Janko in a Jar

Zemanta launched it’s service yesterday. I missed the party as I thought it will be on Friday. Now I noticed the post about them on Techcrunch. Cool.

I am using the service for a while and I like it.

Some pics from event: had ferme

now go and kick some ass…

There is a very simple indicator whether visitors of your website come there because they intended to come to your website or they they just happened to click on it while searching with a search engine. This could be reduced to “Brand vs. SEO” probably although there is more to it.

Some examples..

• Otroski.net had a very loyal user-base in it’s time and around 80% of search engine keywords for it had been “otroski.net” (and variations)
• bravekidgames.com offers games for kids and is not really that special. I had to wait for 2 years to notice the first visitor that came to the site through searching “bravekidgames.com”. Lately I notice them more often but it’s still a rarity. You have to count in that around 2000 people see it every day and it’s up-there for 2-3 years
• QUBIDRAW gets 1/10 of BKG visitors, is around for just a while (and is still a somewhat crapish release-early thing) but I already noticed folks get there by searching “qubidraw”

Source: WikipediaI finally committed itmchat sources to the google code. The whole thing is a work in progress. I rewrote a lot of it so that it has more features and will be easier to extend in future. Right now I am testing and debugging it. I would like to stabilize it and put it online so this version gets tested in real too. Then I intend to add some new features and then clean it up and optimise it.

The 0.01 version is running on some portal for few months now and hadn’t had any problems so far. I wasn’t in the name-making mood when I was opening the Google code project so the name is a little stupid, but who cares.

Itmchat is written in Haxe (server, flash client) and some javascript(JS client) and uses Haxe remoting for all comunication.

Factor gets a lot of bashing at reddit. That is not that bad because traction always produces more energy and output than a soapy you are OK, I am OK, we are all OK stuff.

Few days back certain Factor non-fan amongst many other things wrote:

Because such Forth-like untyped languages have been around for decades and I was using them around 1990. Adapting the concept to 2008 may be fun for you and help you suck in a few naive developers but it doesn’t make it a serious platform; read up a little

While people on factor’s irc channel look highly educated programmers to me I recognised myself in this. Not that I am proud, but reality is I am sort of naive developer and I did get sucked into Factor. I am not formally educated as a programmer. I am more like the guy who once jumped into the river and managed not to sink, and then just stayed there, gradually improving his swimming, but never took time to learn the official butterfly stroke because he was too busy catching the fish.

Well I am “naive developer” in some way but I am also very pragmatic because the “useful working maintainable output” vs. the “sh*t that went into making it” is the only thing that matters to me at the end. I don’t code to learn, I learn to code.

And that’s why I now think that Factor will be my web-dev tool? Because I have tested and got very good results with 3 sides of web-development so far:

As my first Factor lines of code I tried to see how I could extract some data out of text. This simple and small vocab is what I came up with, and was amazed by cleanness and obviousness. So I see that making nice vocabularies that will help me parse strings will reall NOT be a problem with factor.

"i:1;name:Jon;age:3;surname:Wu;;i:2;name:Jill;age:9;surname:Huan;;"
      "i:2" cut-to "name:" cut-off ";" snatch-to
      "surname:" cut-off ";" get-to .s
! "Jill"
! "Huan"

So factor can read, but can it generate? Next, I wanted to se how I can generate SQL, this came out so far:

: get-users ( -- )
   SELECT*
      "users" FROM
      "enabled = 1" WHERE
      "username" ORDER get-rows ;

get-users
! SELECT *  FROM users
! WHERE enabled = 1  ORDER BY username ;

: get-users-of-group+ ( orderby group fields -- )
   SELECT
      "users" FROM
      swap "enabled = 1 AND group = ##" ##1' WHERE
      swap ORDER ;

"email" 51 "email, username" get-users-of-group+
! SELECT email, username  FROM users
! WHERE enabled = 1 AND group = 51  ORDER BY email ;

: change-email ( id email -- )
   "users" UPDATE
      "email = ##" ##1' SET
      swap WHERE-id exec ;

123 "j@a.com" change-email
! UPDATE users  SET email = 'j@a.com'
! WHERE id = 123 ;

Then I tried to make the XHTML forms generating vocabulary:

: show_user-form ( -- )
   "post" "./user" start-form
      "your info" start-fieldset
         "Email" label (*) endlbl
            "email" "" "class='big'" text-input endrow
         "Name" label  endlbl
            "name" "" "size='12'" text-input endrow
         no-label endlbl
            "action_add-user" "Save" "" submit-input endrow
      end-fieldset
   end-form show! ;

The code creates the first form on this page.

Any part of my web-dev toolkit I tried to create in Factor so far was better looking than the ones I had developed in other languages. That’s why I will continue with Factor. I know and used only the “primitive” stuff of Factor until now so I am excited to see what’s ahead.

Source: WikipediaJust few days ago, there was a Nightwish concert in Ljubljana. I didn’t go, I heard one song with their new singer and the new sound & feel didn’t impress me that much.

I went and wrote “nightwish ljubljana” to see the date of the concert and I got to youtube which holds more than 10 videos from this concert. Well, the ones I saw at least are of cell-phone-camera-in-the-night-held-by- -half-drunk-guy-or-chick quality so they can’t really substitute being at the concert.

So what is the moral of the story? Don’t record the concert on your little shitty cell phone, enjoy/consume it yourself. Every moment of your life is over as soon as it happens, it can touch you or it can pass you by.

( Do you see the image on the right and few links in the text. Well I am to lazy for that so Zemanta’s secret service helped me out. Or in other words, I voluntarily became their lab-rat or a “beta tester” as they call such folks these days. )

Source: ShutterstockJava : I liked Java but some of my love for all c++/java like languages is gone now. I see the elegance and power in some different paradigms now. If I would have to do a GUI, CAD like thing again I would still use it. I still love Swing, Piccolo and some other things about it. I am not sure if I will make the WATERISK game in it as I said previously.

Factor : I am 90% sure I will use it as my default web-dev platform. I am building core webdev utilities when I have some spare time.

OCaml : I Tried to find a use for it in web-dev but after looking at things decided not to. I will continue to learn it and write another GL/SDL tutorial (but not tomorrow) or just try to make WATERISK in it.

PHP : Will continue using it for webdev where clients request it or where deployment is very important.

Haxe : Will continue to use it for swf (flash games) development. I hope to work on and release open source chat server written with it soon.

Lua : Will probably use it for a 3d project made in Luxinia engine. I would really love to, but a chance is I will cave to the f****** business senses and use Adobe Director just because of in-browser deployment.

Flex, AS3 : I have a very concrete project with Flex that will start ASAP. First time using it.

Erlang : After OCaml I was looking at Erlang for webdev (mochiweb, erlyweb, jaws). After a lot of consideration I decided I will not for now.

Clojure : I want to dip my fingers into Lisp family of languages and this one seems most intriguing to me (rich data structures, concurency, JVM). Maybe it could substitute some cases where I used java before. LWJGL, JOGL, Swing come to play… maybe some web stuff, who knows..

And why should you care?
you really should not, did you just read all this?

(edit: zemantified… cool)