Mokka mit Schlag » Software Development

Ning has proven why you can’t trust your web site (or web application to the cloud). Just listen to Ning’s Gina Bianchini:

We’re not discontinuing the Red Light District because we no longer believe in the freedom to create your own social network for anything as long as it’s legal. We do. Practically though, supporting adult networks no longer makes sense. Here is what we’ve seen in practice to date with respect to adult social networks on Ning:

Adult social networks don’t pull their own weight. Specifically, they require other social networks to work harder because they don’t generate enough advertising or premium service revenue to cover their costs. Plus, our ad partners aren’t big fans of the adult networks and therefore require us to identify adult networks or risk our healthy advertising revenue. We don’t want to be in the policing business and, unchecked, that’s where this is heading.

In other words, Ning just decided to cut off people who’d built sites on top of their platforms, because, hey, they felt like it. The pornography just wasn’t as profitable as they expected.

This isn’t the first time this has happened either. FaceBook and Apple have also shut down useful and popular applications because they just didn’t like them. The only safe and sensible course for anyone running a web site/web application/blog is:
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I’m experimenting with AdSense for Feeds to see if I can increase the revenue from these sites from its current level at which my time would be more profitably spent digging in the couch for lost change.

This has required some changes to the feeds (they are now redirected through FeedBurner) so holler if anything looks awry. If it borks up, I’ll just kill the feed ads. The only real money this site makes is from the Amazon affiliate sales anyway. (Hmm, I wonder if I can sneak those into the feeds somehow?)

If this works, soon the feeds too will contain adds for “American Touch Painting”, “Top O.C. Divorce Attorney (Aggressive & Caring Representation)”, “Internet Dispute with a Free Telephone Consultation with Aggressive Lawyers”, and “Tummy Tuck Orange County”. Hmm, Maybe this wsn’t such a good idea after all. I wonder if AdBlock Plus works for feeds?

Here’s something weird I noticed while fooling around with the Android SDK:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<TextView xmlns:a="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android"
    a:layout_width="fill_parent" 
    a:layout_height="wrap_content" 
    a:text="Hello World"
    />

If the weirdness doesn’t strike you, look twice.
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Dreams do come true. Chandler 1.0 has been
released. The client component is written in mostly Python and the server in mostly Java. I’ll have to try this out a little later today.

I’m beginning to feel like I can write this story on autopilot:

Our companies web site uses a content managment system whose interface is all browser based. Turning the GSA loose on our web site using an administrative account ended up wiping out 85% of our web site’s content thru the execution of delete actions from web page links in the administrative interface of the content managment system.

…

The CMS system we use is built in coldfusion (which we’re rapidly moving away from to .NET sometime next year.). These coldfusion pages have buttons / images all hyperlinked to perfrom different actions for content records, content folders, and unfortunately whole web site instances. One of these hyperlinked image buttons deletes the content when clicked, which the crawler furiously did last night.

And just in case anybody didn’t get the point the first two times I ran this story:
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I tried Firefox 3 on Windows and I liked it there, but on the Mac? Bleah. It looks like a bad knockoff of Safari but without the attention to detail that signifies Apple products. A lot of the icons are ugly, and off by just a pixel here or there. You’d think one pixel wouldn’t make that much difference but it does. Plus I actually preferred the traditional Firefox 2 chrome to the Safari style brushed metal widgets.

Plus it’s perceptually much slower than Firefox 2. I’m a 20 WPM typist at best and I’m typing faster than Firefox can enter text into this form. The characters are several words behind where I’m typing about half the time.
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