JonM

I have problems with our adserver tags loading much slower than our pages. I often use a CSS hack to that the adserver code loads at the bottom of the page but is position in CSS at the top. However this can't be applied in 100% of situations......

Has anyone managed to load adserver code with this method successfully? I'll be trying myself this weekend and will report back....!

Agree.... the one that doesn't seem like work.. (at least to start with!).

I honestly didn't know this existed.... thanks!

Very interesting, I'm making this desicion at the moment. Currently settling on Chargify, but it means changing banks and setting up a new merchant account which is hassel I could do without! Should save me some time on developing my own system though....

I was wanting to use Twilio for UK SMS sending but the system couldn't send to my own mobile. I emailed again a few weeks back and it was still "unsupported".

I'm glad it didn't work on my own mobile as I would have definitely integrated it into my site and no doubt run into the same huge problem here!

Totally, a few days and a bit of embarrasment here is much better than ploughing months of work in with no return.

We are using RBS WordPay at the moment (purely because our bank account is with RBS), but to be honest, the interface is crap, the hosted payment page is crap and the support via the phone is far from brilliant.

I'm actually investigating using Chargify myself even though it means signing up for a new IPSP and getting a new business bank account with Barclays (the only one they support).

For any Twilio staff reading.... any plans to get UK SMS working at a reasonable price point? I signed up a good while back but it wasn't working at the time.

"The official way to pronounce MySQL is 'My Ess Que Ell' (not 'my sequel'), but we do not mind if you pronounce it as 'my sequel' or in some other localized way."

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/what-is-mysql.html

I only ever use MySQL, so have always said "Ess Que Ell". I work with guys who say "sequel" by default.... it's not caused any friction as yet.

Pretty good these, the same people also do this series: http://sixtysymbols.com/

I studied Physics @ Nottingham so pretty cool to see my lecturers getting involved!

Thanks for the advice. We do have a GetSatisfaction page setup but alot of our user base refuse to use it (I don't want to pay the extra monthly fee to integrate with our login system).

I think it boils down to a communication problem, support / request are fragmented between phone, get satisfaction and our own support ticket system. We also don't have a good way of sending out information.

Perhaps if we had a regularly updated blog and a single support and feature reqeusts system it would eliminate the cause of the problem.

But that's more coding for me!

We've got this very badly wrong right now and are suffering the consequences. In short we are in the middle of a huge re-development of our core product. Unfortunately my co-founder (who isn't a developer) has been telling users various different "launch dates" (which have conflicted; and many of which we have now passed without the launch) on public and the pressure has really mounted on our public support forum.

The long and short of it is that I'm under enourmous pressure, because according to our users it's already behind schedule.

I don't want to break face by just saying that my co-founder has jumped the gun massively and was in no position to make the promises, so at the moment I'm just living with the embarassment and trying to keep my head down an get it out.

In his defense, there is a reason for this and I wonder what advice HN peeps would give.

Day-to-day senario......

User: Is feature xyz available? Company: No User: Will it be available in the future? Company: This does seem be a worthwile addition and we will discuss it in our next development meeting. User: When will this feature be added? Company: We don't have a launch date. User: Ok, when will this feature be available becuase I need to use it now? Company: We don't have a launch date available. User: When will it be available, I'm getting annoyed.

At this point my co-founder usually breaks cover and gives a vuage, fairly distant forward projection; "in a month".

Should we really just be saving "no" and keeping silent on good ideas even though we are developing them?

I used to get a £0.20 ($0.31 US) eCPM for 0.33% CTR (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1136710), however, after getting a call from a Google account manager who had some extra inventory to shift for June, we've since been seeing (£0.39) $0.61 eCPM.

Tip: if you have some UK or German traffic, consider Adjug (http://www.adjug.com/) you can set a CPM floor (we set £0.40) and your own backfill. We are setup like this:

Premium Ads (via our agent) > £1 guaranteed backfill > £0.40 backfill (Adjug) > Adsense & House Ads

The only problem is slight delay in tags loading is one of the servers is slow.

The skill in these cases is knowing when to add exceptions and when to invest in re-factoring your code to work for the general case. I'm getting better at it, but I've generalised too early in some instances and left exceptions which soon became messy in others.

Yeh, but it wasn't valued at that when they bought it.

I don't understand the economics here.

You still have to pay Authorize.net (or whatever gateway) and then ontop of that have a monthly fee to Chargify....

Surely better to drop a one-off development cost on software to sit in Chargify's place, bespoke to your site...

That all sounded a bit depressing..... but very familiar!

I suggest you get in the gym!

Exactly ^^ Observing the phenomena would change it's state. It's one of those complete head-fks about quantumn mechanics.

You just have to accept that the quantumn world concerns probabilities (wave functions) rather than finite "locations" which we are used to in the non-quantum world.

It's a hugely interesting subject.

Have decided against due to a recent development, but thanks for the offer!

Thanks PE.

Yes, we know our agent isn't up to scratch but we are struggling for alternatives. I'll drop you an email.

"Samsung should come to you".

This is the exact opposite of what we are experiencing at the moment. We have reasonable traffic (500k UVs / month, 9million PVs), but regularly miss out on campaigns that would fit our site perfectly. Infact, we usually see them on other websites (same industry, different space) and then call up the buying agency who have "already spent all the budget".

Frustrating! We have an advertising agent which is currently taking 35%. Between them and our backfill we still only monetize around 50% of our inventory each month.

"ramifications of poorly-constructed SQL"

Surely the best defense against this is writing every query yourself rather than letting Rails do it? (As implied in the article).

My argument isn't Ruby execution speed vs PHP execution speed, it's Ruby writing it's own SQL vs me writing it.

I agree 100% that the database is usually the bottleneck, it certainly is for my site.

Who'd have thought that "knowing your code / sql" would be a problem when using software that writes most of it for you!

I'm sure Rails is great for getting an application up quickly, but once you get some traffic and the application gets more complex surely you'd end up hacking it so much you might as well have written from scratch in PHP or similar?

That article just confirmed that I made the right decision when staying well clear of Rails.