Web 2.0.11562 beta

It’s not often that I look into my askimet settings to see how much trapped spam has accumulated but the default setting for this is to keep trapped spams for 45 days. I never really thought this was a bad thing, but having now reduced it to 10 days, I can see a 20 MB reduction in the size of my database backups!

I use a cron job to make database dumps, and I’m keeping the 3 most recent versions. So I realized that I am wasting 60 MB of room just storing spam! Well actually 80MB if you count what’s in the database as well. Comment spam never got treated so well in history as people like me have been treating it!

OK so a week or so has passed and I now have a couple dozen sites displaying Thai language adsense. Here’s a screenshot showing what it looks like. It’ll be a while before I can really see any money from these ads, but as they used to say in the financial industry – the trend is my friend!

Todate: average click value is about 5 cents. It started out around 0.06 but then recently appears to be trending toward 0.04. We’ll see, but I didn’t expect to become wealthy overnight by this. The advertiser pool is still very shallow.

OK so the forum is up. http://thaidomainforum.com

I am in this for the long run, comitted to Thai language domains, and there does not seem to be a resource catering to this niche. So I’m going to maintain it in hopes of seeing a community form. If a community develops we will all be the richer because of it. Niches are great places to try to serve IMO, because otherwise the interested parties have nothing.

I’ve tried phpBB in the distant past – it’s lame and had a bunch of security issues back in the day. I frequent some forums that use VBulletin but it’s not free. Vanilla and SimpleMachines are both free, but written in PHP and no way to get export access to their repositories. I decided to install SimpleMachines because Vanilla, true to their moniker, seemed feature-deprived. The landscape is pretty bleak though – none support a lot of databases, none written in some cool language, none offering a github link.

Having said that, I like the SimpleMachines software. It looks decent, has a couple themes and a nice set of options. The beta version seems to work fine, although I did manage to screw it up installing a language pack.

I get a lot of customers that already have experience dealing with web developers. They often have an old site that is in dire need of refurbishing. Sometimes they’re locked into relatively high monthly charges, that they’ve been paying for years, because they don’t know what to do to break free. This will often be a static site consisting of a dozen pages, that’s been around for five years or so and runs $50 per month. The development cost was partially subsidized by this higher monthly hosting fees. I’ve had customers tell me they paid $1000 initially, and they agreed to pay a higher monthly rate. But keep in mind that these folks are hosted in a shared hosting environment! And little do they understand but often the functional parts are hosted separately as a service, so they cannot be moved.

The real bad behavior, and the reason I write this, is that typically the web dev company registered the domain name for several years. But when I look at the registrant and admin contacts, I only see the web dev company. When I contact them regarding changing the nameserver entries, they will often tell me that money is due, and the customer will need to pay off the contract. And to my amazement the customer will frequently want to do just that! If you are a web dev company take heed – you can put yourself as the technical contact, but be sure to put the real owner as the registrant!

OK time for the serious stuff, the indisputable gospel. Soitenly!

Anyone else impressed by this rails-style nitrogen demo? This is of course, deliberately made to show the same app being built as in this classic video on rubyonrails.org What I saw when I watched was how much sense it makes to use an event-driven framework, since it naturally plays well with javascript.

Erlang is a programming language that aims to be great at making life easy for programmers to write apps that run on systems with many cores or processors. Basically, if I understand correctly, each little mini-process is not able to do much (or waste too many resources) except that it can send messages to friends when finished with the task du jour.

Anyway, long story short, I never saw a rails-style framework for erlang before this. But it makes sense, just like seaside and others. I think it just validates the rails model of using web frameworks to “bake-in” a lot of the conventions or best practices. If you really don’t like something you can change it, but otherwise sit back and enjoy the extra time you’ve saved.

Tonight’s Boca Ruby meetup was the best one I’ve been to so far. We were graced with a presentation given by Jason of RailsEnvy fame on changes to the upcoming release of Rails 2.2. Jason covered a lot of material you’ll surely see in the near future at envycasts.com. It was grouped into sections, like changes to ActiveRecord, and gave code examples for each. Of course there were slick effects from Keynote ™ and great explanations given by Jason.

Finally – I’ve been waiting for a very long time for this one. Thai language adwords are available for Thai advertisers!

For someone who has dozens of developed Thai websites this means a lot, because there are so few ways to monetize the sites. We’ve put up some beautiful, hand-crafted sites like this one http://นวดแผนไทย.com (thai massage), with absolutely no way to make a penny, just to get it out there.

Don’t get me wrong, the pool of Thai advertisers at this point is as shallow as the Cambodian Prime Minister’s strategy for national development. And even when I get my first click, it’ll likely be a 2 or 3 cent click. That’s OK, this will be replacing nothing, and as such is gonna seem so sweet!

I’ve only been using apache for about 700 years now. So I was a bit anxious about what I would run into when I started playing with some of the newer choices. Of course, an obvious one to try is nginx (pronounced engine-x) It’s very lightweight compared to apache (what isn’t) and is typically setup to just serve static content and proxy all other requests to an application-specific server. Yes I know this can easily be done with apache and many people do.

My impression so far? It’s small, simple and nice. Of course it’s setup to avoid the heavy lifting, but there’s something appealing about being a specialist. That’s the weakness of apache – everyone wants to climb onboard. How many modules are there anyway? mod_music, mod_vote_2008, mod_mod – yes I’ll give passenger a try soon (mod_rails) but there’s really only a few features I use and apache has just gotten more and more of more as the years go by. My nginx config file for two sites is still under 1k. Not only that, but it has so few lines I actually understand them all !

update 10/29: here’s the canonical reference with great comments from topfunky