Valters Bože

Horrible combination, spent all day on this!
My goal was to take some data (which contain UTF-8 unicode characters), generate a CSV file using PHP and send it via mail. The problem is that Microsoft Excel doesn`t accept UTF-8 CSV files.
Some people suggest using mb_convert_encoding($contents, "ISO-8859-1", "UTF-8"); or mb_convert_encoding($contents, "UTF-16LE", "UTF-8");, neither worked for me, though I have multibyte extension installed
It seems that the solution is different by server setups. This solution worked for me:

$message= iconv("UTF-8","WINDOWS-1257",html_entity_decode( $message ,ENT_COMPAT,'utf-8'));

Today we encountered a problem. Nothing showed up in Google Analytics tracking campaigns. We used a clickTAG code to swfobject (a.k.a FlashObject) like this:

so.addVariable(”clickTAG”, “http://domain.com/some_page/?utm_source=Banner&utm_medium=Banner&utm_campaign=Banner3″);

But the banner link only went to “http://domain.com/some_page/?utm_source=Banner”. After a bit of research I found out that Flash didn`t accept anything that’s after the ampersand &. Some suggested using & instead of &, but it did not work. I`m not sure if it`s a problem of Flash or SWFobject, but anyway I found a simple solution - use javascript escape() function to translate the URL, like this:

so.addVariable(”clickTAG”, escape(”http://domain.com/some_page/?utm_source=Banner&utm_medium=Banner&utm_campaign=Banner3″));

I knew about site Chitika.net for a few years. (i think it sounds better chikita not chitika :D) The didn`t accept my site back then (www.celebritysnap.com), but a few months ago they updated their policy and accept new sites. I tested both on celebritysnap.com and my furniture site www.antique.lv, both perform very poorly, about 10% of Google Adsense performance, no matter how many success stories Chitika writes. It just doesn`t pay. I tried more of their advertising features. 99% it shows IPOD ads that lead to www.amazon.com, I`m not sure if anyone is interested in such ads. Screw Ipod`s!
I`m waiting to get my first payment and then I`ll quit using Chitika :/ Maybe I`m doing something wrong, but the CTR is 0.05% and below which isn`t effective at all!

Google Chrome - A New browser! Who did expect? And its good, really good! This is a revolution on Internet! Today Google stocks had reached 463 dollars, 10 dollar fall since yesterday. I`m almost sure that recent news about Youtube advertisments and this new browser will skyrocket google stocks back to 750 and maybe even more!
Now I need to find a way to buy Google stocks in Latvia..
Google chrome - Is This The Day Mozilla and Iexplore Died??

Update:

I`m just sick of how many new features there are, e.g. check this screenshot for simple stats about google chrome:

Google reveals it`s data to the world. Google External Keyword Tool has been updated to show actualdata - keyword search count during last month and average search amount. And of course it displays Adwords publisher competition. This is definitely the best news for any internet marketer for the last months and should become the most used tool for many SEO people. Here is a screenshot:


Link: Google External Keyword Tool

Scite is one of the best text editors out there - functional, fast and lightweight! If you write a lot of text that is not in english (read: UTF-8) it becomes pretty annoying as every time you open Scite.exe it defaults to 8-bit character set. To write or see the opened document with UTF8 characters you have to click File > Encoding > UTF-8. While there is no graphical interface for options, you can still change the default encoding manually. Here is how:

• Open Scite, click Options > Open global options file

Most of web users have noticed one of the most useful tools on the web - Netvibes.com . Now it has released its “Ginger” update and offers all users to create their own profile pages. This takes social networking one step further. Now its pretty easy present public information about yourself in one place - all your profiles at myspace, facebook, flickr, youtube, favorite feeds - all in single place. It`s like a new type of personal homepage! Or your digital dynamic CV. No more need for personal domain?

Flickr uploader software “Uploadr 3” is out! As I spend most of the time at work where i`m behind a firewall AND a proxy, first thing I noticed, I couldn`t sign in. Of course I searched for proxy settings, but the software has no settings available until you sign in. Also when you solve the problem, you dont have any proxy settings using the graphical user interface. Here`s how to add/edit proxy settings:

• Close Flickr Uploader (if its open)
• Go to your Flickr Uploadr 3 installation directory and find the configuration file (usually “C:\Programm Files\Flickr Uploadr\defaults\preferences\prefs.js” )

I`m pretty married to Netvibes by using it everyday. Mainly I use it for tracking RSS news, RSS music releases and “notepads” for saving rly various stuff.
Today I logged in and half of my items were lost. “Mail tab” was completely empty, about 40% of RSS items were left. A million thoughts crossed my mind! So I searched for support on Netvibes, but the answer was in the FAQ section:

When trying to access your netvibes page and all your tabs are empty, this is due to a desynchronization with our server.

About a year ago Google offered new referral program for Adsense - Firefox with Google Toolbar. If you referred people to download and install a fresh copy of Firefox with Google Toolbar, you would get 1$. There were also scripts like “Internet Explorer killer” that was showing banners to clients with Internet Explorer encouraging them to use Firefox. I`ve earned some bucks with this referral program, but lately I`ve noticed, that earnings have decreased pretty much.