Blogs

About a month ago, if you want access to your Dropbox files from your Windows Mobile phone, your only option is Ruttensoft's CloudFiles. Now, they have a competitor - Droppedboxx. It's not as fully featured as CloudFiles, but it gets the job done, especially if all you want to do is ftp between your phone and your Dropbox account.

The only feature I miss from CloudFiles is the internal text editor, but I can live without it. Price wise, the official releases for Cloud Files and Droppedboxx are $6.99 and $2.99 respectively.

I just installed Read It Later and Screengrab for Firefox and Firebug Lite for Chrome. All three add-ons/extensions are really helpful in my day-to-day management of Wopular.

I just installed Pressflow and simultaneously updated Drupal late last week. Pressflow is a modified version of Drupal that allows it to scale more easily. For sites with huge traffic and databases, it's essential. It supports database replication, Squid and Varnish reverse-proxy caching, and is optimized for MySQL and PHP 5.

As you could probably tell by my latest entries, I've been spending the last couple weeks finding different ways to monetize the site. Wopular has about 400k-500k unique visitors per month, according to Google Analytics. That's a decent amount of users. It's about time I stopped coding new features and started earning. There's a certain challenge with monetizing an aggregation site, but I'm not gonna talk in depth about it here. I'll save that for another article. Mainly, it's that the average user only views a couple pages, compare to several with the average content site.

In my attempt to diversify revenue on Wopular, I'm throwing in another kind of ads -- in-text advertising. These are ads you see when you hover over keywords that are double-underlined. They're great because you can use them along with display advertising, thus providing an additional source of revenue without cannibalizing your existing ad inventory. Currently, the two most popular in-text advertising networks are Kontera and Infolinks.

Dropbox has became an indispensable web development tool for me. It lets you share and sync files across multiple computers - your desktop, laptop, and netbook. It also keeps a history of your edits, like google docs. I use it as a poor man's svn to keep track of my edits to pages on Wopular, in addition to syncing design comps, and to-do lists. Since I already use my HD2 to pick stores to feature on the site, I thought wouldn't it be nice if I could also do some coding with it.

Google recently added a new feature on Analytics - graph annotations. It's a small feature, and I had to do a double-take to make sure I wasn't seeing things when I first saw it. You can click on any date in the graph and make a note that you can make private or share. Below the traffic graph, there's an ajax arrow that you can click on to make annotations or see a list of them. It looks like the feature only supports notes on a day in the graph and not a range of dates. It's a helpful new feature. If you launched something new on your site, you can annotate it to see how it affects traffic.

AdBrite's full page ads overlays your website with an advertiser's until you click on a button at the header to skip the ad. A while back I disabled AdBrite's Full-Page Ads because shortly after enabling it, I saw a significant traffic drop. Although it could have just been the natural order of things, I didn't want to take any chances. Traffic came back shortly after I disabled it, but again, it could have just been be the normal ups-and-downs of the the traffic cycle. I've read that since it's just javascript, it shouldn't affect search engine referrals which makes sense.

Sorta. Kinda. It's been converted to a star system. If you search for a movie and the Rotten Tomatoes page for it comes up, then you'll see a star rating (converted from the Tomatometer), the Tomatometer percent, and the number of reviews they're based on.

Ever since I saw the specs on HTC's HD2 several months ago, I wanted to get it - 1GHz processor, 5MP camera, and 4.3" screen. You see, my contract with T-Mobile then was done, so I was looking for a new phone to replace my ancient T-Mobile MDA. I had that phone for four years which, in cell phone years, is a lifetime.