/devel

I’ll be mostly offline at least until the middle of next week. Elektro Ljubljana was fixing something on Saturday and we only got our electricity back. ADSL is out and since Monday and Tuesday are holidays, I can only hope that Wednesday will bring good news.

It’s a bit tricky to do Internet related development without, well, Internet.

In last couple of weeks I’ve begin to notice that ever larger part of my visitors are coming to my site through search engines, most of them from Google. I seem to be the most unsatisfied WordPress user or at least the loudest of the lot. I find Google’s ranking algorithms highly perplexing and therefore extremely interesting. So far the only thing I learned about them is that I haven’t got a clue.

I’ve added Google ads to this blog a couple of days ago. A move, which unsurprisingly didn’t lead to instant riches and a life of a professional writer and won’t do so anytime soon. But I am learning and when I’ll have enough data for an actually meaningful statistical analysis, I might even write a word or two about it.

Of course lack of data doesn’t stop me from thinking about it and the question that’s been on my mind these last few days is, does showing Google ads influence your page rank in their search engine?

Let me be clear upfront. I don’t think it does and also have absolutely no reason to think otherwise.

But opportunity is there. Obviously it doesn’t make sense for Google to promote websites solely because they show their ads. Bad search results would lead to exodus of their users to other search engines fairly quickly.

However, let us imagine a scenario where we have two websites with the same calculated rank for a given query. One has Google ads and the other doesn’t. There’s obvious benefit of favoring the one with ads, but the risk of doing so is probably quite small. After all, they have the same rank.

I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that Google favors “their” websites in situations like this and truthfully, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with it.

Spletne urice now have a home. I probably won’t announce new talks here anymore, because frankly, there’s probably little point in doing so.

There you’ll also be able to find slides of previous presentations, detailed future schedule and hopefully in time, a more lively debate than you had here.

My blog has become one of many showing ads from Google. As many have said it before me, I did this mainly to learn more about them and their effectiveness. Honest. Volume of traffic on this site is simply too low to expect more money than maybe, just maybe enough to buy a CD every few months or so.

The fact is that we’re thinking about ad based business models (not for this blog, but the service that’s coming up really soon now), but we lack experience with click-through based models and I believe this site might be a good enough test case to learn more about them.

I have a request for you. I’m not looking for sympathy clicks and would really appreciate it, if all clicks were generated because of your personal interest in presented offers. I might earn more otherwise, but I won’t learn what I want.

Thank you.

I get a feeling sometimes, that most blogs are an outlet for people to complain about something. I know I do it more often than I’d like to. I’ll do it less, but this post is another rant.

Lately, whenever I read or hear anyone mentioning Apple, my blood starts boiling. Reason for this is quite simple; today is a two-month anniversary since I took my broken iMac to local Apple service and it’s also the day when they let me know, they got another broken motherboard from Apple so they can’t tell me when they’ll be able to fix it. But they can give me my money back.

It would be awful even if this was the only time I ever had a problem with Apple. Sadly it isn’t.

I can understand that every manufacturing line produces a certain percentage of faulty products. I might accept, unwillingly, that Apple products on whole fail less often than competition and that it’s just my bad luck that got me a faulty computer. But this hardly matters, if you have no real idea when they’ll be fixed, when they actually do break.

I think it’s far better for me, as a user, to have a product that fails twice as often, but which can be and more importantly, will be fixed in a couple of days, then something that presumably almost never fails, but when it does, it might take an unspecified number of months before you’ll get it fixed.

So, I’m quite certain I won’t be buying anything hardware related from Apple anytime soon. I have to decide if this includes getting rid of this iMac or not. Getting rid of it means I’ll probably won’t get my data back and I certainly won’t finish a couple of projects.

The other dilemma is what to say, when friends ask me about Apple products, which every now and then they do. I had a good experience with my local Apple reseller (more or less Apple only shop) and would like to recommend them, but it’s impossible for me to recommend products they are selling. Truth may set me free.

I wish Linux had a better video and photo editing software. It’s the only area I can think of where it doesn’t actually exceed my expectations.