Vladimir Prelovac » Rants

Rush to make money

Vladimir — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 12:34:02 +0000

I am one of those who believes that printed book and newspaper will never become extinct. There is something in the feel of the paper in your hands that makes it special. Plus newspapers can be reused in some many practical ways, once they served it's original purpose of providing you with news.

Nowadays almost all newspaper companies have made a move to the Internet. While browsing Telegraph Newspaper website today I noticed few things that could be addressed to their advertising and web development departments.

Here is a screenshot no. 1, from today's home page of Telegraph:

The ad code was either not properly inserted or somehow else broken, causing the extra ad information to be output.

Example no. 2 shows Google Ads serving 'relevant' ads about Two British soldiers killed in Afghanistan.

I don't have anything against Google Adsense, on the contrary I think it is a great service. But I am asking myself would I be using it if I was owning one of the largest newspapers in the world? Is it the best one can do in monetizing a website today? What would you do if you owned Telegraph?

From Windows to Linux – Total Commander replacement?

Vladimir — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 14:08:19 +0000

I finally scrapped all sorts of Windows from my laptop and turned to Linux, more specifically Ubuntu. Last time I did that was couple of years ago and it didn't go very well.

But now Ubuntu behaved just as I would expected and better, finishing a no hassle installation in few minutes. And every single device on my laptop worked automatically. Wi-Fi, bluetooth, webcam, sound, graphics, battery management - everything was there. Good job Ubuntu!

Working on Web is easy as you need only four applications: browser, text editor, file manager and image editor. Browser (Firefox and Chrome) exists on Ubuntu - check. Image Editor (gimp) - check. Text edit (Ultraedit for Linux) - check. But replacing a file manager, my trusty old Total commander, proved to be a much harder job.

Some features of Total commander I can't live without are:

Search for text through files and directories
Compare files by content (and live edit in compare)
Browse 'into' archives and perform file operations on archived files
FTP connection management

So far I installed and started testing the following Total commander alternatives on Linux:

Worker
Gnome Commander
Tux Commander
BSC
Krusader
emelFM2
Double Commander

As I can see each has some strengths and weakness.

I'm eager to hear how you coped with a similar situation.

Things that Bill Gates can’t do better than you

Vladimir — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 17:27:22 +0000

While being really rich opens you the opportunity to influence the world quicker than usual, there are no other apparent benefits and lot's of things the richest guy in the world can do are also available to you. And these are not just some random things, but the most important things in the world.

Sleeping

No matter how rich, he probably won't have a much better sleeping experience then you do. So you are already covered for about third of the time you live. By 'covered' I mean you have the same benefits as being the richest guy in the world.

Have kids

Kids are life's biggest treasure, and no matter how rich, he can't be better than you in having kids. This also means that whatever money he has to spend on their education they may or not turn out to be better people than your own kids. It all comes to the parent and the world's richest guy's money provides him no edge there.

Do sports

Chance is you are probably in better shape to do most sports than the world's richest guy. And sport is about the healthiest activity you can be doing in this world. You may not have access to the Royal Golf Club of England, but do you really care?

Hobbies

Hobbies are small pleasures that make you happy, like fishing, your garden, drink beer with buddies, collectibles and other rituals. And you don't need a lot of money to have hobbies. World's richest guy's hobby can be luxury cars but does it really matter what is it that makes you happy as long as it makes you happy?

Work

This is a tricky one. Rich guys have more options, but if you are in position to do what you love you are already there. It doesn't matter if you are a fireman or a stock broker as long as you live your dreams.

Friends

Your friends are your second treasure and they have been with you through both good and bad periods. The best thing you don't have to spend a cent to make a friend. And chance is money is more likely to make you enemies anyway.

Laugh

Need I say more?

Help others

Helping others is about as noblest thing as you can do in life. Though, more money allows you to help more people, but I am really having difficulty counting rich people who devoted their lives to helping others rather than to get richer. So, if you help others your are probably doing better than most rich guys already.

Integrity

You can call it pride, dignity, character. It is what defines you as a person.

The Venus Project

Vladimir — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 16:15:51 +0000

Spreading the word for Venus Project.

Jacque Fresco Lecture

Zeitgeist: Addenum and Zeitgeist Movement

Venus project raises the question about sustainability and offers a different view on the future.

Heard this the other day: doctors in ancient China very actually paid by the number of healthy patients they had, not the sick ones as it is today. Most important pillars of society are all upside down today. Military is paid for wars, not for sustaining peace. What if tomorrow fireman are paid by the number of fires they extinguish. What do you think will the number of fires go up or down?

33 years old – seems about right

Vladimir — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 13:00:29 +0000

Today I am turning 33, glad to say relaxed and happy. I am in my house on Island of Brac, making final preparations for the olive picking due probably on Wednesday. The weather is great for this time of the year, and I spent whole day yesterday swimming in the sea.

Ther are some more good things about this year:

I published the book on WordPress Plugin Development in February
Founded Cleveritics.com, the next generation web-analytics
Finished the training for the pilot license (PPL)

When I look ahead I see a year full of interesting things. My startups will either work or not and there are so many things I'd like to dedicate my energy to. Balancing the work with life, need for travel and sports will be a delicate challenge.

Online Startup Idea: A Worthy Photo Editor

Vladimir — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 11:55:16 +0000

I needed a simple photo manipulation the other day. Just to cut two parts of the image and bond them together.

It turns out that none of the seven (!) online photo editing tools I tried can perform this simple operation. And not to mention preserving transparency on the image.

Also while I am at it, it seems they all have a very serious issue with the business model. They are all free but then rotate ads as you work instead.

Which is totally counter-productive and annoying for the user, who is already annoyed buy the lack of basic operations like copy and paste.

Honestly, just make a worthy tool, with a small price tag and watch the money roll in.

What can we learn from those 100 yrs old

Vladimir — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 10:59:11 +0000

Don't rely on medicine! I never ever heard a 100 yrs old claiming they did it because of medicine or drugs. Always without exception it will be something related to their lifestyle or food. And it took some time until that fact crystallized.

Today we are often convinced that no matter what kind of (unhealthy) lifestyle we live, there will be always some kind of miracle medicine to take care of no matter how badly messed up we are. Ironically or sarcastically these messages are sent by those who are selling the drugs.

Think about this. If you are in your twenties or thirties now, and you already have some kind of medical condition, what do you think that will look like by the time you reach your fifties? Sixties? Seventies?? That won't be pretty, unless you do something about it now.

Change your lifestyle. Eat healthier. Don't get angry over small things. Laugh. And don't delay any of those.

How to get started with Internet marketing

Vladimir — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 18:28:27 +0000

'I want to try this whole Internet thing everyone is talking about. How do I get started ?' - I got asked this question by friends over and over again.

I have a ready answer so I thought I should put it down on paper.

Read How I Made a Successful Website in only 4 months a booklet by Randy Brown. Easy to follow information, my all time favorite first read about starting with Internet marketing.
Check out Thirty Day Challenge - Very informative, loaded with information, so be prepared to spend a lot of time there.
Get into the right mindset. Read some good books about understanding money handling skills. 'Richest Man in Babylon' and 'Rich dad, poor dad' come to mind.
Listen to this interview. It's between two successful Internet marketeers and helps understand the proper mindset. Disregard all other marketing talk and hype for now ;)
And most important of all - Stop reading, start doing!

Microsoft vs Google – Bing, LookingGlass, what’s next?

Vladimir — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 21:00:54 +0000

When people think about Internet they think about dominance of one company - Google. Like it or not, Google currently controls search, and with it the big portion of Internet revenue cake.

However, compared to Microsoft, Google is still relatively small, albeit growing at a faster pace. Here is the revenue chart of two companies.

Fact is that Microsoft has been relying on sales of it's two main products Windows and Office for too long time. Their attention finally shifted to Internet and the first major product launched this year was a new search engine, followed by a big Microsoft-Yahoo deal.

Today Microsoft announced LookingGlass, Social Media Analytics product which will aggregate feeds from Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr and other social media sites and provide analytics. Looking Glass will be browser-based and powered by Microsoft’s Silverlight, another web technology they are pushing. It shows how actively Microsoft engages with leading trends on the Internet establishing it's position ahead of the competition.

Google has some of the best web services around but they are not perfect, especially in those that bring most revenue. For example, Adwords and Adsense work almost as two independent companies withing Google and you can not transfer funds from one account to another. Adsense works only on CPC basis which leaves a lot of space for a strong CPM based content network, which many advertisers would prefer.

It will be very interesting watching the battle of two giants in the near future, Google having the advantage of home ground, and Microsoft with longer product experience and insane marketing and development budgets.

Rankpay review – Pay per rank SEO is the way into the future

Vladimir — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 20:05:47 +0000

Rankpay.com offers a unique off-site SEO service. You pay only for what they manage to rank you for.

It works quite simple - you enter a site and add few keywords. and based on their algorithm they calculate how hard is it to rank your site for these keywords.

You enter your credit card number and do not pay anything immediately. Only after certain rankings are achieved you start paying monthly sum according to the plan you were presented at the beginning.

No rankings - no payment.

I am quite a bit a fan of a concept like that when it comes to off-site SEO.

More reviews:

Icreon - SEO services
adroitCoders - Web development
LogicSupport - Server administration

Icreon review – Do yourself a favor and run

Vladimir — Sat, 19 Sep 2009 19:13:53 +0000

Update: since the review was posted, I was contacted by managing director of Icreon and eventually the full refund has been made. The moral of the story and the conclusions remain on you.

Continuing the mini review series here is the Icreon, company whose manager Sandeep contacted my email several months ago offering SEO services. This review may generalize the bad experience I had with outsourcing SEO.

At the time Icreon had a PR5 site and clients like National Geographic Channel (at least that's what they say on the site) so I accepted the offer and signed a 3 month contract with them.

The price was a bit more then what I was expecting to pay for outsourcing, which on the other hand could mean they mean business. I gave them a fairly easy work of ranking an old site for a number of keywords including the domain name keyword.

Since Icreon was very sure of their ability and insisted on money upfront, I have asked a special clause inserted in the contract, stating if they do not rank 75% of given keywords, the contract ends and the money is refunded. In uncertain field of SEO, this is a way of protecting your investment. They accepted the clause and the work started.

I was receiving regular weekly reports on the site's ranking and after two months I could see that none of the keywords were ranked as planned, and good portion not ranked at all. Sandeep insisted on more time and full three months.

Three months passed, after that a fourth and the situation has not improved significantly. They haven't achieved the goal for any of the keywords and therefore I have invoked the refund clause.

This is when it got bad. I can not really blame them for failing to rank (if anyone guarantees you ranking, run like mad) but I was expecting at least the refund will be honored.

This is when stalling and excuses begun and days of waiting became weeks, and weeks a month. Having in mind that a paypal refund should take couple of minutes and there is nothing preventing them to do so, this move is an obvious act of unprofessionalism and bad business manners.

They are a company rightfully deserving the screaming guy image. Bad, bad!

Other reviews:

Logicsupport - server administration
adroitCoders - web development

adroitCoders Review – Development outsourcing that works

Vladimir — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 07:41:00 +0000

Continuing the little outsourcing review series I started, I am glad to review adroitCoders. They are a web development company based in India with a team of young and talented developers, true wizards when it comes to PHP, MySQL, Javascript and Linux architecture.

Like many, I use Scriptlance to outsource web development a lot. While a great service you will often get burned by companies or individuals who would accept the project and never finish it, or worse take money upfront, never finish it and they you need to spend your time chasing them. The usual ratio is 10:1 when it comes to bad and good, so it is really handy when you know someone you can immediately trust.

My first experience with adroitCoders was for a medium size project for which I did not have any specification - they created it for me. This is usually a very good sign as it shows they are ready to commit to the client. The project was finished with a lot of changes, all of which were included without any increase in price.

And that is what really got me. Although the changes were probably in the range of 20% of original specification, they responded by building a clean and firm business relationship instead. In turn I decided to trust them with a new major project, much larger then the original one.

The manager, Nilesh, is very knowledgeable and commits to understanding the client and project needs. He is one of those guys that you just drop your ideas on and sleep peacefully, knowing you are probably going to see them live in couple of days.

So far my experience has been nothing but great and I hope this will continue throughout the project we are are currently working on, and I already have another major one in mind for them.

I really liked this excerpt from their site:

Great! let me also tell you we're dirt cheap. Since our development team is located in a tier2 city in India, we have cost effectiveness drilled deep where the bone marrow is.
Contact us so that we can discuss how you can have that cool app done!"

How could one resist?

Other reviews:

Icreon - SEO services
Logicsupport - server administration

LogicSupport Review – Do you like to gamble with your server?

Vladimir — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 08:21:00 +0000

Avid readers have probably noticed site being down heavily during the recent period of time and it all comes to the company I have been trusting the maintenance of my server - LogicSupport.

This review passes on my experience with them after everything settled as I did not want my initial emotion to affect it. It is also a good read for everyone having a company - this is the good example of how not to treat the clients.

LogicSupport services

What LogicSupport offers is server administration service. When you have a dedicated server you naturally want to keep everything in good shape, and not worry about security, patches and generally keeping it running so that's why you opt for one of these companies. I signed up to LogicSupport and went for their 'Titanium Server Administration' plan.

Little did I know what will come next.

How things went wrong

During first day of their service, they installed a security package to the server. One of the first things that I noticed was that their reports were very scarce. You would expect a full report of changes made to the server according to the plan you paid for.

The trouble begins when their admin installed Eaccelerator on my server although it was running SuPHP (for less technical folks these two do not work together). The result was that immediately PHP service was not working anymore, resulting in all sites on the server going down. Worse then that, everyone accessing the sites from that moment on, would now see the PHP source code of the page instead the compiled PHP output. So that means that anyone opening wp-config.php on my site could see my MySQL database host, user and password!

As soon as I notice the problem I send them a ticket. Notice that I noticed the problem, although a part of their service is monitoring your server and making sure everything works (this is a trend that continued with them). Seeing they have not done anything in next two hours I had to log in and find the problem, and disable Eaccelerator myself.

The bigger problem I am left now was that hackers had a window of about two hours during which all sites were fully exposed, and they could have get hold of all passwords. LogicSupport does not recognize this threat, so I manually turn off http, mysql and ftp and write them a ticket about it, explaining the severity of the new situation.

The first admin on the other side in the meantime disables SuPHP (he is probably still trying to get Eaccelerator to work), and restarts all services!

Now because SuPHP is disabled, caching plugins can not write anymore to the folders on disk, causing the resource usage to skyrocket (this is a pretty busy server with several huge sites on it and nearly million hits a day).

As soon as I notice that I write them a ticket. But instead reverting the changes they propose the following:

That being said, we will only suggest that suspending accounts as the final option.

I was shocked as although I have explained them what caused the problem, their only suggested reaction was to suspend the account (these are high traffic sites and any downtime causes big monetary damages). I insist that they don't touch anything and I proceed to manually turn on SuPHP so the sites can work again.

To my surprise while I was doing that, they completely remove the databases from two high traffic sites despite my firm instructions not to disable the accounts (technically they did not suspend it but removing the database has the same effect). So even when I restore SuPHP I now face 'Error establishing database connection' message when I try accessing the sites.

This is when it became clear to me that I am dealing with very inexperienced people (this was a second or third admin by that time who was working on the case).

I finally manage to speak with the manager over the phone after sending two or three tickets during the day instructing he should immediately call me (there is no direct way to contact anyone, no phone number or manager email on the site).

He finally calls and offers apologies. The sites start working again late in the night after 14 hours of downtime and security exposure.

I am exhausted and uneasy to wake up in the morning.

Unfolding of the case

The morning brings an email from the PRM on the server (one of the monitoring services), stating that one of the services was generating too many processes. It was a first sign of hacker intrusion so I immediately write a ticket to them (again I had to diagnose the problem).

Here is the reply of a new admin (I think the fourth now working on the server).

The message that you received is send from PRM. The Process resource monitor(PRM) is a programme that kills a process automatically if the process exceeded its resources usage and emails you when its killed. This is included in the phase three installation and now we have temporarily disabled PRM in the server.

To my utter surprise he does nothing to inspect the problem or check for intrusion. The solution he offers is simply to kill the notification service. No notification - no headache!

By this time I am already determined I want them out of my server, I just want to minimize the damages and have them undo everything. I am left with a whole day of downtime, possible security threat and a big headache.

Trying to settle

Finally one of the co-owners of the company writes offering an apologize and money back. That's $70 of money back, while the damages we are talking about are in the range of $2,000 (caused by downtime of major sites and whole day of my time). He offers explanation of what happened.

After going through the ticket number, and my meeting with Nycin yesterday, he is given notice of suspension. As we cannot fire a person without notice due to legal obligations in India, we have issued him a warning notice and moved him out of the team already. You wouldn't believe how frustrated I was by the reply he gave me during our interrogation. Well, he did not inform you about the possible outcome nor did he spend time studying the php environment on your server. He was also going through certain personal issues himself which is irrelevant to be detailed in this email. He stated that as a reason for hurrying through the installation. The fact that he was trying to be helpful does not take away anything from the mistake he committed.

I seek a sign showing they understand the severity of situation caused by them. I insist on writing the review of their service on a popular webmaster forum but their management is firm in belief that these kind of things just happen and point out that I have signed the TOS which basically strips them of any responsibility on the damages done on the server.

My last email to the owner was frowned upon, he calls me a blackmailer :) (I can now laugh to this whole case, God knows how stressed was I at the time)

Here is my email:

As a company manager you should know that it is disrespectful to offer something worth $70 to compensate for the damages worth almost $2000, especially when the guilt is entirely on your end.
You should be able to offer a full year of service. During that year I will be closely monitoring your service. I will be writing my review then instead. If another serious incident happens in the meantime then something is deeply wrong withing the structure of the company and the world deserves to know. If everything is ok then you will be getting another customer.

And here is the review. I have all the ticket correspondence in case anyone is curious for more details.

Conclusion

I admit a mistake on my part, trusting a valuable server to such a low-cost service (in my defense, I was blinded by favorable reviews I read about them beforehand and I did go for their most expensive plan hoping I would get the best service).

On the other hand I am now on a way to run a web startup company and as such this whole experience however bad it was, was a good lesson. Managing the company is much more then just counting the money.

Other reviews

adroitCoders - web development

Icreon - SEO services

Starting a start-up, all the good stuff

Vladimir — Sat, 29 Aug 2009 13:59:49 +0000

So you are again thinking about that Internet startup Vladimir?

Let's take it slow with 6 Tips for Start-ups. It's a lawyer speaking, it can be a bit boring but he is a very wise man so pay attention.

When you are warmed up, you are ready for 5-6 hours of high quality recorded video material from Startup School 2008 featuring speakers like founder of Amazon, Friendfeed, Ning, YCombinator... Pay really good attention, these people have been through it all.

Finally you can learn from real experience of bunch of ordinary guys who created video series called 'Living the Startup Life', filming their lives as their create a startup, launch a product and have fun doing all that. Here is the link to the first episode.

Do you give a coin to every beggar you meet?

Vladimir — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 14:13:36 +0000

I have a friend who does. I think he does it also when I am not around to see.

But I am not like that. I usually pick only those most obvious in need. My thoughts and emotions are often mixed.

Sometimes I see beggars who were recruited to be beggars and have their managers taking share of their profits. That gets me really mad. It makes it difficult to recognize 'genuine' beggars.

Sometimes you just don't have enough coins.

Is it a just justification? Should you always have enough coins?