It was one fateful evening on a lonely Saturday, when the stars were slightly dimmed by the overhanging clouds, that John Chow and Jeremy Schoemaker exchanged curious yet delightful glances at each other in a quiet bar by a highway running through the interior. The greenery of the fields and forest were dimmed to a midnight turquoise with a dark splash of night-sky over it, and the river running by could only be heard, if not for the occasional glitters that came from its running waters reflecting the gentle moonlight from the heavens.

It was a place where there was quiet and peace in the air, and these two celebrities were able to escape the everyday life where they are constantly recognized and hounded by fans from all over the continent. First came a drink, and then came intimacy. And before they knew it their visions were blurred and their speeches slurred, their legs crossed and their hands held tight. And when the night came to a climax to the point where neither would be able to recollect anything of the devious acts they performed on each other… well, the unthinkable happened.

Years went by while both went on with their own lives with no memory of what happened between the two that night, having friendly competitions with each other with RSS feeds, but alas, proof always remains, just like the white stains on Monica Lewinsky’s dress that revealed what really happened under Bill Clinton’s desk while nobody was watching (and kudos for him). The two had spawned an offspring, named the Chowmoney.com. The product of Johnchow.com and Shoemoney.com came out like this :

Yes, these two seemingly handsome looking gentlemen put together produced this hideous form of a human being - something I can only refer to as a joke of genetics, a flaw in creation, a mockery by God himself. Chowmoney.com, which had lived under the veils as an unwanted bastard offspring has finally come out to the world.

Nonetheless, the point is that a very creative and smart person took Johnchow.com and Shoemoney.com to create a merged-parody site and is out there to make some serious cash. Kudos for that, almost as cool as getting head from Monica under the desk.

So over the last several months, John Chow and I have been working together to get his new TTZ Media website set up, and also to get the Ad Banner system set up.

My role in this project was the coding of the whole thing. I started coding the XML API reception system that would parse the XML feed from Shopping.com’s API. After a few banners were created, we moved onto the Adcode generation panel, which by the way is better than Google’s Adsense Code Generator. With extensive use of AJAX, there are 0 page refreshes needed to start and finish getting the ad code you want. All the controls, refreshing is done in Javascript and AJAX. Here are some screenshots of it - more screenshots can be seen at the portfolio page of Synchronous Design & Marketing (which is my new design firm based out of Vancouver BC, and soon to operate in San Jose, Costa Rica).

This ad code generation system, in my opinion, is the most robust one out there. I’ve seen adcode generation platforms all over the place but nothing tops mine.

1. Through a very intuitive CSS/DIV based design, I can expand the sizes of the ads to virtually unlimited number of different sizes.
2. Pretty much every piece of text can be changed in color. Even the link color/hover color can be changed. The background color is flexible too, even though I wouldn’t recommend it as all of the shopping.com thumbnails have a white background.
3. You can change the font face of the ad banner.
4. The adcode is as clean as Google’s Javascript embed code. Some ad codes out there are so messy and hard to read. This code is rather easy to modify on your own without having to come back to the adcode page.
5. The ads give options to enter whatever keyword you would like, so that you have complete control over what kind of ads you show.
6. There is a very easy-to-use ad template saver and loader (once again AJAX, so no page refreshes!!!), as well as an ad channel saver and loader (again, all AJAX). If you’re not sure what AJAX is, please read this article on where to apply AJAX.

Additional features of the banner system include a very intuitive click/view tracking system as well as a click fraud prevention scheme that utilizes IP tracking, Cookie collection and more, while the payment module calculates the payout for the affiliates in a very flexible way that John Chow wanted.

The beta testing for the banner ads were done with some 40+ affiliates, and was successful other than the times when the server went down due to some MySQL engine problems. Of course, the word “Success” is an important one here - the whole point of the beta was to optimize the code so it runs faster and leaner. Now the affiliate marketing system has opened up to the public.

The TTZMedia.com website itself serves as a catalog running off Shopping.com’s XML API. Go to the site at www.ttzmedia.com and see for yourself. You can apply for an affiliate marketing account there as well. The TTZ Media website is still being developed - mainly the front page still needs some more work although the framework is set up, and other cosmetics will change slightly. But the bulk of the programming is done.

This project received lots of help from Paul Butler at its latter stages. I sub-contracted him as a server administrator to help with my poor Linux skills. He helped me set up the necessary extensions in PHP as well as other tweaks on the server required to make this project a success.

Added - Looks like Tyler Cruz did his own review of the TTZ Media system already!

As much as I am a huge fan of facebook in so many different ways including the fact that they provide a cleaner layout than MySpace, require less clicks and page-refreshes than myspace using AJAX, and the fact that they provide an extensible API, some of the recent movies made me frown a little bit.

There are too many god damned applications coming up and there’s way too much stuff on some people’s profiles than there should be. On some of my friends’ profiles, I need to scroll down for quite a bit until I can reach the wall section to write something there. Also some of the applications leave useless updates in the newsfeeds, which means relevant newsfeeds are being pushed back way too faster than it should be. If I don’t log in often I’ll miss even more than I used to.

On the upside, the application boxes adhere strictly to the standards of the Facebook design which means that the look is at least uniform. But nonetheless, I find that it is becoming annoying and too complicated (which is precisely why I never got into MySpace). Of course, it’s still a hundred times cleaner than MySpace could ever be.

Another source of irritation is that there are some applications that are very similar to each other which causes an overlap. As far as facebook users are concerned, this is not a marketplace of competition, but a website for convenient contact with friends and associates. I quite frankly do not care to install both the TravelBuddy Visited Countries as well as the Cities I’ve Visited application (OK, if I hadn’t been so well traveled I wouldn’t have, but since I wanted to show off I added them both anyways).

The applications should be better filtered based on usability and also in consideration of other existing applications. And perhaps imposing a limit on how many applications one user can have would be a good idea to keep things clean as well.

What’s everybody else’s take on this?

I will be travelling this summer quite a bit (more detailes to be disclosed later!) and for starters I had to book a rental car as well as a hotel room in Seattle for 1 night for next week. While I was looking at options through my BCAA membership website (they give me some discounts), my friend told me about www.priceline.com. And no, this is NOT a pay-per-post or a review-me-post. This is simply a review out of my own personal experience, referred to by a friend.

The concept is this - you can either book the hotel at the regular rate (usually for 4-star hotels, over $200 US a night), or you can call your own price.

Here’s how it works : you can select an area (for example, Seatac Airport, or downtown Seattle) and then start the star scale (they tell you what the median price is for that class of a hotel in that region). Once those are selected, you call a price. In my case, I tossed in $100 US as my offer, while the median price was $239. After that, they inform you that there are service charges of $22.xx or so, which brings this to a total of $122.xx.

Now, here’s the exciting catch : once you make the bid, you must put in a credit card # and full personal information, and when you click the button, the system starts searching. If the system happens to find any available hotels within your price bid range/area/star scale, it will automatically book it for you, charge your credit card, and it’s a done deal. You cannot change or cancel your reservation and there are no refunds. For giving you a great deal, you cannot treat this like a generic booking with tonnes of freedom. Oh well, not a bad thing at the end!

So yes, there’s how I scored a room at the Sheraton Seattle for myself for $122 a night!

How can they afford this? I suspect that every hotel has surpluses of rooms and instead of letting them sit at $0 a night, they may as well toss it out at half price without publicly advertising it (which will piss off other customers who paid full price), they give a certain portion of rooms to priceline.com, which brings them some revenue rather than none. Besides, chances are I will be using other services at the hotel (drinks, food and more) so it should be a good way to scoop up some extra revenue for the hotels, while I get a killer deal.

I owe a lot of reviews from my post on how to kill a dog. The responses were overwhelming, and everybody came up with some great ideas that I was very impressed with.

Unfortunately I am bound by laws and cannot commit such crimes, and I ended up having a nasty chat with my roommate and she boo-hooed at the end, and now I see marked improvements in the behaviour of the dog.

Nonetheless, reviews are owed to these people. Instead of picking 1 winner (it was hard to tell) I’ll just do a pooled review of a bunch of you guys.

1. Leo Chiang

   He’s an interesting figure. He’s a big, bulked up healthy Asian guy (duh, his last name is Chiang), who is a stunt actor (go figure) and also a film specialist. He writes about the not-so-typical blog topics, such as on how the food chain works (w/ video), whether Viagra enhances your workout (although, being at the gym with a raging boner is a questionable move), and about his brand new Hummer brand BBQ (I love that thing)!

2. Ed Lau

   Ed is another fellow blogger, within the social circles of John Chow and all. Ed often comments on my blog on other things. He recently wrote about how a guy lost money investing in real estate, and then tried to blog about it and lost even more money, somehow. Also, be sure to check out the video on the Microsoft Surface Computer.

3. Gary Lee

   Gary is a friend I met through the blog world of things as well, and a very interesting figure. Unlike me, he is an Apple fan. He’s the one who started the Technorati Faves Train, and recently he got into email marketing campaigns. He is also running a blog contest for the best home workstation.

4. James (digitalkeyto.info)

   He has an interesting domian, that’s for sure. He talks about changes to Google’s search structure, which will make changes to SEO. Also he discusses the many different ways to make money online (not just blogging).

5. Nathan at http://www.nathandrach.info/ wrote a comment too, but his site is down right now, so I’ll have to get to it later when it’s up again.

I’m sure so many people have been talking about this, and I will pitch my 2 cents in to this concept which is one of the greatest pinnacles of Web 2.0 - “Segregation of Data and Presentation”

You guys are all going “What…???” if you don’t know much about web design. And even if you do, if have been focusing only on the small stuff like how to make that PNG show on IE or how to apply transparency on objects, you won’t get this right away - here’s an opportunity for you to think bigger and wider.

A while ago when the internet was first developed, data was kept within a website, and not transferred externally very often. And even when it was, it was done thorugh each individual’s own ways of doing it rather than in a universally accepted formet. In other words, data was not transferrable. If you want to read something, you go to that site - there’s no other way. Also, before the CSS2 days, there was a time when modifying the design or controlling the whole layout was such a pain in the ass. Now it’s all changed. And here’s how :

1. XMLXML stands for Extensible Markup Language. It is extendable, self-definable, and most importantly it carries PURE DATA. JUST DATA. It requires external files or parsing to be formatted into a visual layout. Well, that sucks, no? No, it does NOT suck. This gives flexibility. Same data from 1 source can be parsed and presented in a gazillion different ways on a gazzilion different platforms. It’s awesome. It rocks.How do you think RSS feeds work? Blogs all spit out an RSS feed that looks something like this :

   <item>
   <title>The Most Brutal, Most Honest Review Me Post Ever</title>
   <link>http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/JeffKeeConsulting/~3/117634970/</link>
   <comments>http://blog.jeffkee.com/2007/05/17/the-most-brutal-most-honest-review-me-post-ever/#comments</comments>
   <pubDate>Fri, 18 May 2007 06:14:23 +0000</pubDate>
   <dc:creator>Jeff Kee</dc:creator>

   <category><![CDATA[Stupid People]]></category>
   
   <category><![CDATA[Comedy]]></category>
   
   <category><![CDATA[Cool Websites]]></category>
   
   <guid isPermaLink=“false”>http://blog.jeffkee.com/2007/05/17/the-most-brutal-most-honest-review-me-post-ever/</guid>
   <description><![CDATA[While a lot of the PayPerPost items force you to be postive about a product in order to qualify for the payout, Review Me does not ask for that. You can be completely honest with any kind of reviews for anybody, and I found one that made me laugh at the end.
   Who did this? None […]]]></description>
   <content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>While a lot of the PayPerPost items force you to be postive about a product in order to qualify for the payout, Review Me does not ask for that. You can be completely honest with any kind of reviews for anybody, and I found one that made me laugh at the end.</p>
   <p>Who did this? None other than a fellow blogger, and also my client (one of the bigger accounts!), <a href=”http://www.johnchow.com” target=”_blank”>John Chow</a>!</p>
   <p>He was asked to serve up <a href=”http://www.johnchow.com/seven-day-system-for-making-money-online-but-for-who/” target=”_blank”>a review for this scam of a pyramid scheme</a>, and he cleanly exposes the dark sides of it - about how ONLY the guy who owns the website will leech off your efforts while chances are you won’t get any back!</p>
   <p>This review is a MUST-READ, just so you can read the last sentence on John’s review - and I won’t reveal it here! <a href=”http://www.johnchow.com/seven-day-system-for-making-money-online-but-for-who/” target=”_blank”>Read for yourself about this scam</a>!</p>
   
   <div class=”feedflare”><a href=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/JeffKeeConsulting?a=ux3UbqQ8″><img src=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/JeffKeeConsulting?i=ux3UbqQ8″ border=”0″></img></a> <a href=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/JeffKeeConsulting?a=8F2o8VPA”><img src=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/JeffKeeConsulting?i=8F2o8VPA” border=”0″></img></a> <a href=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/JeffKeeConsulting?a=0qrO7oFl”><img src=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/JeffKeeConsulting?i=0qrO7oFl” border=”0″></img></a></div>]]></content:encoded>
   <wfw:commentRss>http://blog.jeffkee.com/2007/05/17/the-most-brutal-most-honest-review-me-post-ever/feed/</wfw:commentRss>

   <feedburner:origLink>http://blog.jeffkee.com/2007/05/17/the-most-brutal-most-honest-review-me-post-ever/</feedburner:origLink></item>

   OK, I know this just looks like gibberish. But this file defines the data. This files defines the title, link, date/time, author, content, categories of my blog post. Based on this XML, any engine can display this any way it wants to, without any security risk to my actual data on my server!

   This is also the backbone of how aggregator sites like Technorati works. It collects the XML data from selected blogs (such as your favorites) and displays it all together in the Technorati-crafted format! How amazing is that?

   Newspaper websits now offer this. You don’t need to visit the actual site to get the news - now you can put the XML feed, or more commonly known as RSS feeds, on your RSS reader/aggregator and you can get it all!

2. AJAXThis has more emphasis on the performance and presentation within a website. AJAX stands for Asynchronous Javascript and XML. AJAX works like this :AJAX is a technology that allows you to interact with the server using minimal amount of data (just the data that you need to send in) and then get the results back without refreshing the whole page. Usually, to indicate success, or for the functional purpose, the AJAX code includes scripts to update a part of the existing webpage that you already have open on your browser. That way it reduces the amount of time you spend waiting for the whole page to reload when you input a comment, or fill out and submit a form etc. It makes things go faster, easier, and also it reduces bandwidth for mega-sized websites like Facebook. I already raved about how much I love and respect Facebook because they follow the Web 2.0 trend with AJAX and all.
3. CSSUsually a lot of Web 2.0 pitches do not include CSS, because it is not as new and fresh as XML and AJAX technology. BUT. Why is CSS important?You can build a website out of purely DIVs, with content in it. By itself you’ll just have DIVs after DIVs piled up in rows. However. With CSS, you can define the presentation of the entire website!!! Check out the CSS Zen Garden for more details on how that works, if you’re not sure.What does this mean? Well, that means, once again, the data is segregated from the presentation. While this is different in nature from XML parsing, this still gives the web developers option to design the same content in many different ways. This means that when you want to re-design your website, you often don’t even need to touch the HTML files - you just modify your CSS and all the elements can be defined (if you’re savvy enough with CSS!).

   While this technology has been available for years, as it developed from CSS1 to CSS2 and what not, this is becoming more and more prominent of a technology as computers are no longer the only devices that surf the net. My Blackberry can surf the net. So can Palm Treos, and cell phones, and, well, of course, computers. These devices have different screen-size capacities, as well as different functionalities (my Blackberry cannot run Javascript). Obviously, to spit out the same website layout as you would on a computer wouldn’t look too good on any other platforms, nor would it work very well.

   <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="screen" href="screen.css" />
   <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="print" href="print.css" />
   <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="handheld" href="mobile.css" />

   Here’s how the multi-CSS works. Basically, when this code is inserted, the same bloody page will render differently in different type of equipment it is being read by. When a printer tries to print it, it will display it based on print.css. When it’s from a hand-held device with limited screen size, and processing functionality, it will use the mobile.css presentation.

That’s Web 2.0. Segregation of data from presentation gives flexibility, transferrability. It makes data transparent. It makes data fluid.

The internet revolution has barely begun.

While a lot of the PayPerPost items force you to be postive about a product in order to qualify for the payout, Review Me does not ask for that. You can be completely honest with any kind of reviews for anybody, and I found one that made me laugh at the end.

Who did this? None other than a fellow blogger, and also my client (one of the bigger accounts!), John Chow!

He was asked to serve up a review for this scam of a pyramid scheme, and he cleanly exposes the dark sides of it - about how ONLY the guy who owns the website will leech off your efforts while chances are you won’t get any back!

This review is a MUST-READ, just so you can read the last sentence on John’s review - and I won’t reveal it here! Read for yourself about this scam!