>devblog_

I was recently contacted by fellow software developer Michael Bauer, who called my attention to a certain website. That site is an affiliate of mine and I thought that it was my best affiliate.

A deeper look however showed that the website placed the usual affiliate cookie not just on the pages displaying my software, but on all. Each and every page that I visited (it’s a big  site), had the cookie-setting-code. And not just for me, but for a number of other software vendors, too. The cookies expire in half a year.

In other words: Every person that visits any page of that website, would bring the website owner a provision if the visitor should decide to buy any software from any of the listed vendors within the next 6 month.

Previously I had thought, because of the sales, that this was my best affiliate. Now however, I have my doubts how many sales he *really* generated and for how many he just got the money.

Is this okay?

I don’t think so. Is this a violation of the terms or even illegal behavior? Well, so far Share-it (who handles the affiliate system) says that this okay and that I’m free to terminate my cooperation with the affiliate.

I’m no expert (even though I’m probably involuntarily on the road to become one, sigh) on this topics but on this seems similar to Cookie-Stuffing, so I won’t give up so easily on this and post updates on this.

But untill then, if you have an affiliate program, you should check your affiliates’ websites, especially those that you think are your best ones.

Some years ago I wrote a computer game that had a really nice effect for displaying the menus. It looked really cool, but it took several seconds until the menu text was displayed properly. Since I knew the menus by heart, I clicked even before it was readable and could navigate the menus efficiently. I didn’t even notice that there was a problem until I’d shown the program to friend and he’d explained to me what I was doing.

I had gotten used to it and didn’t see the problem any more.

And I think that this is a common problem when you’re developing a program. In the end you know it so well, that you’re not noticing any more when anything isn’t solved properly. This applies mostly to the user interface, but it can also apply to programming and performance. The best way for this is to have somebody elso use the program and just sit next to him. Don’t explain. Just watch. You’ll be surprised…

However, sometimes there’s an easier way.

Currently I’m developing a new software and I noticed that there is a short time span before you get used to a bad solution. I noticed several times that I clicked at the wrong location, that I thought a dialog wasn’t easy to understand or that it would be great if the user could do this or that here (for example drag a file into the dialog instead of entering the path). For my new software (for a change) I try to note these thoughts and improve the program right away, hopefully creating a better first version.

So, if you’re creating a new software, notice your own problems and thoughts. And fix things before you get used to it.

Vista is known to be “special” in some aspects. What’s perhaps not so well-known is that it doesn’t like anything called “Demo”. In fact, it will show an increased warning level for any installation file that has “_demo” in the filename.

A signed installer name “test_demo.exe” will generate a red warning. If you rename it to “test_trial.exe”, you’ll only get a yellow warning. Don’t ask me why, I got no idea (please contact me if YOU have). But I don’t call my demo “demo” any more…

Some customers are afraid of buying online. Afraid that your company isn’t real. And a 3-year old copyright notice at the bottom of the page won’t raise their spirits. So do yourself a favor and keep it up to date. And while you’re at it, insert a time period like “Copyright (c) 2003-2008″ to show how long you’re already in business.

If you’re lazy (just like me, I admit it), automate that with a tiny piece of PHP:

Copyright &copy; 2003-<?php print date("Y")?>

To make sure you’re always “alive and kicking”…

The nofollow attribute was introduced by Google to cope with the problem of spam links, for example comment spam in blogs. Links in comments should be marked as nofollow, thus won’t count for Google’s rating and thus would be worthless for the spammer.  That was the idea.

But it might backfire for Google. Nowadays you can find the nofollow attribute not only in blog comments, but also social networks, forum postings and in Wikipedia articles. (It’s ironic: With Web 2.0 finally everybody could have his say - Too bad that it doesn’t count any more.) And with the spammers focusing on the sites that don’t use nofollow yet, these sites are likely to use it, too, soon.

So what’s the consequence?

By effectively abolishing the opinions of the small users only the website owners and journalists remain. Most website owners have their very own ideas about links: Their own products & services. And considering the journalists an interesting trend has evolved: Whenever they want to spice up their text with a few links for credibility, they link to Wikipedia. That’s easy and safe because they don’t have to check their sources for spam, fraud, etc.

The result?

Less diversity and less competition probably. The big fishes in the pond are bound to be the winners under these conditions. And Google is going to loose, too, because they’re missing the small, upcoming sites and trends. And just linking to Wikipedia instead.

When trying to run this blog with the same installation as my “Outlook and Sync blog“, I found out that this was more difficult than expected. Wordpress doesn’t have a readymade feature for this, you have to do some tricks. And most of the tricks that I found were pretty difficult or involved several steps.

Here’s a trick that is easier. It requires that:

• The different blogs should be on different domains or subdomains
• The blogs should take up the entire (sub)domain (so they shouldn’t start in a subfolder)

Then it’s quite easy. Simply configure all the blog’s domains to point to the same Wordpress installation folder. You can probably do this in the configuration panel of your webspace provider.

Now edit the wp-config.php:

Before:

$table_prefix  = 'yourblog_';

After:

$domain  = $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'];
if (stristr($domain, 'yourblogname1'))
   $table_prefix  = 'yourblog1_';
else if (stristr($domain, 'yourblogname2'))
   $table_prefix  = 'yourblog2_';
else
   $table_prefix  = 'yourblog_';

As a nice side effect you’re only needing one database instance for this (they’re often limited in rented webspace) and just have more tables in the same database. All blogs use the same installed files, but have different content and can have different layouts and activated plugins.

Happy Blogging!

The default wordpress theme really is boring. So I’m using my Faro Rasca theme for a start. It’s a photo from a lighthouse on Teneriffe, Spain.

Are you out there?