IT jugnle

My New Personal Web Project

2010-10-05T13:19:00.000-07:00

Hi there,
This post will be probably not read by anyone else but me, anyway...
I released my new website, which is something like a social network, something like a blog, and something like a poll site. You can use it in many flavours.
The URL is: http://pointdebate.net/
You can check out my profile there: http://pointdebate.net/debater/Steliyan_Petkov_Georgiev to see my latest activities.

The site was reviewed on KillerStartUps, although they were hard on me, because they reviewed it the last day of the month and this way it really didn't have a chance in the Top 10 (of the month) standing. Life sucks.

Here is the KillerStartUps review: http://www.killerstartups.com/Web20/pointdebate-net-for-people-partial-to-debating

I will be happy if anyone drops a comment.
Till next time.. may be in two years,
Cheers

Favicon issue with 2 website on one IP address

2009-08-10T11:48:00.000-07:00

Firefox (I'm using 3.5.2) is apparently having problems with the favicons which reside on the same IP. It seems that FF keeps the favicons mapped to an IP address, instead to a domain name. When I open my new site I see the favicon of my older one. They both share a single VPS with one IP only.
I have also experienced strange issues with the FF Bookmarks bar - the icon which leads to my FB profile is the favicon of my friend's blog.

CSS dropdown menu behind a flash video

2009-08-10T10:28:00.000-07:00

If you have a CSS drop-down menu, which when expanded goes behind a flash object on your page, for example a youtube video, using the z-index CSS property is not going to help you. What you need to do is to set the wmode attribute of the embed element to "opaque". Here is an example:

<embed wmode="opaque"  src="http://www.youtube.com/v/OM_soUJ9In0&hl=en&fs=1&" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344">

Too much time with my computer

2009-08-09T12:40:00.000-07:00

I spent almost the whole weekend with my laptop on my lap. Except for yesterday evening when I drank 5 beers ... and I remember arguing with people on twitter over some stupid things, so actually I was in front of the computer again.
I think I need to spend more time outdoors. The vacation next week should have a positive effect.

Work goes on

2009-08-08T12:39:00.000-07:00

The work on footll.com continues...
What I was doing today is to trying to find good feeds for the aggregator. I found a couple of good websites, publishing news for the majority of the most popular European leagues - England, Spain, Italy. To go further and find feeds for less popular leagues like for example the the Bulgarian first league you need to do lots of manual work. Currently I am using the google search in coordination with a specialized RSS search enigne. I must say that for the Bulgarian league, although less popular, it is still possible to find some quality feeds around the internet, but this is not the case for lots of the Asian or African leagues.
Another think you should look after is the quality of your feed links. Some sites on the Internet don't provide original content, but rather republish or syndicate content from foreign forces (Yes, exactly as I do) so my goal is to find the ones with original content and include only them in my aggregation.
More update on this later....

In the meantime I was trying to help some pligg users in the pligg forum for some minor issues. Well, it was not easy. Some of the forums' users ask questions that need just elementary knowledge of programming or at least CSS and javascript. Some require features what will just kill their website, like the guy who as seeking for modification to make his site require that the user votes for at least three links, before the site allows him/her to submit a new story. Incredible...
I don't know if my efforts in the forum are worthy. In the end of the day not all sites out there can be a success. If every high school student was able to build a site what makes millions (or at least hundreds) then money are going to lose their value...

See you soon

RSS feeds as sitemaps

2009-08-07T12:55:00.000-07:00

One good way to optimize your blog or news site for Google is to submit a sitemap. This could be done though Google webmaster tools.
There are several different types of sitemap formats, as described in the sitemap protocol. Probably the most natural and easiest to submit is the RSS sitemap format. Since your site probably already publishes your content as RSS to which your users can subscribe, you will not have to put much additional effort into this by using the same feed for the search engines.

If your site publishes several different RSS feeds, probably one for each category that your site covers, you could of course submit all of them to Google. In my case I have over 3000 different RSS URLs, so decided to first give it a try with a single feed - the one that publishes all my new articles regardless of their category.

Before submitting the RSS sitemap to a search engine I recommend that you first check the validity of the feed you would like to submit through the W3C RSS validator. This could save you some problems wondering for what reason Google rejects your sitemap. For example one thing that lots of CMSs mess up when generating a geed is the pubDate format. The W3C validator kept insisting that my BST (British Summer Time) pubDate is implausible, i.e it is in the future. I managed to go around this through changing the format from TimeZone to time difference from GMT. Namely I switched from
Fri, 07 Aug 2009 20:44:19 BST
to
Fri, 07 Aug 2009 20:44:19 +0100

Another peculiarity is that the W3C validator recommends that you should insert a element in the channel section of your RSS feed. When your feed satisfies this recommendation the W3C validator suggests you to place a Valid RSS image to your site. So I assume that it shows you that it is perfectly happy with the feed. And here comes the discrepancy between W3C and Google. In simple words: Google just doesn't like the element there. Well, Google didn't mark my feed sitemap as containing errors, but rather notified me with a warnings with the not very meaningful message: "Invalid XML: too many tags" which misleadingly suggests that I have duplicate tags inside my feed, which was not the case. Removing the element fixed the issue in Google's eyes and my sitemap turned green in the Google webmaster tools. So it is up to you to decide whether to satisfy W3C or Google entirely. I personally chose the search engine.

To finish this post - don't expect that right after googlebot reads you sitemap(s), it will start crawling and indexing your pages immediately. This will likely take some time, don't push it.

No luck

2009-08-06T06:04:00.000-07:00

Hard times at work. A lot of work, little will to work :)
Levski Sofia won yesterday, time to see what Black Sea, the city Rival of Spartak Varna, will do against PSV tonight.

5 working days to my vacation.

Back to blogging

2009-08-04T07:37:00.000-07:00

It seems I haven't posted anything in this blog for quite a while.
So what happened for the last two years?
I still work at my regular job as a software engineer, where I do some JSF development lately. My PHP experience helps me in a way, but still JSF is much different, especially in the way it manages requests. Almost all JSF requests are POST and are submitted back to the current page. This seems quite strange to a PHP developer in the beginning.
I have completely abandoned my ZLIO shops. Good experience in SEO for a beginner, you feel good and proud you have a site on the web, but nothing more.
I started another project recently. A soccer (European football) oriented digg clone site, called footll. Football has a big audience and thus you have a lot of competition in this field. I use PHP open source software called Pligg, which I heavily modified for my needs. Besides development, there is tons of work on such a project, regarding user interface, marketing ,support, legal issues, etc. Just imagine how you need to configure over 1000 different football teams in their appropriate leagues, countries, etc. And furthermore at the end of the season you have teams which were promoted or dropped out so once configured, this cannot be left without manual supervision.
This project is one step away from low-value affiliate programs such as ZLIO, but I still don't believe it is enough for a significant internet success. Anyway I think of it as another way for gaining some useful experience, which I am going to apply in my next projects, which already circle my brain.
I hope that my next post here will be sooner than 2011.
If anyone was that lost in Internet that he found this article and read it up till this point: Bye for now, take care and cheers.
Steliyan

Amazon left Zlio

2007-05-21T12:32:00.001-07:00

I just received an email from Zlio that Amazon leaves Zlio. Too bad. May be that was the biggest Zlio merchant partner. I can't say this is something I didn't expect. I assume this is news that will push a lot of Zlio users away from it. I predict in next months Zlio will lose another partners and will gain new ones. This is normal because Zlio is a new service and still doesn't have established partnerships with the outer merchant world. What I hope is that it will survice. Expect more news on this topic in my next posts. I am attaching the mail body:

Dear user,

One week ago Amazon informed us that they no longer wished to have Zlio promote Amazon products in the United States. We were advised through a generic email with immediate effect. For the past week we have endeavored to understand and get to the heart of their concerns – Amazon has remained inflexible. As we have yet to resolve the matter, we feel compelled to inform you of this situation.

Of course Amazon is not the only merchant and we are working hard to have as many products and merchants available for you. Within the next 10 days we expect to announce several new agreements with major merchants in the United States. Strangely enough, we continue to work with Amazon outside the United States.

The unfortunate effect of Amazon’s decision is threefold:

1. Shopkeepers in the United States will no longer be able to add Amazon products to their shops.

2. In 20 days, Zlio will remove all Amazon products from your shop and replace automatically as many as possible with identical products from other merchants.

3. Amazon will no longer pay commission to Zlio for products promoted on you shops and this with effect one week ago. Please contact us if you feel that this has resulted in any significant loss to you.

While we regret Amazon’s decision, we are dedicated to provide our users with the most comprehensive list of products as well as the most competitive group of merchants. To that end, we expect to confirm that Barnes & Noble as well as several other large merchants have joined the Zlio network. Freedom of choice guides us in everything we do.

We apologize if this has caused you any inconvenience. Feel free to reach out to me personally if you have any thoughts or recommendations. I look forward to hearing from you.

--

Jeremie Berrebi

President/CEO

Zlio.com

Google supplemental results

2007-05-19T13:33:00.000-07:00

I just noticed that I have lots of my pages of my zlio shops (more than 50% of all site pages) placed by google in its supplemental results index. Well, this is not a good thing. Here is a summary of what I found in Internet on the topic:
- google returns results from its supplemental index only if it can't find a page from its normal page that matches the query
- google doesn't completely ignore supplemental pages
- your supplemental pages will not be returned as a result of a query to generic search words, they will be listed only with search words such as 'red baseball cap with a little black on it with a gray NY logo'. Not very useful, isn't it?
- supplemental pages are far more rarely indexed by googlebot than the normal ones. I saw a supplemental page indexed by G a month and a half ago. In the same site the normal pages were indexed 3 days ago.
- you can check if you have supplemental pages by typing in google: "site:mysite.com". If a page is from the supplemental index this is marked in the results.
- G punishes pages for duplicate content by moving them to sup

Now we see that this is not good and we need to avoid it in order to gain more traffic. The question here is how? Here is my findings:
- most SEO experts advise that the best way to escape from the so called supplemental results hell is get more quality backward links. They advise that just creating a website for the only purpose to link to another is of no use and webmasters should strive for quality backward links and the quantity is not important.
- my findings on the above show that this is not exactly correct. I saw zlio shops with backward links from their owners' blogs. Even if the site doesn't have other backward links besides this one, it still has all its pages in the normal G cache. Of course if you are linked from sites of higher quality, the better, but it still seems to me that every backward link works for this.
- try to avoid duplicate content. This is extremely difficult for affiliate programs like Zlio because every page that sells an item I sell looks almost exactly the same as mine. Try to put more quality and related text on every place on your pages you have access to.
- Do not use the copy/paste method. Especially avoid doing this from high ranked sites such as wikipedia, etc. Instead of copying the text try to modify it so your content be unique.

2007-05-17T13:09:00.000-07:00

I am continuing my experience with the zlio affiliate program. During the last day I experienced a major problem with my shops. It seems that this was a problem concerning the whole zlio community as I noticed the problem in other zlio shops. The problem was that for some items the buy button just wasn't working. For over 50 percent of my items the buy buttons was a just an anchor link to the top of my page. I was troubled that this was happening because zlio was leaved by some number of its partner sites. The reason I was led to this conclusion was that for these items I wasn't seeing anything in the section "Get the best deal with our partners !". Well, it turned out that I wasn't right. All my buttons are working now as expected and I am being redirected to the proper partner site (amazon.com, buy.com. etc)
I am still having troubles with google indexing my sites as I wish. At least now I am sure that it didn't ban my sites entirely. But google isn't indexing even the half of my pages. Yesterday I had about 60 pages index of one of my sites and now I see that google returns results from only 20 of them. Too bad, as I have more than 700 pages in this site.

Zlio Affiliate Programs

2007-05-12T11:38:00.000-07:00

I am almost a complete newbie to affiliate programs and I am currently making some effort to make use of them. Affiliate programs promise a relatively easy way to make money over internet. What you have to do is to persuade internet users to buy something that someone else is selling. Let's say you have a soccer site. If you link from your site to amazon.com for example and drive traffic from your soccer site to amazon, who buy soccer balls there you get paid a percentage of the soccer ball price. Maybe sounds easy in the beginning... Well, it is not that easy.
To be successful in this your site needs a lot of traffic. And furthermore it needs targeted traffic. If you soccer site attracts Start Wars fans, you are not likely to sell many soccer balls, as Start Wars fans are most likely to buy laser swords.
When trying to attract visitors to your site it seems everything comes to one abbreviation: SEO. That is where things become difficult.
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. This is relatively new branch of the computer science. Well, I guess it is not that new, but I say new, because it is not as old as programming for example. SEO means 'how to make search engines show your site up in their search results' or in more lamer style: "how to become n1 in google?"
So I knew this and that and I decided to give affiliate programs a try. I signed up in zlio. I chose zlio because it was recommended to me by a friend, but there is many, many thousands of affiliate programs you can start with. In zlio you create your own personal stores. Your stores are hosted by zlio and you receive a zlio subdomain, so starting a new store cost no money to me. The stores are 'out of the box'. You don't have to write any html or scripts. Actually you are not allowed to touch your html directly which is a big disadvantage in my opinion. You manage your store through a control panel, through which you can add products, add/delete categories, etc.
So I made about 5 stores, added their urls to Google and started waiting for the google bot to add them to its cache. It showed up in about week. In the beginning everything was developing just as I had expected. I didn't have a lot of visits to my sites, but they were steadily increasing every day. Until.. yesterday. I found that google have completely removed its cache of some of my pages, and left only a page or two of the others. I saw my visits dropping drastically today. I hope this is because my sites are still new and thing will get better in time. But this wait is just so unpleasant after I had put a lot of effort in this over last two weeks...

Here I am

2007-05-12T11:21:00.000-07:00

Here I am on the Blog planet.
This is just to start up my blogging activities.
I wonder how many 'this is my first time blogging' posts like this were written,
but the 10 000 miles path begins with the first step.
OК, let' start.