Posts by Dani

I've seen it used to reference PHP include files ... those PHP scripts that can't stand on their own but simply are helpers meant to be referenced from other php scripts.

I was able to get the user's email by asking for the permission https://www.googleapis.com/auth/userinfo.email instead of dealing with Google Plus.

Gah I think I missed you in live chat by about a minute. Let me know if it's fixed now.

Diafol,

I copied and pasted your code exactly and simply replaced client_id = 1 at the beginning, and it works fine.

No, I don't feel there should be a time limit because a main attribute of the forums is that everything you write not only helps the OP but lives on to help many, many millions of people years into the future.

When using implicit (clientside) flow:

• redirect_uri must reside on same domain as was used to register the application

When using explicit (serverside) flow:

• redirect_uri does not need to reside on same domain as was used to register the application
• redirect_uri passed in to retrieve code must be the exact same as redirect_uri passed in to retrieve access_token

The code parameter is based off of your client_id AND redirect_uri so be sure the same redirect_uri is used to fetch the code as is being passed into the subsequent request to fetch the access token.

It looks here as if you're fetching the code parameter from a browser request and then passing in http://dwapi.pritaeas.net/ as the redirect_uri to generate the access_token. Be sure you're passing that same redirect_uri into the browser request used to generate the code.

OK I'm reading through the code that generates the access token and here is a list of all possible reasons why you'd be getting that error:

• The client_id being passed in is wrong or doesn't exist
• The owner of the client_id (aka you) doesn't have permission to use the API because they are banned, etc.
• The client_secret passed in doesn't match up with the client_id
• The code being passed in is wrong

The code parameter is based off of your client_id AND redirect_uri so be sure the same redirect_uri is used to fetch the code as is being passed into the subsequent request to fetch the access token.

Because too many people format code snippets incorrectly or not at all.

DaniWeb offers something similar with our Vendor badge but, in seeing this and doing some research today in how StackOverflow has a whole internal team devoted to getting vendors to use them to power their customer support, I've gone ahead and created a webpage. Not quite a whole team of people pushing companies to do it, but hey, it's a start.

This code is untested as I'm just typing it off the cuff, but try something more along these lines:

<?php

    class database {

        ... blah blah blah

        public function fetch($query = '')
        {
            ... blah blah blah ...
        }

    }

    class user {

        private $person;

        public function get($property) {

            return $this->person[$property];

        }

        // Constructor function that gets called when creating an object
        public function __construct($authuser = 0)
        {
            global $database;

            $this->person = $database->fetch("SELECT * FROM `users` WHERE `authuser` = $authuser");
        }

    }

    $database = new database;

    $person = new user(12345);

    // If I wanted the current users first name, fn is the column name in users table
    echo $person->get('first_name'); 

    // If I wanted the current users last name
    echo $person->get('last_name'); 

    // If I wanted the current users email address
    echo $person->get('email'); 

?>

How would you know about their business plan?

Because the co-founder of StackOverflow wrote about it in his blog. It's been published how much venture capital StackOverflow has received, and it's also been published that the majority of their revenue comes from their job postings. I can see how many job postings there are per month multiplied by how much it costs for a job posting. Their revenue falls in line with how much money DaniWeb was making at its peak, and even then, we only had a small fraction of how much traffic StackOverflow gets. I can say with confidence that they very barely make enough money to pay their hosting bills, nevermind salaries for all of the fulltime employees they have on the payroll.

Also what is wrong by being bought up by someone as part of the business plan?

Nothing is wrong with that. Buy low sell high. I commented that the reason VCs are comfortable investing in a company that is not profitable is because traffic is climbing so fast that there is realistic buy-out potential in the near future.

Of course it's frustrating for others like DaniWeb that are not venture funded and need to compete directly with companies that have seemingly unlimited funds and no need to prove a bottom line month after month, compared to us bootstrapping our way through things. But that's the road I decided to take once upon a time, so now I have to live …

See, the way I see it, Google is a private entity in the business of providing a mechanism to allow searchers looking for information to find third-party websites that have the information they're looking for. The service they offer is a free service for the benefit of the searchers, and the websites they send the searchers to are not their clients or customers. They simply deliver the websites free traffic for the benefit of the searchers. The benefit to the websites is just a happy casualty.

Now, being the pro-commercialist that I am, I can say that Google, being a private entity, has the right to modify its search algorithm to serve its own best interests. In most cases, its best interests are going to be what causes the greatest percentage of its users (the searchers) to be happy. However, sometimes there are corporate politics going on, and sometimes it does other things in its own best interests, like show StackOverflow in the SERPS 8 out of 10 times on a single page because (for some hidden agenda we don't know about), it's in Google's best interests to position StackOverflow as the most popular programming website at this point in time.

The way that I see it, Google isn't ncessarily doing anything wrong. Sure, they might be stacking the deck against me, but that's what I love about the huge strategy game of the corporate world. I see this as a situation where I run a mom 'n' pop shop, …

Netminder, this I agree with.

Every self-sustained website needs something to pay for those thousands upon thousands of dollars in hosting costs. EE does it with a paywall, and Google doesn't like that, so they don't send users there. DaniWeb (and most other forums) do it with advertising, and Google doesn't like "excessive" advertising, so they don't send users here either.

They do, however, send traffic to the ONE site capable of not being able to do anything negative to users, because SO is just living off of millions of VC funding with no sustainable business plan ..... well, other than to get so huge that they get bought out by Google or some other huge publishing house, in which case all of the VCs will make their money back and be happy (which is why they are fine pouring their money into a company with no realistically strong business plan).

Like you say, sure you can go around hoping that the government will find something wrong with what Google is doing, but to be perfectly honest, I am way too pro-commercialism to go down that route. ;)

OK, long polling set up!! :)

Someone over in the Google forums posted this link:

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/google-plus-developers/dg9tkCPQ3TE

Basically, it is Google saying they are closing their Google+ Developers support forums in favor of redirecting their customers and end-users over to StackOverflow.

Clearly, there is favoritism here. It's not just StackOverflow having good SEO.

We log complete daily transcripts of our live web chat. There are a lot of interesting conversations that go on here, but of course they are posted as short, concise messages, as one would expect from a live chat room.

What are the chances that Googlebot would eat our chat archive right up?! I think that people can find valuable information in a daily archive the same way they could in an old discussion thread, coming in from a Google search.

Is it no longer possible to change the crawl rate for a site in Google Webmaster Tools? Can't find the option anymore.

Never heard of them but their website looks terrible. As bhav123 says, try GoDaddy. They're a huge company and they're good and cheap for small companies who don't need much.

Google Panda rollout this week, confirmed by Google today, even though they previously said they were no longer going to confirm Panda updates.

Word on the street is that they've softened the algorithm to not penalize border cases, and I've heard that some people are talking about recovery. DaniWeb hasn't, but I'm not so sure it's Panda that we were hit by. Know anyone who recovered??

There is full read and write chat functionality now added to the API :)

Who wants to write two-way IRC<-->DaniWeb Chat integration? ;)

Any takers ... ??

You need an access token in order to post, but it's feasable if you create a new DaniWeb account named "IRC Bot" and have everything posted from the IRC channel posted by the bot (perhaps the message can be preceded by the nick in parentheses or some such).

Wow, that's a lot of links. I really don't have the time to read them all now, but here's how I remember the story going (off the top of my head).

• StackOverflow launches
• StackOverflow rolls out an API and a lot of other sites start syndicating its content through its API and public RSS feeds
• StackOverflow gets killed by Google because all of the sites that are syndicating it are outranking it, and it is suffering from duplicate content penalties
• StackOverflow reaches out to Google and lobbies for an algorithm change, stressing that other sites syndicating their content should reflect positively on the quality of their content and is a good thing and they shouldn't be penalized for it
• Soon after, Matt Cutts announces a massive change to Google's algorithm targeting duplicate content, and specifically cites Stack Overflow as being the instigator
• Panda is released soon after that

Whether or not StackOverflow also had an inside track to Panda (or any other Google algorithms) is a thing of conspiracy theorists, but clearly Google has made them out to be the one and only winner in their niche ... and let's face it, online programming communities is not a small niche.

The robot question? You mean human verification? That stops once you post two more times.

Yes, there has been proof lately that Google's algorithm tends to significantly favor big, established brands. However, as with DaniWeb, it is possible for a small one-or-two person company to grow into a huge online brand without millions of dollars. Remember, having a huge online brand identity and huge online presence doesn't necessarily have to match up with what you would consider a big brand in the real world.

This is by design. When you're on the 2nd+ page of a thread, it is meant to just show you a shortened preview of the first few sentences of the OP. We can't parse markdown because the cutoff might be mid-code block, etc.

IMO, that's what is great about Markdown. It doesn't need to be parsed in order to understand intent. It can be read as-is without looking marked up.

I dunno, in my mind, the concept of the search engine is that, at its core, it's supposed to be designed to give the end-user options of where to visit, given the user's specific criteria. Imagine looking up attorneys in the yellow pages and the first complete page of listings are just all different offices for the same law practice. Sure, they might win 90% of their cases, but that doesn't mean that I still don't want to be presented with options. Not everything is suited well for everyone.

My biggest gripe is that while they definitely deserve to rank well, they don't deserve to be the ONLY site that ranks well. Owning nine out of ten results for all discussion-based results with the broad keyword "c++" is a bit too extreme IMHO.

They seem to be ranking well NO MATTER WHAT, even in cases where they are simply doing little more than linking out to other sites that have the complete answer. The fact that Google is sending traffic to StackOverflow even in cases where the StackOverflow landing page doesn't contain the answer directly is proof that the algorithm is too biased towards the stackoverflow.com domain as a whole.

Google should be spreading the wealth around a bit more. Not everyone appreciates the Stack Overflow format, and Google is creating a monopoly here. IMHO no single broad keyword should ever be nearly completely owned by a single domain unless the keyword is a brand.

Looks to me as StackOverflow spent a lot of money to get favorable placement.

That's just the thing. You can't buy Google placements. Or at least, it's never been heard of before.

From a strictly SEO perspective, StackOverflow has overall higher quality content than the forums they have replaced in the SERPs because they have fewer mispellings, grammar mistakes, and leet speak, than most other forums.

However, this is a double edged sword. StackOverflow is able to achieve this because they have ridiculously stringent rules and moderators manually correct all spelling/grammar mistakes and rewrite question titles, etc. Questions that aren't perfectly written and concise are immediately closed or rewritten. Many feel as if StackOverflow is over-moderated and therefore completely lacks a friendly, community feel to it.

From an SEO perspective, sure, their content is written in perfect sentences with perfect spelling and grammar. Googlebot eats that right up!! But many humans get offended having a site over-moderate what they contribute, and Google needs to understand that when it comes to forums and community discussions (especially global communities where English isn't always necessarily the poster's native language), grammar shouldn't be the end-all be-all major factor.

The first example your websie shows in #2 while Stack shows in #1.

While I've made sure to ensure that I had personal results turned off when writing this article, Google results do fluctuate and also differ based on geolocation and other such things.

If you cannot keep up with the huge costs (I guess you can't) I think you might need to invest in a little advertising and not just relie on SEO.

We use a lot of different means of driving traffic, not just SEO. As you can read in this article, a significant amount of our traffic comes from other sites (such as StackOverflow!) that link to us. However, as with all Q&A discussion communities on the web (including StackOverflow, of course), SEO is the #1 traffic generator hands down. A huge hit from Google is crippling no matter which way you slice it.

However, the point of this article is not to complain that we were hit. It was to point out that all programming communities were hit at the same time and had all of their SERPs traffic replaced by StackOverflow, to the point of where StackOverflow owns nine out of ten of the google results for the broad keyword C++. Additionally, not only have we lost our traffic, but we lost our traffic to StackOverflow pages that do nothing more than link to the pages on our sites that they replaced.

As many of you know, DaniWeb was hit by a Google algorithm update back in November 2012 and we lost about 50% of our search traffic. In investigating the issue, I discovered that DaniWeb, in addition to most other programming forums out there, all lost their google traffic to StackOverflow.

For those who don't know, StackOverflow is a Q&A-based wiki-forum hybrid that was born a few years ago and subsequently received a lot of venture capital. Hands down, it deserves really high listings in Google results: it is fast-loading, lots of people link to it, it has almost exclusively high quality content, and their unique Q&A platform ensures that the best answers are always shown immediately below the question, optimized for those Google searches where you just need to find a quick answer without having to wade through discussions. All in all, no complaints. It deserves to rank high in many cases.

However, back on November 20th 2012, DaniWeb, and many other programming forums, all lost 50% or more of our traffic literally overnight. We were happily receiving about 300,000 pageviews per day for quite some time until we received 330,000 pageviews on Monday, November 19th. We then instantly took a hit down to 230,000 the next day. By Friday the 23rd, we were at 182,000 pageviews. It's been slowly going downhill ever since, and today we're down to averaging a mere 130,000 pageviews daily. I have heard very similar stories from many other programming forums. For example, …

They certainly don't work as much today as they used to in the past. Nowadays it's built into the search algorithms that they understand what a forum is and what forum signatures are, and treat them accordingly.

It's here, here at last! Only about a decade too late, and about six or seven years after Google announced they were working on it.

AdSense now offers asynchronous code, finally. It looks something like this:

<script async src="http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js"></script>
<ins class="adsbygoogle"
     style="display:inline-block;width:728px;height:90px"
     data-ad-client="ca-pub-xxxxxx"
     data-ad-slot="xxxxxx"></ins>
<script>
(adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({});
</script>

Asynchronous code is non-page blocking, meaning it doesn't slow down the rendering of the page, and only loads the ads after the rest of the page has already finished loading.

Absolutely awesome. Nice look, easy to use, no "phaffing". Not bad for "less than a day's coding" :)

Thanks!

I noticed the member list are links to profiles, however in iRC I think they're like PMs. kiwiirc (my current favourite), offers a shortcut menu on click with options for [message, info, slap]

I changed it so the member list are links to the member's personal shoutbox instead.

I like the fact that invisibles like myself don't show up in the list, however, this could be a shock as I sneak up behind you and say "BOOO!"

This is by design.

Will you be inserting smiley images / colours etc, or will it be cutdown markdown - if anything? Sure we don't want that amateurish nonsense in the forum posts, but for chat? Why not?

Most likely not right now, sorry. Still want to keep it professional and tightly integrated enough with the forums that it becomes implicitely understood that the same rules go for everywhere. For example, right now the chat uses the same profanity filter as the forums, and moderators have the ability to permanently delete old messages from the chat log.

From our chat last night, I don't think that rooms would necessarily take the place of forum PMs. Chat is immediate. I get maybe one PM every 2 months - asking for help usually.

Still on the fence about private rooms. I don't want them to make …

Sneak preview = http://www.daniweb.com/community-center/3/chat

Working on integrating a live chat feature right now.

Alexa is just a rough third-party estimate of how much traffic you get, based on a sample size of people who use the Alexa browser toolbar and other such methods. It's rather meaningless and inaccurate IMHO.

Just the ability to log in with Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, etc. and quick-post all in one shot. Part of the ongoing efforts to encourage more lurkers to take the plunge.

since once I click it, I can't turn off the live preview again.

Same as it always was: click on the preview itself to make it go away.

As I pointed out, your work is simply requiring that you use the wrong tool for the job. Not to say that a screwdriver isn't loads useful, but it's rather frustrating when you need it to do the job of a hammer. Sure, you can sit there banging its handle into the nail for a year and a day, and ultimately get the job accomplished, but not using the right tool for the job shouldn't dismiss the usefulness of either of the tools.

Blasphemy! I really like PDFs. Perhaps your issue isn't with the actual format but with the fact that you are using them incorrectly. They're a good portable format when documents need to be read (not so much modified and worked with, which seems to be your dilemma). They're small in file size, can be emailed, can be opened across nearly all platforms and mobile devices without the need for any costly software, can be opened within web browsers, display identically across platforms (amazing for more complicated layouts, or when fonts and graphics are necessary), and even print exactly the way they look on screen. Honestly, I can't think of any other format in existance that could fill the place of PDFs when it comes to ease of use, portability and complete standardization across platforms.

Spiceworks, one of DaniWeb's advertisers, has just rolled out their DaniWeb API integration!!

Check it out here:

http://www.spiceworks.com/p/daniweb

Please be sure to give suggestions :)

Oh, I was investigating whether I indeed was or wasn't following OAuth standards, and the result of my investigation is that while I was following Facebook's OAuth implementation, Google's implementation is much more friendly towards native non-web based apps.

As many of you know, we got rid of the live preview last week. Originally it was intended to just be a test to see if it was causing severe posting lags on very slow computers, but it turns out that most of the regulars prefer not having it (either that, or the original novelty of it greatly wore off).

Therefore, some of you may have discovered that for the past few days there is a little green checkmark in the top right of the editor toolbar. You can click it to generate a preview that also spellchecks. As before, click the preview to hide it.

Dani is a very good interviewee.

Thanks! :)

Either she is a complete natural to media, or has applied her training impeccably.

Thanks and nope, no training. Nor have I even ever taken a business course before. Hofstra University offered two tracks: a B.S. in Computer Science (which I took) which required you to take a lot of the higher level natural sciences and engineering courses, or a B.A. in Computer Science which allowed you to replace some of the upper level science and engineering courses with liberal arts courses. I was actually midway through pursuing a minor in chemistry (which I never completed due to my dad passing away), coupled with my IT/IS minor which I did complete. Unfortunately I didn't make time in school for any business courses (or pretty much any electives, for that matter).

Additionally, about midway through my degree, I had decided that I was going to pursue my MBA at NYU after finishing my undergrad degree. I have always really liked the strategy involved in the corporate world, and I thought that an MBA would get me a high paying software engineering job at a large corporation in Manhattan. By the time I graduated from Hofstra, however, DaniWeb had already taken off and I really wanted to take the opportunity at the time to run with it. One of my biggest regrets today is that I never got my MBA.

Whew! FINALLY!!

I was able to get it working by doing two things:

1. Manually specifying an absolute path to the .pws file
2. Cutting the file down to just a small fraction of its intended size

OK, the redirect_uri is no longer mangled if it has a scheme other than http://

It's nothing since it doesn't exist anymore :)

Years ago, you had to manually submit your website to search engines so they would know about you. Nowadays, web crawlers follow links throughout the web, and they discover any webpage that has been linked to from another webpage.

I would call up your ISP and say that you're having issues with the current IP address you've been assigned, and is there any way to force a new IP assignment?

As the community administrator, I would rather the answers be posted on the site as a reply to the questions being asked. However, I don't think it's the worst thing in the world if an answer includes a link to another website that has an answer in great depths.

I think the general rule of thumb should be if it's a relatively succinct answer, then it's best to keep it on DaniWeb. It's actually a better experience for the OP to see the answer right below their question instead of being sent offsite and have to start navigating their way around another site to find an answer originally intended for a close-but-not-quite-the-same question. However, it makes most sense to link to someone else's long, detailed explanation, etc., or if there's a really good and relevant conversation going on somewhere else.