category: web


9 Totally Free Icons sets for your Website

 Thursday February 19, 2009
 
One of the greatest gifts of our profession (software developers) is the vast amount of resources on the web to help make our jobs easier. Today, I'm posting this list of various web icons sets that are free to use. Hope you enjoy. read more... 
Viewed 1816 times   Comments (0)   
 

Google Protocol Buffers

 Monday August 25, 2008
 
Just doing some Sunday reading (yesterday) and I ran across this youTube video of an interview with one of the developers of a recently open sourced project called Protocol Buffers. The project was released by Google sometime back in June and is something that is used in nearly all of their large systems including Map Reduce and Big Table.

Protocol Buffers is a serialization utility, much like AMF and XML are. All have their own transport format (binary in the case of PB) and handle the encoding, decoding, serialization and parsing of that format so it can be used natively by other programming languages (this is where XML differs in that it's not a packaged utility). The concept isn't something new, but in typical Google fashion, it seems to be simple and is purported as being fast and efficient. read more... 
Viewed 731 times   Comments (0)   
 

Various enhancements to jalpino.com

 Friday August 22, 2008
 
Just wanted to list out some recent enhancements that I've made to the site.

Photo Gallery
The most notable enhancement I made to this area was including a dynamic watermark to the images that I pull back from Flickr. I didn't do this for the copyright aspect of my photos (although its an added bonus read more... 
Viewed 828 times   Comments (0)   
 

Google Adsense RollerCoaster

 Saturday August 16, 2008
 
The High
A few weeks back I decided to bite the bullet and throw more advertising onto mp3Salad. I always enjoyed the fact that the site was mostly advertising free, it gave the site a more "open" spirit in that it wasn't just being used as a capital vehicle.   Advertising at times can totally ruin a good service, I didn't want that to happen with mp3Salad.

However, the flip side of me thought about the potential that I could be making in regards to it's popularity, at one point I was getting over 500,000 pages views a month!  I figured I would be stupid in not trying to monetize that in some way, even if it were in a small somewhat invasive way. So that's what I did, I decided to place Google ads on two more areas of the site, the homepage and beneath the search form.  Both additions blended well with the site and in no way took away from the service. This was great, and so was the increase I was seeing in my Adsense account.

I wasn't making enough to quit my day job, but it was providing enough of a passive income to prepay my hosting for several months and cover my domain registration costs. This was working out great, Google had sent me a few checks, I was happy. However as quick as it started, it almost ended.

read more... 
Viewed 839 times   Comments (2)   
 

Site Redesign

 Thursday July 17, 2008
 
If you are one of the 8 people that actually visit this site, then you'll immediately notice that I've redesigned the site. I was getting tired of the old layout and decided that it need a face lift, so I started putting together a few ideas in Photoshop and ended up with this.  There is still a lot left to do to the site before I would consider it complete, but for now, I was anxious to get it out there.

For the fellow techies out there, the site was re-developed from the ground up using Model Glue, Reactor and Coldfusion 8. The architecture of the site was derived from another project that I developed, the goal for me is continually build up the features and functionality of it with hopes of possibly releasing as an open source project...  
Viewed 512 times   Comments (2)