Archive for the ‘Technology’ Category

New huge monitor

Jul 8, 2009 General, Technology

I got a new 23″ monitor last week, its an Acer V233H which runs at 1920×1080 HD resolution. See pic below, after using this for a week at home, my dual 19″ widescreens at office look very tiny to me, (need to ask my boss for an upgrade… :) )

Dual setup at office:

:)

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Squeeze pages in web marketing

Jun 21, 2009 Technology

When it comes to direct marketing, squeeze pages tend to play a very important role in getting leads

Squeeze pages are typical landing pages, whose complete focus it towards getting user information(lead). Usually squeeze pages tend to not have any hyperlinks pointing to external content(not even the parent site), this helps not to lose a lot of traffic from the page. These pages usually have a form embedded or almost all links in this page point to a lead capture form.

Read more: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Squeeze_page

These pages tend perform exceptionally well when compared with normal landing pages but the whole concept of these pages is getting outdated. In this post, we will discuss about how squeeze pages will work or won’t work for your needs. Lets assume that by theory and science, Squeeze pages will *ONLY* work with narrow match campaigns.

  • Squeeze pages are quick to build and easy to trash
  • These pages can be optimized for any specific keyword(s), this allows creation page pages which are fine tuned for a specific set of audience.
  • These pages do not lose so much traffic in other diversions, instead , most of the traffic is either converted immediately or bounced. This makes the page best suited for targeted campaigns.

Here are a couple of reasons why squeeze pages won’t/shouldn’t work for you, if you are connecting your “broad match campaigns or organic search traffic”

The primary problem with optimizing landing pages in general for broad match or organic traffic is that, when you get this traffic, you also tend get a very large number of “specific search queries”. The inherent problem with these specific search queries is that they may not necessarily be the keywords that these pages are optimized for. This also tends to have a negative conversion rate effect on these pages.

Lack of information

These pages tend to have lack of sufficient information for decision making and there is no way for the user to gain access this information, unless he exits the page, once he does that, there is no re-entry option.

Bounce rates

Since these pages are highly focused towards single conversion point(s), these pages tend have high bounce rates for users searching for other/similar content, although the parent site may offer this content, since it is not accessible from these pages, bounce rates start to creep up rapidly for these types of pages.

Organic traffic should never be allowed to get into these pages, as it can show a very high impact on organic conversions.

Effort re-usability

Developing a page involves combined effort from various marketing units, although the re-usability ratio varies between organization to organization. It is highly affected by time consuming campaigns involving squeeze pages, its always better to integrate large campaigns into the parent website to offer highly effective effort re-usability. The overall amount of man-hour effort that goes into production of these pages if effectively reused  can be made to apply for the parent website, and can in turn be used to convert organic traffic into a highly effective lead source.

Maintenance

Just imagine a scenario when we create 100 or so of these types of pages and they are completely disconnected from the parent site and hosted at over a million locations. Maintenance is always a mess in these cases, these pages just cannot be maintained and they tend to get older soon.

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Passed ZCE-wo-hoo-I am a certified PHP developer now

May 23, 2009 General, Technology

After days of preparation and studying, I at last took the courage the take the Zend exam last Monday (18th May). I have been preparing for this exam for quite some while, even though I have passed in all the mock exams, I was targeting for the ‘Excellent’ grade in order to confidently put myself in a position to take the exam.

About the exam

  • This is exam full of trick questions. So don’t expect direct answers, there is always a trick around.
  • The real exam can be a lot harder that the mock exams offered by php|architect
  • The certification guide will cover a lot of basics of most of the units, but is not all; you will need to buy additional books and materials in order cover the complete exam syllabi.

Materials

I had the following study materials at my disposal, this doesn’t mean that you will need all of them if you are preparing for the exam.

Zend sells the last three things in one package at a discounted price; you might want to check that out.

Benefits

It gives you a good sense of satisfaction and achievement. This to me is the greatest benefit. The preparation that I went through for this exam makes me feel like an expert in php. I don’t have to go back to the php manual for every odd function, now I can tell them by names.

Secondly it gives you recognition among the developers and others. They allow you to use a logo, which looks fancy on your resume (Checkout my CV). They also have your name listed in their yellow pages directory.

You can call yourself a Zend Certified Engineer, except when you are in Ontario, Canada for crazy reasons…. :)

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Commenting code

Dec 6, 2008 Technology

Commenting code has always been a debatable topic, especially if you have people like me in the team who tend to ignore commenting unless and until they think that they themselves may need this comment. But I have seen code files having a comment at almost once every 10 or 5 lines, I m not sure if it is of any practical use other than making the code completely unreadable. I firmly believe in the concept of English text explaining the logic of commenting, but you don’t need to do this to a developer. A developer should be able to understand code in any possible format and not rely in comments, because coding becomes one of the ways of communication for the developer, he has been with it and has to able to talk and understand code.

Never comment code; if it is hard to write, it should be hard to understand as well.

I am not someone who says a complete no to comments, but i have some point of views like these

  • if there is a simple routeA way of doing something and a complex routeB way of doing something, and if your code has routeB, there should be comments to say why not routeA. this may not be right example, but for me comments can be used to explain why a a particular piece of code behaves like this
  • The code itself can be used to make explanations, or the code can be made readable so that comments become unnecessary (e.g)// method to run database query
    public function oprDB_q() { };

    can be replaced by
    public function runDBQuery() { };
  • well ever famous FIXME’s and TODO’s
  • .. well if i find some more reasons, i will put them up.

how to create and password protected zip archive in ubuntu

Dec 3, 2008 Technology

This is the command used to create encrypted zip files(password protected), i was struggling hard for sometime to see if there is a gui option to do this, unfortunately i couldn’t find any. the command will ask you for a new password and a confirm password, once you give it you get the zip file out.

zip -e myzipfile.zip mytextfile.txt

and so it works and i m happy.

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