Toluu

Alleba Blog

By Andrew dela Serna

Daily Top 10 Posts for Wordpress 2.7January 4

Quick update for Daily Top 10 Posts plugin users who recently switched to Wordpress 2.7. Thanks to those who gave me the heads-up about the error that looks like a big zit in the stylish new version 2.7 dashboard. I have nipped the error accordingly and everything is beautiful again.

For users of Wordpress 2.6 and below, please continue to use the previous version (0.4) or your dashboard will break.

Thanks.

Daily Top 10 Posts v0.5 for Wordpress 2.7
Daily Top 10 Posts v0.4 for Wordpress 2.6 and below

Google Auto-Suggest Feature Launched for Southeast AsiaDecember 12 2008

I apologize for the long absence! Busy, busy month! Anyway, I wanted to share with you that an auto-suggest feature has launched for Google Philippines, as well as for Google Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia and Vietnam. Go Southeast Asia!

Here’s a sampling:

Whoa, people are actually searching for my name! (hehe)

Max’s Restaurant’s 3-Day Online Delivery ServiceOctober 28 2008

My friend RJ asked me a while ago if I knew of a restaurant in Manila that delivers and accepts payments through Paypal. He said Max’s Restaurant did, but him and his friend didn’t feel like eating chicken tonight. I asked my friends on Plurk if they knew of any. Gail pointed out something odd about Max’s online delivery. In their Conditions of Use page, it states that you must make your order 3 days in advance. But notice the banner on top where it says “We Deliver the Max’s Experience in 30 mins”. Hmmm. Isn’t that strange?

What is stranger is you are forced to make a minimum purchase of $12. But if you cancel your order 1 week ahead of time, there’s a processing fee of $12, basically leaving you with nothing. If you cancel 3 days before, you get a 50% refund but you still need to pay the $12 fee. So let’s say you order food worth $12 and cancel in time for a 50% refund. You get $6 back, but you owe them $12 to process the cancellation. As a result you end up $6 poorer. So why bother cancelin

Google Feedproxy: Should You Switch?October 21 2008

Back at Ratified.org, I noticed a handful of blogs whose Feedburner statistics have stopped updating. I looked into it and saw that all of their feeds have switched to a somewhat peculiar URL: http://feedproxy.google.com/xxxxxxx. Because of that, their Awareness API, the place where Ratified.org grabs all the feed statistics, are no longer working. For a while that forced me to manually update their subscriber numbers, which is a bit frustrating on my end, because I try to keep Ratified.org as fresh as possible. Doing this everyday is simply not going to be feasible.

Webmasters who decide to display Google Adsense ads inside their feeds are required to migrate their feeds to the FeedProxy thingamabob. But I found out that some have expressed regret after doing it. They say that their earnings were disappointing and their stats have gone bonkers. A few reported that they lost a chunk of their subscribers and their feed URL’s are outranking the actual posts in the search engine results!

My take on this is, I prefer to see my feed reader unencumbered by advertisements. But that’s just me and you can say it’s also because it’s giving me a hard time collecting your stats (heh). I’m not trying to dictate how you should monetize from your blogs, but my advice is that you weigh your options before doing something drastic. If you care about your Ratified.org r

Google Search Results with Discussion and Forum DataOctober 18 2008

Google now features metadata crawled from forums and discussion sites in its search results. These include the number of posts from the target page, the number of authors, and the date of last post.

Here’s a sample result I get when searching for Windows Vista Problems:

It’s a neat new feature that helps you figure out if a result comes from a forum and if it has a reasonable amount of replies to help you solve your problem. So if you’re searching for iphone unlocking tips or C++ multimap performance, expect a little more help from good ol’ Google!