I get annoyed by advertisements. Not the message they are trying to put into my brain, absolutely not. They are vital for sustaining business: without advertising, who will [...]]]> Note that this post does not contain any evidence. It’s all personal experience and opinion. I work for an e-commerce company that uses advertisements to sell products.

I get annoyed by advertisements. Not the message they are trying to put into my brain, absolutely not. They are vital for sustaining business: without advertising, who will know about your product?

No, it’s the way they look, the way they respond, the way they’re always in the way of what I want to see. Here are some tips from me, to advertisers.

1. No moving ads, no ads with sound. They make me want to go to my JavaScript console and type stupidAd.gtfo() because they are distracting me from what I’m there for. I’m probably reading something interesting, or looking at something at your website. Out of principle, I won’t click on them.
2. Don’t use popups or anything else that superimposes itself on top of what I’m watching. I’ll click it away anyway – if I can, some are like little mini-games – so there’s no point in trying to show me something I’m probably not interested in. If you think I am, I guess you don’t know me.
3. Let people pay to hide all ads. I know a few sites that offer hiding all ads for >10 euros per year. It works. It makes me happy to see websites that care for the people who visit. If you don’t offer something like this, you’re forcing people to see *** on your website. You’ll probably convince people to install something like Adblock, which will deprive you off all income from this person.
4. Make the ad look interesting enough to read it, yet without the amount of contrast with the rest of the website that makes me nauseated.

If your advertisements suck, you won’t sell as much. Really, the same thing applies for websites as a whole, but that can’t be helped. There simply are people out there that don’t know how other people think about their website.

So, to conclude: please let me use the internet (or games (like Angry Birds)) without being forced to look at nonsense I didn’t ask for. I know you want to make money, and I respect that. But don’t enforce crappy-looking ads to users – they will hate you for it like I do now.

The same kind of reasoning actually goes for the placement of curly braces. I tend to always [...]]]> I’m noticing more and more people tend to favor omitting semicolons when writing JavaScript.
Now, my opinion concerning these matters is simple: the language may allow it, but it’s dangerous and will lead to problems. Eventually.

The same kind of reasoning actually goes for the placement of curly braces. I tend to always have them on the same line, just for consistency.
Let me give you a few examples why.

(function () {
    return
    {
        a: 5
    };
}());

// the code above actually translates to:

(function () {
    return; // ES grammar says return cannot be followed by a newline
            // so semicolon insertion "fixes" it
    {
        a: 5; // this labelled statement (yes, really) gets a semicolon as well
    };
}());

var a = function (b) {
    alert(b);
} // no semicolon here

(function () {
    // blah blah, do stuff here

    return 5; // just because.
}());

// because I didn't pay attention, the above code alerts 5. Now, let's see what's going on:

var a = function (b) {
    alert(b);
}(function () {
    return 5;
}());

// I missed a semicolon, the immediately-called-lambda is now used as an argument list

And these are just minor point. Just remember: always be consistent. Omitting the semicolon adds a minor performance penalty as well:
the “placing” of semicolons is part of error recovery. It shouldn’t be neccessary, but it is.

Sometimes the language isn’t that great, but just ignore these little handy-dandy things. You’ll be better off, and a better programmer.

There are quite a few things I know a lot (or somewhat less than “a lot”) about, which means – for me, at least – that it’s pretty hard to choose which topic to [...]]]> Well, I have to be honest… I’m having a hard time figuring out what topics I should write about.

There are quite a few things I know a lot (or somewhat less than “a lot”) about, which means – for me, at least – that it’s pretty hard to choose which topic to choose.

Now, I have two options:

1. Write a whole bunch of posts about everything and post them every once in a while.
2. Let other people choose what I’ll be writing about!

For me, the second option sounds like a lot more fun. So, I’m asking the people who read this to pick a topic out of the list. Of course, I’ll also be asking my collegues and such to “vote”. Double the fun!

Now for the fun part: what things do I know something about?

• Programming
  • PHP
  • JavaScript
  • CSS
  • HTML
  • SQL
  • Java
  • *nix
  • Regular expressions
• Music
  • Main instrument: Guitar
  • Theory (not too advanced, but quite a lot)

These are the subjects I’d probably feel comfortable writing about. Make your pick!

Even though I’m working with Sphoof to write a very simple blog (yes, to prove Sphoof is a viable way of writing solid applications) I wanted to have a [...]]]> I just couldn’t resist, you know. Everyone seems to have their own blog, except for me. Finally: I’m here!

Even though I’m working with Sphoof to write a very simple blog (yes, to prove Sphoof is a viable way of writing solid applications) I wanted to have a blog. I wanted it, so I installed WordPress, which looks pretty nice.

So, what can you expect here? Well, I play the guitar (in a brilliant band called Paradox Machine), and I’m a fulltime webdeveloper at expert-shops.com. I like the combination, especially because IT and music don’t seem pretty related. Well, to me they are.

I’ll see you around, I guess!