Ron Mertens’ blog

Usually I get around 200 spam messages a day to my gmail account.  Once every 2-3 days I go over them, and usually I find one or two real messages that gmail mistakenly marked as spam. Today I went over about 500 spam messages, and found over 20 (!) real ones in there. Including e-mails [...]

Today I have released a new feature on picoprojector-info: a buying guide, complete with 2 nice tools (feature search and side-by-side comparison). There are over 50 pico-projectors on the market today, and these tools can help find the best ones for your needs. This has taken me over 2 weeks. Most of the time has [...]

Tags: drupal, pico projector

Conduit is a nice Israeli company… allowing people to easily create toolbars. I’ve created quite a few of those, for TripTouch, AdSenseLog, OLED-Info and others.  None of these have been really succesful, by the way I’ve been in touch with several nice guys from Conduit… and last week they sent me a cool mug and [...]

A lot of people want to start developing a web site, and for some reason talk to me about it.  Many are developers,  just starting out with web development…  I always recommend reading a book called “Building Scalable Web Sites“.  It’s a great read, with lot’s of info on hosting, DB, programming, security, performance, scalability [...]

I just finished ready a new book ‘Building Findable web sites‘, by Aaron Walter. This is part of my quest to learn SEO. So what’s my verdict? I’m not so happy with this book. The idea is good – talking about ‘Findability’, which is more than SEO. He defines the findability of a web site [...]

I’ve always used Eclipse for my PHP coding. I decided to check whether it’s worthwhile to switch to a commercial editor… I checked a couple of editors (PHPEdit and PHPEd, what great creative names!) – and decided to stay with Eclipse. I didn’t like the ‘look’ of these two, and frankly I didn’t see any [...]

I’ve just released a new service: Video-Alerts. It’s a simple tool that allows you to define alerts when new vidoes are uploaded (currently to YouTube only). you specify the channel (music, fun, tech…) and the keyword, and get the alerts to your email inbox. I got a nice mention at Globes, by the way (hebrew).

As you probably know (or not), I have 6 drupal sites on-line… 5 Of them are on the same server. Up till today (well,yesterday, to be exact) each had its own code-base. I have now combined it all under one Drupal code installation, using Drupal’s cool multi-site option. This means that every site has its [...]

As part of my quest to ‘taste’ a bit from several religions, I started reading the Tao Te Ching. I was rather happy with it. I’m also playing with iGoogle these days, and to my surprise there was no ‘Tao Te Ching’ widget! So off I went, and created one. For some reason I can’t [...]

So I finally decided to make the move – upgrade all my drupal web sites from 4.7.4 to 5.8. I have 6 of those sites. It took me several days to actually succeeded in upgrading one of them… so many small bugs and stuff to sort out. But it worked in the end. Anyway I [...]