Online Advertising Click-Thru Rates, Revisited

A couple years ago, I wrote Online Advertisements and Statistical Analysis, in which I did my best to show that a past study of online advertising click-thru rates (CTRs) wasn’t worth the pixels it was printed on.

About a week ago, my wife and I were visiting friends, and I found myself in a room with 3 neuroscientists. The topic of statistics came up, and I managed to insert into conversation my small triumph in analyzing the click-thru study and determining both a confidence interval and the number of tests that would need to be run in order to have a meaningful confidence interval. “Sure,” one of the scientists says, “but what you should really do instead is a chi-square test for goodness-of-fit.”
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3 Ways to Make Your Pages Facebook-Friendly

Sharing on FacebookYou’ve made a Facebook page and a Twitter account. You’ve even added “chicklets” to your site to let people easily share your content. But are your pages optimized for sharing?

When a user shares a link on Facebook, they can change the title and the description–but most people don’t know that, and won’t take the time even if they do. It is important to make sure that the default information that appears is what you want other users to see.

  1. Use a good title.

    This has always been important for SEO, but it’s also what shows up when a user shares your link. You can supply text specifically for sharing with an Open Graph meta tag:
    <meta property="og:title" content="3 Ways to Make Your Pages Facebook Friendly" />

    This can help you keep it short by eliminating your lengthy blog name or company name.

  2. Make sure the first paragraph is important.

    The first paragraph shows up as the descriptive text. If your page contains rich media or other non-text content, you can add an Open Graph meta tag

    Like the title meta tag, it looks very similar:
    <meta property="og:description" content="What do your pages look like when you share them on Facebook? Do they have a good title? Relevant intro text that interests the reader? An interesting image? Tips on how to make your page work for all 3." />

  3. Include a relevant image.

    Wall posts with images stand out more. Facebook will select the first non-linked image as the default, and will let users select from a menu of other non-linked images on the page

    4. You can find out about other Open Graph meta tags at http://developers.facebook.com/docs/opengraph/. Facebook recommends including the XML namespace attribute for the Open Graph in your html element:
    xmlns:og="http://ogp.me/ns#"

    Digital Inspiration’s Set Thumbnail Images for Your Web Pages describes a way to specify a thumbnail images using a link element:
    <link rel="image_src" href="http://osric.com/chris/images/sharing-on-facebook.gif" />

Using SharePoint’s Imaging Web Service to access Publishing Images

I spent a fair amount of time yesterday trying to access the images in the Images list (also known as Publishing Images) of a SharePoint site using the SOAP-based Imaging web service. Every time it failed, usually with an uninformative error message.

Finally, I used cURL to send the SOAP requests so that I could see every last detail of the transaction. The SOAP response was pretty clear at that point:

The list PublishingImages is not found

or

The list Images is not found

I tried other Picture Libraries on the site, and that worked fine. That’s when it dawned on me: the SharePoint Images (or PublishingImages) list is a Document Library, not a Picture Library. That makes absolutely no sense whatsoever, but fine, it wouldn’t be the first time I’ve run into something nonsensical in SharePoint.

I was hoping to use the download method of the Imaging web service. I don’t have an alternative solution at this time, but I hope to find one soon using one of the other SharePoint web services.

Opening links in a new window without the target attribute

Web developers often use the attribute target="_blank" to force a link to open in a new window. However, if you use an HTML validation service to check your web pages, you know that the target attribute is not valid in strict versions of HTML and XHTML.

There is a simple way to have a link open in a new window using Javascript. You may have seen code like this:
<a href="#" onclick="window.open('http://osric.net')">osric.net web hosting</a>

That method has some serious drawbacks, though:

  • The user now sees # in the browser’s status bar instead of the actual destination URL
  • The link fails if the Javascript fails (or if the browser has Javascript disabled
  • Search engines may not follow the link

I’ve written a summary of the issue and the methods I’ve found so far that best address it. I moved it to a page outside this blog because of the Javascript examples, which were easier to include on a separate page:

How to best use Javascript to open links in a new window

More People Alive Today Than Have Ever Died

A few years ago, I ran across this quote:
“There are more people alive today than have ever died.”

As we contemplate overpopulation, a quote like that is quite thought-provoking and shocking. Could it be that the living today outnumber all of our ancestors? It’s astounding. However, I didn’t believe it. I still don’t believe it, and for good reason.
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JSONP and Sencha Touch

I was recently trying to get a Sencha Touch demo up-and-running, but my callback functions after requests for JSON data never ran, and Firefox would throw errors along the lines of “invalid label.” I didn’t understand why–until I read more about JSONP.

JSONP prefixes your JSON response with a function name, which runs when the response is retrieved. It’s a way of handling the data without a listener.

This means that your JSONP provider needs to detect a JSONP parameter, and then wrap or “pad” the response within the specified parameter value.

For Sencha Touch, the JSON returned should be wrapped in Ext.util.JSONP.callback();. If your JSON looks like this:

{"results":[{"name":"Chris"},{"name","Harry"}]}

then your JSONP should look like this:

Ext.util.JSONP.callback({"results":[{"name":"Chris"},{"name","Harry"}]});

Not that you should hard-code that function name anywhere in your JSON output–web-based APIs and services should pick up the function from your request and wrap the JSON for you. For example, the twitter search API accepts a callback querystring parameter.

http://search.twitter.com/search.json?q=fakecriterions&callback=myCallbackFunction

would wrap the JSON response inside

myCallbackFunction();

I ignored the extra letter in the acronym at my own peril–I figured it was just a trivial variation on JSON (which it is) that wouldn’t make any difference in how it was handled (but it does).

Why I’m Not Friends with My Bank on Facebook

I received a request today from my financial institution asking me to follow them on Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, and YouTube.

Aside from the fact that I doubt that their updates on these various services will enrich my life, there is another very good reason not to follow them:

Security.

It’s easy to trace your connections online. Most of this information, for most users, is public. If you follow Bank A, it stands to reason that you have an account at Bank A–something a malicious person would not have known before. Even if your online persona isn’t directly connected to your name, you might be surprised at how easy it is to connect the two with a Google search.

(That last item says a lot, I think.)

Any bank that suggests you follow them on social media must be pretty confident of their security! Or, more likely, their marketing teams and their security teams don’t talk to each other.

You wouldn’t stand on a street-corner handing out cards that say, “My name is Bob Billiards and I have an account at Bank A” would you? Then don’t follow your bank on a social media site.

Generating puzzles for a Four-by-Four Word Game

A few years ago, I made a crossword-like game wherein users fill out a 4×4 grid of letters to spell 8 words (4 across and 4 down): http://osric.com/chris/wordgame/

Four by Four word puzzle game

However, over the course of several days, I was able to develop only 20 puzzles by hand. Trying all the various combinations is clearly a task better suited to computers than humans. Such a grid has 16 slots, each of which can contain one of 26 letters–so there are 2616 total permutations to check. That’s about 43,000,000,000,000,000,000,000–which could take a very long time, even for a computer. One key to speeding things up is to ignore permutations that don’t contain words.
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Creating a Javascript Game (LetterLock)

LetterLock - A Word Game
osric.com/letterlock

I recently created a simple word game using Javascript, which presented certain challenges. The game displays 3 random letters to the player, who must then attempt to create a dictionary word in as few moves as possible by shifting the letters up or down in the alphabet.

There were several programming decisions or challenges that came up during the game’s creation, for which I was able to apply some of the things I learned in my recent computer science classes.

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