Alex Pooley's Blog

My wife and I sponsor a child in Mongolia. Every now and then we receive letters, photos, and other types of updates which I always find particularly interesting. I thought I would share the most recent update I received today in case you have ever wondered what’s involved in sponsoring a child. Also, you may be interested to learn that the total sponsorship money ($10 or so a week) is split between the sponsored child and the child’s community.

You can find out more about sponsoring a child with world vision at the world vision website. World vision is a “Christian humanitarian organisation” which does irk me a little - what does religious affiliation have to do with helping people?

It seems you can’t volunteer to help unless you’re “a committed Christian excited at the prospect of using the unique gifts and talents God has given you to help children and families in need”.

wtf.

I came across this post in my daily readings. It describes hows Scott Petersen has created a toolchain that takes C code, converts to a byte code, and then runs via a virtual machine through Flash. Supposedly Scott has Quake, Ruby, Python, and other scripting languages running through Flash. The implications of this are huge. With the ubiquity of Flash, their virtual machine (Tamarin), and the ability to automatigically get C code running through Flash, we’ll finally have a decent platform on which to create rich Internet applications.

Personally I think this is a game changer and Adobe’s management should be commended for their foresight. This move will likely cement Flashes ubiquity, and please many web developers, myself included.

Site Relaunch

In my last post I mentioned that Google had turned off the traffic flow to my site via their search engine. Well, I’ve done some tinkering and my 200,000 page site is now a massive 3.3 MILLION pages! Kapow!

The first incarnation of the site relied on Google navigating the site via Sitemaps. Each page on the site was a hanging node, and the only way to move between pages was to perform a search with a form post. I suspect that Google recently changed some policy regarding sitemaps, and so they stopped acknowledging pages in the sitemap. But I’m only guessing, I really have no idea. Either way, I’ve dramatically improved navigation around the site with standard links, and will keep an eye on the stats to see if my traffic grows.

Google Video Ads

Anyway, while plastering ads on my site I ended up stumbling across Google’s video with ads. Ooh la la, these things are nice! When setting up an ad, Google offer various sizes and colour themes. Smaller sizes provide video thumbnails that expand in to a player when clicked, and larger sized ads include a player with embedded thumbnails. Here’s a screen shot of a ’skinny’ ad I’ve placed on my site…

As you can see, the ad unit makes a nice addition to an otherwise dull page. Unfortunately, clicking on a thumbnail opens the player, which expands the ad unit size, which makes it harder to integrate with page layout. The next screenshot shows you what happens if you click on a thumbnail - note the horizontal page scroll!

On my site I have a search page. Due to the nature of a search page, there isn’t really much else to display other than search results. So what I’ve done is included a large ad unit on this page to soak up the remaining real estate.

Technical Junk

In case you’re interested, the new site runs on Ruby On Rails. The previous version of the site was simply a huge set of static web pages that were simply pre-processed and placed on shared hosting at Dreamhost. I originally pre-rendered the site because the complexity of the site is in cobbling all the data together, and I “just” wanted an easy way to render the data. I found the pre-processing approach was way too inflexible for updating the site, despite it’s clear deployment benefits.

In Summary…

I’m not sure if any of these updates will actually result in increased traffic flow. Surely with 3.3 million pages Google will simply have no choice but to send traffic my way. I’m going to sit on this for a bit to see what happens, then I may try my hand at a press release.

This site actually goes against guidelines 3 and 4 that I set out in my last post.

Perhaps I will prove myself wrong. We will see…