Ron Mertens’ blog

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 [...]

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 as

the [...]

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 own [...]

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 post [...]

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 already [...]

My latest toolbar (yeah, another one) is one for AdSense publishers. This one is more interesting than the last ones, because I actually coded a component in there to display your latest AdSense stats. A mini AdSenseLog, which is free… It turned out pretty cool I think
AdSense Toolbar

I became really fascinated with those toolbars you can easily create…
So here is my latest – the Gadgoolbar (the Gadget toolbar). Several gadgets RSS feeds and some other nice links and stuff. Enjoy! And share with your friends
R.