Given the current state of the economy, how can you find a job? Join us for this webcast discussion with recruiters from across the country, and find out what it takes to get a job in today's market. We cover the top five things every developer needs to know when looking for a job, and then we have an open question and answer session so you can ask questions that are important to you. The discussion is moderated by Microsoft developer evangelist Zain Naboulsi, and it is one webcast you don't want to miss.
Friday, February 27, 2009 1:00 PM Pacific Time (US & Canada)
Okay, people. This is not a drill. The economy is flatlining. Splurges are out: Budgeting is in. Even the president says he'll be watching those bailout dollars like a hawk (a hawk named Joe Biden). So why should we consumers get a free ride with our own spending?
Granted, just as luxe shoppers have been hiding their habit, we're not sure you'll want to advertise you're wearing "cheap lingerie" or buying your loved one a "cheap engagement ring." But life (and purchases) cannot stop on account of the economy. Thrifty shoppers are dropping their credit cards and heading to their computers on a hunt for the cheap. Here are the top Web searches in the last 30 days. Shop till you (responsibly) drop.
Long time Buzz Log readers may remember that we sometimes rank, by search popularity, female celebs who share the same first name. What's the point? There is none, other than to determine who "owns" the monicker.
Nicole, for example, used to belong to Ms. Kidman. Numerous box office duds have dimmed her star. Ms. Ritchie has since taken ownership.
Today, we look at searches on celebs named Jessica, Kate, and Jennifer. Who draws the most lookups in each category? Read on for the straight scoop. Oh, and a special nod to Ms. Rabbit, the only cartoon character to make our list. Bravo!
Did being preempted by the president throw "American Idol" contestants off? Group 2 unwittingly played a patriotic duty by postponing their performances for Obama's state of the economy speech, and a good third of them seemed to suffer for it in poor choices, pitchy notes, and stilted delivery.
But, someone has to rise to the top—three, precisely. Below are six who impressed enough to spur Web scrutiny.
Top Six Searched "American Idol" Group 2 Contestants, Performance Night
A few months ago, we shared a number of AdSense for search optimization tips with you. Here's the story of one AdSense publisher who recently tried some of these techniques and saw substantial results after making a few small changes.
VanGoghGallery.com is an art resource site that provides information about the life and work of Vincent van Gogh. Site owner Greg Alexander runs the Van Gogh Gallery to educate and share information about the artist, and has also used the site to explore new Internet marketing techniques. Greg joined AdSense in 2007, and although he didn't know much about the program at first, he found it "a great opportunity to generate some revenue without spending the effort to sell ads." He also tried other ad providers, "but none of them yielded the results that AdSense did. In addition, AdSense was the only one that provided relevant ads for our visitors."
To help users navigate through the many pages of the Van Gogh Gallery, Greg added an AdSense for search box to the right column of his pages. By enabling SiteSearch and displaying search results on his own pages, he was able to help users find what they were looking for while staying on his site.
As an optimization experiment, Greg recently moved his search box to the center column of his pages and extended it to twice its original width.
Before
After
In addition, Greg made slight changes to the search results pages -- he removed the borders from the ads and search results, and added a new search box to the search results pages. According to Greg, "altogether, these changes took less than 15 minutes to do."
After making these updates, Greg noticed a dramatic and immediate increase in the usage of search on the Van Gogh Gallery. He found that "the number of queries performed each day increased 8 to 10 times, and search ad clicks and revenues increased even more." His search earnings quickly grew from less than a dollar a day to double digits since his optimization test. "Now we frequently receive more search ad clicks than our total number of searches pre-optimization," says Greg. "I'm still amazed at how simple changes can have such an incredible impact."
Greg has started using the earnings from his AdSearch optimization efforts to build and host additional websites about other artists. "Ultimately," Greg says,"we hope to use the earnings to fund research trips to Europe to see the works of the masters and expand the quality of information we offer visitors to our sites."
Have you also tried our AdSense for search optimization tips and found success? Let us know.
Posted by Jane Brinkley - AdSense Optimization Team
In a week when South Asians ruled the Oscars and another responded to the president, it was inevitable that someone would tie the two together. Sure, we'd expect it from the blogosphere...but Time, which once listed Bobby Jindal among its 2007 list of "People Who Mattered"? Its Swampland blog assessed Jindal's response as proving "limits to the Slumdog Millionaire touch of gold." Post name? "Jai No!"
The "Slumdog" comparison, however tenuous, might be better than the one circulating online: "bobby jindal is kenneth the page" (off the charts), as in the perky Georgian from NBC's "30 Rock."
Which actually inspires an idea for Jindal to rebound from this criticism: Declare a run for 2016, with Tina Fey as his running mate. Sarah Palin accent optional.
The IAA put on a breakfast on conversational marketing, which was well attended by folks from all parts of the advertisign ecosystem, brands, agencies and publishers. I thought it was a pretty good example of people speaking for their constituencies...
It sounds like something from a James Patterson novel. Unfortunately, it's all too real. Los Angeles police are in pursuit of a serial killer nicknamed "the grim sleeper."
So nicknamed because he took long breaks between murders, the killer last struck in 2007. The story is back in the Buzz after police released a 911 phone call to the public. The call, which starts with, "I'd like to report a murder," has sparked tremendous interest in the cold case. Queries on "grim sleeper" soared into breakout status and related lookups for "grim sleeper identity" also jumped.
Currently the LAPD is offering a $500,000 reward for information leading to the capture of the grim sleeper. Those with legitimate tips are encouraged to contact the department.
Traditionally, file uploading in the browser has been awkward, slow and error-prone. File selection is done one at a time and monitoring progress of the upload is difficult. There are no simple callbacks for total bytes, progress, error handling and so on, restricting the developer’s ability to provide meaningful messaging on the UI end.
Conveniently, existing browser plug-ins such as Flash can be used to provide or enhance certain functionality which browsers themselves do not support. The combination of Flash and JavaScript allows for batch file selection, progress and error reporting, and speedier uploading.
In a typical Flash-driven uploader, Flash provides the core service and provides callbacks to JavaScript-land with status updates, messaging and so on. JavaScript then updates an HTML and CSS-driven UI. Flash-JavaScript communication is made possible by Flash’s ExternalInterface API, introduced with Flash 8. Several projects have implemented uploaders based on this approach, including the YUI Uploader control and SWFUpload among others. While developing against ExternalInterface can get a bit quirky, an effective library can abstract away most of the quirks and provide a convenient API allowing you to take advantage of Flash’s improved file-handling abilities through JavaScript.
Building an effective upload UI
On Flickr, we implemented a simple large “Choose photos and videos” link which when clicked, opens a multi-select-capable file-selection dialog driven by the YUI Uploader (which requires Flash 9). YUI Uploader provides file metadata via fileSelect event callbacks after files are selected, at which point the file list and UI can be updated. The user can add and remove files as they like according to business logic, configure upload options and so on.
Beginning the Upload
Once the user has prepared their selection of files and clicked “Upload Photos and Videos”, the file queue is processed. YUI Uploader can upload files simultaneously or in sequence to a given URL (a signed API call in Flickr’s case) with callbacks for file progress, errors, file completion and upload completion. The idea is that the control’s Flash component simply sends files and reports errors and progress, leaving all of the event handling to JavaScript. Because of this separation, upload behaviours can easily be changed or updated without having to change the Flash component.
Upload Progress
During file upload, the uploadProgress event fires regularly, providing the file ID, bytes uploaded and total bytes for each file. This data can be reflected as a progress bar, a percentage value or raw bytes depending on your UI.
If a file upload fails due to a connection or IO error from Flash, the uploadError event will fire so you can attempt to gracefully recover by retrying the upload of that file. Another safeguard is to implement a basic timeout such that if a file upload “hangs” for too long without a reported error (e.g., 2 minutes passes without an uploadProgress event), the file upload can be aborted.
File Upload Response Handling
When a file has been posted to the target URL, the server response is passed to a JavaScript callback via the uploadCompleteData event. Photos are processed asynchronously post-upload in Flickr’s case, so a processing ticket ID is provided in the upload response. The ticket ID is then polled via API calls until a success/fail result is ultimately returned after server-side processing.
Uploader Start-Up Handling
YUI Uploader handles the creation and writing out of the Flash object and its initialization process. Once the control has loaded, the contentReady event fires and the file selection process can begin. It is worth considering displaying some sort of “loading” element in your UI, in case the user wants to “choose files” before the control has initialized. In Flickr’s case, we show a small animation next to the “Choose photos and videos” link to indicate a loading state, as well as greying out the text itself.
It is also helpful to have a fall-through error handler that redirects the user to an alternate upload method, such as a non-JavaScript form-based file upload. The Flickr Uploadr detects for Flash 9+ upfront with JavaScript (e.g., the SWFObject), and also uses a try...catch block in the init method and around the file-selection bits. So if something goes wrong during initialization or when the user clicks the “Choose” link, exceptions trigger a fall-through to our basic uploader. This also is an appropriate fallback for users who don’t have Flash or JavaScript to begin with.
Special Casing: Handling Flash 10 Security Restrictions
Due to a change in the security model beginning with Flash 10, file selection must now begin via the user clicking directly on the Flash movie. With previous versions, you could call [Flash movie].selectFiles() from JavaScript and the selection dialog would be shown without requiring user action.
To keep the user experience consistent on Flickr where an HTML link could trigger the selection dialog, we made the Flash movie transparent and overlaid it on top of the HTML link. Thus, the Flash movie captures the click and the selection dialog works as expected. One might call this a legitimate, local form of clickjacking.
If repositioning the Flash movie is undesirable in your use case, another option is to render the link, text or button UI within the Flash movie itself and show the movie as a normal inline element.
Should I Use This?
While there are some notable technical considerations associated with developing a Flash-based uploader UI — such as initialization and error handling — as with most nifty/shiny web things, the technical complexity of the implementation rests solely with the developer. Once the application logic has been implemented by the developer and integrated with YUI Uploader, the end result is an upload experience that is consistently faster, more convenient, efficient and more robust to the end user.
As we enter March in a tough economy, here are some useful tips to help you with savings, your home, and more. These features can also be vastly entertaining, whether you follow Tiger Woods back on the course or just want a daily dose of cute puppies.
