Ron Mertens' blog » Web technology

Gmail e-mail spam-filters are trigger-happy?

Ron Mertens — Thu, 06 May 2010 07:13:25 +0000

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 from LinkedIn, Facebook, Yahoo and others. Very strange. I guess Google are tweaking the spam-filter, and they’re not going too good a job – I prefer spam messages in the my inbox than real messages in the spam folder! Some of these were really important.

If you’re using Gmail, I advise you to go over the spam folder… you might find interesting stuff in there

Pico-Projector buying guide

Ron Mertens — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 12:18:40 +0000

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 been spent upgrading Drupal from 5.x to 6.x for all my sites. Version 6 is great, and enabled me to do those tools much easier…

Thank you Conduit

Ron Mertens — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 07:37:38 +0000

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 disk-on-key. So this post is just saying thanks…

Building scalable web sites

Ron Mertens — Wed, 13 May 2009 07:06:38 +0000

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 and more. So go read it…

Building findable web sites

Ron Mertens — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 06:26:13 +0000

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 way to attract visitors (who can find you on search engines)
the way people find content on your site
making people return to your site

My main problem is that I wanted an SEO book, and there’s not much SEO discussions in it… I would have wanted more (maybe my fault – I should have got a real SEO book). Another thing is that there are some code example in the book that are quite irrelevant. For example he devotes many pages to build an Ajax search engine in your site, or building a mailing list… but this book is not about coding, so I think it’s just a way to write more pages.

So it might be a good book to start and learn about SEO plus get some more tips on writing blogs and sites. But if you want a book dedicated for SEO, look for something else (I know I will – and I’ll update you when I find something).

PHP editors

Ron Mertens — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 07:29:10 +0000

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 features that Eclipse didn’t have.

But I did decide to upgrade to the newest Eclipse, install a different PHP pluging (PDP 2.0 instead of PhpEclipse) and finally enable a debugger. So it’s not all lost time…

Video-Alerts

Ron Mertens — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 11:00:34 +0000

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).

Drupal multi-site

Ron Mertens — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 07:14:13 +0000

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 Database, theme and user files (such as images) – but the code and modules is shared between all sites. This means that it will be much easier to upgrade, move server, and manage the sites. Good for me!

Tao Te Ching + widget

Ron Mertens — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 09:29:20 +0000

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 it here (although on the Metalgrass blog it worked fine! Maybe I need to upgrade my wordpress?) so you can check it out in the Metalgrass landing page in this link.

Drupal 5.8

Ron Mertens — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 05:50:24 +0000

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 upgraded u3-info and expresscard-info, and will continue to upgrade the rest.