wordpress offering. Definately recommend it for anyone who wants to build a quick site which is easy to manage.
