Here is one for the books. This is a graph of the so-called ‘reach’ that my roller derby photography page has on Facebook. Reach means: how many people have been exposed to my photos. (In an earlier blog post I explained why I have a Facebook page in the first place.) Every dot represents the … Read More

If you check in at a location on Facebook or enter the location for a photo, there is a chance that you will end up linking to spam. The main reason for this is that Facebook is crap and the people who make Facebook are idiots, but I say this in anger after hacking spam … Read More

Event calendars tell users about interesting events that are about to happen. They can also help create an impression of how busy the near future will be. Furthermore, calendars may double as a navigation or filter tool. Events as blog posts in WordPress I’ve helped build a number of event calendars for websites in the … Read More

Lately this happens a lot to me: 1) I search the web for a product. 2) I settle on product X. 3) The ad network remembers my choice. 4) I buy product X. 5) The next two weeks, the web inundates me with ads for product X, even though I have already been sated with … Read More

(TL/DR? Skip to results.) Yesterday I wrote that even though social networks currently combine targeted advertising and private user data collection, doing them both is not a requirement for running a profitable social network. The networks can just focus on the former, that is focus on the harvesting and selling of user data, and dispose … Read More

This post is partially outdated because of recent developments. See the notes at the bottom. This note about how to comply with the Dutch cookie law is mostly a memo to self, but I believe the information past the fold is also useful to anyone who runs their own website and needs to ensure the … Read More

Lately a lot of companies have been asking for websites built along the principles of ‘Responsive Design’. I had to give up on building a responsive website in early 2012 due to lack of time, but in January 2013 I got another chance. (Side-note: both websites are on intranets, so I cannot show them to … Read More

LinkedIn has introduced an endorsement system which lets you ‘endorse’ the skills of your connections. A few quick notes about this: I haven’t checked whether these are skills you entered yourself; that seems to be the case though. I have endorsed wide, easy skills, such as mastering your native tongue. I have endorsed specialized skills … Read More

About 95% of my income as a front-end web developer comes from large ad and web agencies that hire me to be a part of project teams. These teams build websites that cost anywhere from 10,000 to 1,000,000 euro.* The other 5% is from small jobs, and the smallest of those are when other freelancers … Read More

Six years ago I blogged that open source CMSes tended to be too difficult to set up and use to be usable for small business and non-profits. I suggested that a number of blog systems and nukes could step forward and supplant them, and that is exactly what has happened. In 2008, Joomla!, Wordpress and … Read More