a php developer weblog

Opera mini is part of the Opera mobile division of Opera, the company behind the quite popular browser. They recently launched a campaign for mobile phones here in Germany. By just sending one SMS to a carrier independant number, one receives Opera Mini back, a Java application that is tailored to the phone. The requirements list is very short: a Java capable mobile phone, and a GPRS internet connection. Since many years Java is supported on most mobile phones around, therefore this should be no impediment to a wider adoption. What is interesting now is how this browser operates. It has some sort of centralized personalized repository, that serves each user in particular. The local application, the opera mini, doesn't resemble a browser at all, it's more of a rendering engine. The HTTP request travels from this application to Opera servers, it's these servers that request the webpage from the desired website, render the webpages there on the opera servers, cut the images down, resizes them, reformats html so that by the time it it sent back to the browser, it can be even 5 times lighter than the original webpage. Pages cache, history, cookies, all is stored server side. So Opera behaves like a giant personalised proxy, which serves user requests in this centralized way. More in Opera mini FAQ.

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here's some fresh news for adwords users. Google started testing their new application, called click to call (screenshots, FAQ, slashdot). It's basically an extension to Adwords, by which advertisers can reach web users by phone. The search for certain keywords brings a small telephone icon, and when it is clicked, one can enter his phone number. Then Google calls both parties, via some VoIP protocols it seems, and connects them. The billing is done on the advertiser side; via adwords, therefore the call is free for the user. Google invested a lot into VoIP protocols, and will probably loose money at first by investing them into infrastructure, but will soon recover them via adwords. Most adwords advertisers already have up to date phone numbers in their accounts, therefore just one approval away, we'll see massive scale phone advertisement real.

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Wordpress.com, the website using the popular Wordpress.org software is now open; an invitation is no longer required. I don't link to them because they seem to be slashdotted now (but the url is obvious). The bloggers talked a lot about them today, and probably the website didn't anticipate such a peak load. Or it's just that this launch downtime seems to be some sort of "default launch schema", whenever something big goes out, it has to be down in order to teach the crowd some respect. If this is a technique, then google should patent it (</cynical>)

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Google just released their application: Google Analytics; after they bought it from Urchin. It targets mainly Adwords webmasters, and claims to offer them an analytical tool to improve their ROI. Conversion tracking, keywords statistics, executive, marketer and webmaster perspectives. Main graphs they display:

• the total number of visits and pageviews your site received, the average number of pageviews per visit (P/V), and the number of visits and pageviews over time
• the number of first-time visits and returning visits
• the cities from which the most visitors come to your site
• your top referral sources.

What will get interesting is how the daily data will correlate to the historical data; if they ever keep track of that.

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CNET has been building for years an internal hypertext network; mapping each article one to each other; mapping companies they write about. They made this article by article, going back in the past with links to relevant articles. It must have been a huge work; I think I'm not the one wondering which tools they used, if any. From my experience, one of the few engines that could deal with such data would be Autonomy; with their enterprise level search and DRE (Dynamic Reasoning Engine).

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I wonder what did Kevin Roth do wrong. Between other things, Kevin created a very nice Rich Text Editor web tool; which was also used here on blogHi, and was really popular around the web. It seems that his main website was shut down; it's a real pitty. He was listed in DMOZ, and had the first google position for "rich text editor". His website was running since 2001: whois information. His hosting company displays a huge:
Account for domain www.kevinroth.com has been suspended
message. I hope he sorts things out soon. Former address: http://www.kevinroth.com

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In this web design One True Layout article by Alex Robinson, that is featured in today's del.icio.us today's most popular, I counted at least 9 browser specific constraints; and 4 hacks. It is the Example of the One True Layout (2-1-3 ordering) I am talking about; I also didn't include the firefox hacks. The article itself is full of browser specific issues. I do understand that designers have to live from something; be it their creations maintenance (browser hacks); but comparing the 3.2 kb long ugly and browser specific CSS file to a simple 5 lines html tables; I can't but wonder how stubborn some people are.