Maria's Notes

How people view me after I say I’m Russian - Imgur

Fri, 23 Dec 2011 13:35:15 -0800

How people view me after I say I’m Russian - Imgur

Zend Certified

Mon, 16 May 2011 13:26:36 -0700

Recently I received my certificate after passing Zend PHP 5.3 exam. I am glad I passed it, there were some stuff I didn’t know very well about before preparation, like namespaces, late static binding, etc. The study guide that goes with exam purchase is pretty decent. I liked its minimalistic approach, so it just tells you the main points and what topics are covered on exam. All other information and detailed explanations should be looked on php.net. I got many questions about “final”, “static” keywords, object inheritance. There are many questions with code examples, where you should guess the output.

Here is a good article about what is covered on exam: http://devzone.zend.com/article/12647

Apartment hunting

Sun, 24 Oct 2010 07:54:19 -0700

Searching for apartment in bay area. Padmapper.com helps a lot.

Happy 101010!

Sun, 10 Oct 2010 08:34:00 -0700

Happy 101010 (42) - the answer to life, the Universe and everything!

"Go the extra mile. It’s never crowded."

Mon, 27 Sep 2010 09:19:28 -0700

“Go the extra mile. It’s never crowded.”

- Unknown

"California’s a wonderful place to live—if you happen to be an orange."

Mon, 05 Jul 2010 09:41:06 -0700

“California’s a wonderful place to live—if you happen to be an orange.”

- Fred Allen

Got iPhone today!

Tue, 29 Jun 2010 11:21:00 -0700

"Sorry, dude, someone at the Genius Bar totally sat on your iPad… It was Megan Fox, and she..."

Mon, 28 Jun 2010 11:46:41 -0700

“Sorry, dude, someone at the Genius Bar totally sat on your iPad… It was Megan Fox, and she wants to say she’s sorry”

- “Deliver Bad News in a Good Way”, Wired magazine, Jul 2010

Wordpress plugin Related Posts Thumbnails

Fri, 21 May 2010 14:33:35 -0700

Today my Wordpress plugin “Related Posts Thumbnails” has been approved and released.

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/related-posts-thumbnails/

Read more information about this plugin here:

http://wordpress.shaldybina.com/plugins/related-posts-thumbnails/

This plugin has been successfully used for several months in one of my blogs. Visitors tend to click on the related posts teasers, increasing page views significantly.

I was initially inspired by LinkWithin widget, which I installed on my blog first. LinkWithin is a Javascript widget that collects all post images, resizes them, stores them on its own servers and displays them when you scroll down to the end of the post. Overall, it is a great widget that can be installed on every platform and supports externally stored images. However, there were several issues I couldn’t fix. Here are the few:

I experienced an increased page latency due to the loading of this Javascript and external images, It slowed down my site performance in a browser (in addition to Google FriendConnect, AddThis widget, ads and featured posts slideshow).
Its dynamic HTML rendering provided some unwanted “flickering” effect below every post.
It kept showing links and thumbnails of deleted posts.
Relation is based on post titles — not tags or categories.
For several of my posts it skipped the first image and displayed the second one as a thumbnail.
Even when I changed my post images completely it kept displaying the old ones.
It was actually hard to get response from their support.
I couldn’t change the colors and size of my thumbnails.

So here is my plugin for Wordpress:

It uses built-in Wordpress taxonomy — categories and tags.
It generates static page HTML, so search engines can actually see it.
Colors, font preferences and default image can be customized.
Only published posts are displayed.
It is based on built-in Wordpress post thumbnails feature, that allows to customize thumbnails size hosted on server.

Bookmark on Delicious on iPad

Thu, 20 May 2010 10:02:00 -0700

When I see something on web I want to save I add it to my Delicious. As I browse more often using my iPad I needed a way to bookmark on Delicious. The process of adding this bookmarking is similar as described for Instappaper but different javascript.

- Click on + to add current page to Bookmarks. Change the title to “Bookmark on Delicious”. Click Save.

- Select All and copy the following javascript:

- Open Bookmarks list, click on Edit. Select Delicious bookmark. In the link field remove text and paste the code from clipboard.

- Click on Done. And now you will be able to bookmark websites faster on Delicious while browsing in Safari on iPad.

My Top 10 Firefox Web Development Addons

Thu, 06 May 2010 13:47:46 -0700

Firefox is my primarily web development browser. For regular Internet browsing I use Google Chrome.

As for today the following Firefox addons I find very useful for my work.

Firebug - no need to describe this. Must have.
Page Speed - Firebug extension from Google, that helps to optimize page loading speed.
YSlow - Firebug extension from Yahoo to optimize page speed.
Web developer - lots of useful stuff.
HTML Validator - validates page according to W3C standard.
Copy Plain Text - helps to copy text without formatting.
SEOQuake - very useful plugin for SEO. I also install SEOQuake Yandex extension, which extends SEOQuake for Russian most popular search engine.
EditCSS - I use it sometimes, when I want to create new website or make mass CSS changes.
MeasureIt - measuring tool.
ColorZilla - color picker tool.

Wordpress plugin "Generate Post Thumbnails"

Wed, 21 Apr 2010 16:50:00 -0700

Today my first Wordpress plugin was released at Wordpress - Generate Post Thumbnails.

This plugin helped me to automatically generate post thumbnails for existing posts on my Wordpress blog and I hope it will help somebody else.

Plugin page for more information:

http://wordpress.shaldybina.com/plugins/generate-post-thumbnails/

"Start by doing what’s necessary, then what’s possible, and suddenly you are doing the..."

Thu, 08 Apr 2010 11:39:06 -0700

“Start by doing what’s necessary, then what’s possible, and suddenly you are doing the impossible.”

- Francis of Assisi

Most popular Google searches about Spongebob. These questions...

Sun, 04 Apr 2010 12:47:00 -0700

Most popular Google searches about Spongebob. These questions are bothering people most about him. Don’t ask me what I was searching, I don’t remember :)

Basic Tumblr customization suggestions for better SEO

Thu, 25 Mar 2010 12:10:00 -0700

I analyzed this blog with Google webmaster tools and found that it is not SEO friendly. Go ahead and check your blog search results at Google: “site:your_blog_url”. Probably, you will see your blog posts, with the same short description and duplicate titles. Here are some tips to improve your tumblr blog if your theme doesn’t support this.

I would suggest to change the following on your Tumblr theme customization page (you need to change your theme to “Use custom HTML”):

Title

If you use tags in your posts, and allow Google to index it in most Tumblr themes you will have the same title for each of your tag pages and your index page as well. So, I changed my title HTML tag to:

{block:PostSummary}{PostSummary} - {/block:PostSummary}{block:TagPage}{Tag} / {/block:TagPage}{Title}

Description

I saw the same meta description on every page of my blog. This was the text I entered in “About”. So you can see now at http://www.google.com/search?q=site:http://notes.shaldybina.com that all my page results show in their description “Hi everybody! That’s Maria’s notes about Life, bla-bla-bla”.

The best solution I saw at http://self.kovalyov.net to omit meta description - so search engines set it themselves from post content. There’s no other way to set post summary using currently available Tumblr theme tags. I decided to leave my About description at index page, and customize my tags pages description. For all other pages my blog won’t show meta description at all. This is my personal customized meta description tag:

{block:IndexPage}{/block:IndexPage}

Permalinks

And, of course, it is always better for SEO for each of your blog post set a better looking permalink at “Set a custom post URL”. If you write in Russian use transliteration.

Nexus One and iPhone family plan price comparison

Wed, 24 Mar 2010 17:45:00 -0700

Me and my husband have recently decided to buy smartphones. We are actually interested in both Nexus One and iPhone. Each of them has its pros and cons. So one thing that we wanted to see as one of the factors is their price and monthly cost. It’s pretty obvious if you buy one phone - Nexus with T-mobile contract will be the best bargain. However, there is no family plan offers on T-mobile today, so the cheapest option is not really obvious. So I investigated different plan options that we have.

I don’t want to go into details on different networks benefits. I am going to select the minimum available plans for today in California. So I decided to operate with the following plans:

Nexus with T-mobile contract will cost $79.99 as it is stated at http://google.com/phone
AT&T individual plan will cost $39.99 (450 minutes) + $30 (Unlimited Data) + $5 (200 text messages) = $75*
AT&T family plan will cost $39.99 (550 shared minutes) + 2* $30 (Unlimited Data) + $5 (200 shared text messages) = $125*

* - in addition when you join AT&T you have to pay once an activation fee of $36.

In order to see the difference between payment costs more precisely I’ll select one date in the future and check how much money will be spent. Let’s take 24 months period - the usual contract duration.

So what will happen if we buy phones with the following options.

1. Nexus + Nexus with contract (T-mobile)

Phone	2 * $179
Plan costs for 24 months	24 * 2* $79.99
Total	$4197.52

2. Nexus + Nexus (AT&T family plan)

Phone without contract	2 * $529
AT&T account activation	$36
Plan costs for 24 months	24 * $125
Total	$4094

3. iPhone + iPhone

Phone	2 * $199
AT&T account activation	$36
Plan costs for 24 months	24 * $125
Total	$3434

4. iPhone + Nexus with AT&T family plan

Because iPhone is only available on AT&T right now, this is the only combination that allows you to have both Nexus and iPhone on a single family plan.

iPhone	$199
Nexus	$529
AT&T account activation	$36
Plan costs for 24 months	24 * $125
Total	$3834

5. iPhone with AT&T + Nexus with T-mobile

iPhone	$199
Nexus	$179
T-mobile individual plan costs for 24 months	24 * $79.99
AT&T account activation	$36
AT&T individual plan costs for 24 months	24 * $75
Total	$4134

According to these calculations, the most inexpensive solution would be to have two iPhones on AT&T family plan ($3434 over 24 months). At the same time, if you are both Google phone fans, it’s better to consider AT&T family plan than go with individual plan contracts as seen in 1 and 2. Finally, if you want to get both phones experience, then family plan is also a better bargain.

Los Angeles

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 16:31:00 -0700

Los Angeles

Picasaweb hidden size

Mon, 15 Mar 2010 16:15:00 -0700

I was never satisfied with the size options range of embedded images at picasaweb - 144, 288, 400, 800. I needed something in the middle between 400 and 800. I don’t know, how I didn’t notice it before and why interface doesn’t show it in the embedded options, but there is also 640px image in “s640” folder. So when you embed the image by copying text from Embed image text field you need to replace for ex. s144 with s640. In general, I am pretty happy with Picasa - fast and easy upload with picasa.app. However, their resized images are still pretty bad compared to other services. But as long as I have my low-quality camera this is not a big issue for me. Besides, it leaves original image untouched, so if I need a good quality I upload image with a desired size.

Update: thanks to stansult, he found a lot of other sizes, actually:

0 (original image), 32, 48, 64, 72, 104, 144, 150, 160, 200, 288, 320, 400, 512, 576, 640, 720, 800, 912, 1024, 1152, 1280, 1440, 1600 (this was original size in his experiments)

Interstate 5 Road. Somewhere between San Francisco and Los...

Thu, 25 Feb 2010 15:42:15 -0800

Interstate 5 Road. Somewhere between San Francisco and Los Angeles. It’s actually very long, goes from Vancouver down to Mexico.

Inside Macbook Pro. In the middle of process of upgrading...

Mon, 08 Feb 2010 23:36:54 -0800

Inside Macbook Pro. In the middle of process of upgrading memory.