Category — Web

Approx. 2 weeks ago the new Facebook profile layout was announced and you can test it. Yes, right now! If you want to see your own profile click on http://www.new.facebook.com/profile.php otherwise just put new. before facebook.com and see the new, clean and (at least for me) usable layout. All those app boxes are gone, gone, gone and there is more space to do what you usually do on Facebook. No more clutter and long downloading time.

Today I was gathering the numbers of facebook.com users across the countries.

And the numbers are quite interesting. Here you can look at the spreadsheet with number of users (+ male and female) across the countries. The numbers were gathered with facebook’s advertising tool that shows the approximate number of the target group.

Here are two quick facts:

There are over 77 million active facebook users (who logged in in the past 30 days) and 51.940 out of them are from Slovenia.

See the data for your country!

ToboAds is a Slovenian contextual based ad network (similar as Google AdWords and AdSense). It enables various ad formats that contain text and text with image.

Here is an example:

It has an interesting concept of charging for displayed and clicked ads. In general advertisers pay 0.2€ CPC (Cost per Click) and 0.0002€ for confirmed ad and publishers get half of it, therefore, 0.1€ CPC and 0.0001€ for every ad that has been viewed for at least 2 seconds. But here comes the question how to know the sistem is working on your site? Maybe your number of displayed and seen ads is low and you want to check how and when your ads get confirmed by ToboAds sistem.

First of all you have to know that (besides clicked ads) the confirmed ads also get you money (0.0001€) so try to optimize the position of the ad spaces on your web side.

Here is an example from princessdesign.net:

I have marked the browser content area (which can be seen without scrolling) in yellow. These ads get a chance to become confirmed if the visitor sees them for at least 2 seconds. If they get confirmed, you get 0.0001€.

On the other hand the ads positioned lower on the web page are regarded as displayed ads. The visitor cannot see them yet and they cannot get confirmed unless the visitor scrolls down.

How to see if the confirmation sistem works?

1. First download the Firefox add-on FireBug.
2. Install it and restart Firefox
3. Then open FireBug (Tools - Firebug-Open Firebug) and go to a web site with ToboAds, for example http://www.princessdesign.net
4. In Console tab the request is displayed after 2 seconds any you can clearly see when your ads get confirmed.

Here you can see that in this particular case the time was not 2 seconds but rather 240ms. While testing I have also seen cases when the number was between 150ms and 250ms.

What is your experience?

Slimbox is a light version (with some enhancements like navigation) of Lightbox JS. Lightbox can be described as a simple, unobtrusive script used to overlay images on the current page. You might seen both of them on numerous web sites.

Example of Lightbox:

Example of Slimbox:

But how to localize Slimbox into, for example, Slovenian language?

There are few things to do:

1. Localize the images (Next, Prev, Close)

2. Localize the text Image … of …

3. Change the keyboard keys which control Next, Prev and Close

1. Localize the images (Next, Prev, Close)

Under the folder /images you have four gif files: closelabel.gif, loading.gif, nextlabel.gif and prevlabel.gif. Just open the files (in bold) in yout image editor and delete existing text with localized version. Be also careful about the letter that will used for navigation - in original Slimbox c is used to close the overlay, n for next, p for previous (some other keys are also available) - and underline the appropriate letter.

Original Slimbox labels:

Localized Slimbox labels (in Slovenian language):

You can also download these three files as zip file.

2. Localize the text Image … of …

As you can see under the picture there is an indication of the number of pictures in the gallery and the number of the picture you are viewing.

For example: Image 1 of 5

You can change this in the file slimbox.js, line 144. Just replace words Image and of into appropriate words.

3. Change the keyboard keys which control Next, Prev and Close

In original Slimbox you can navigate between images with the following keyboard keys:

Next: n and right arrow
Previous: p and left arrow
Close: Esc, x and c

These can also be changed in slimbox.js, lines 106-108.

You must use JavaScript Character codes to represent different letters on the keyboard.

Therefore the keys are coded as:

Next: n (case 78) and right arrow (case 39)
Previous: p (case 80) and left arrow (case 37)
Close: Esc (case 27), x (case 88) and c (case 67)

And when you want to localize it, just map the right keys.

Example of Slovenian localization:

Next - Naprej: n (case 78) and right arrow (case 39)
Previous - Nazaj: j (case 74) and left arrow (case 37)
Close - Zapri: Esc (case 27) and z (case 90)

Example of the localized code (slimbox.js, lines 106-108):

case 27: case 90: this.close(); break;
case 37: case 74: this.previous(); break;
case 39: case 78: this.next();

Have fun using Slimbox!

If you publish videos on YouTube you are also able to see the how many people watched it, where they came from and how they discovered it.

On My Videos page choose the Insight button.

Then an Insight page is loaded and you can choose between three tabs: Views, Popularity and Discovery.

Insight > View

Insight > Popularity

Insight > Discovery

The most interesting for me is Discovery, because you can see the source of visits to the video. Then if you click on list of top sources you can see the keywords that were used, pages which link to your video … For example, my video Jesenice Fans in Ljubljana was found by keywords: olimpija (33%), jesenice (8.3%) and olimpija police (4.1%).