7DayBuzz is probably one of the coolest new blogs out there that I found. It’s new, it’s fresh, and the contents are very diverse and interesting - the diversity reminds me of JohnChow.com. The owners’ names are Tom and Kim Sawyer (no, there’s no Huckleberry Finn on the editors board), and they are a nice couple who live in the Southern Neighbour, USA. In case you did not realize, I am Canadian.

7DayBuzz has a rule that resounds in its name - they will update every day, if not more!!! That’s more than I can say about my own blog, unfortunately. And did I mention the diversity of content already? There’s something for everybody. Here’s some takes on the more interesting posts that they’ve had recently.

Vaccinations: What To Do (or Not Do) - We all acknowledge Vaccination as something we do as a given. But some say that vaccines can cause autism, aspergers, and other disabilities and anomalies. The official recommendation is that children are to receive more than 2 dozen vaccinations, and then there’s the question of what side effects it may have! Read for yourself, and pitch an opinion.

Is America Ready for a Black President? - Let’s say you’re a democrat who supports Clinton (not Bill), and Obama (the potential Black President) wins the nomination for the Presidential Election. Would you rather vote for John McCain to prevent a black man from becoming the US president? Sounds crazy eh? Well, at least by Canadian standards, this is complete bigotry and would not be tolerated in many places, but hey, we never had slavery - USA did, and apparently, some people feel that way! They’d rather vote for a Republican candidate in order to stop a black man from becoming president. Get the scoop!

The Messiah’s Disciples and Their Behavior Towards One Another (MATT 18:1-35) - Redefine a “child” through biblical teachings and meanings. I hear many of you saying “well I’m not religious so…” Here’s the thing about the Bible, the Koran, and other scriptures - even if you are not religious, there’s things in the scripture that can be used as universal learning material, not to mention give you a good education in anthropology and culture.

Yes, as you can see, the diversity of posts are astonishing, and it’s one of those places where you can hang out, chat, sometimes get into a heated debate/argument over politics, and have fun.

It was one fateful evening on a lonely Saturday, when the stars were slightly dimmed by the overhanging clouds, that John Chow and Jeremy Schoemaker exchanged curious yet delightful glances at each other in a quiet bar by a highway running through the interior. The greenery of the fields and forest were dimmed to a midnight turquoise with a dark splash of night-sky over it, and the river running by could only be heard, if not for the occasional glitters that came from its running waters reflecting the gentle moonlight from the heavens.

It was a place where there was quiet and peace in the air, and these two celebrities were able to escape the everyday life where they are constantly recognized and hounded by fans from all over the continent. First came a drink, and then came intimacy. And before they knew it their visions were blurred and their speeches slurred, their legs crossed and their hands held tight. And when the night came to a climax to the point where neither would be able to recollect anything of the devious acts they performed on each other… well, the unthinkable happened.

Years went by while both went on with their own lives with no memory of what happened between the two that night, having friendly competitions with each other with RSS feeds, but alas, proof always remains, just like the white stains on Monica Lewinsky’s dress that revealed what really happened under Bill Clinton’s desk while nobody was watching (and kudos for him). The two had spawned an offspring, named the Chowmoney.com. The product of Johnchow.com and Shoemoney.com came out like this :

Yes, these two seemingly handsome looking gentlemen put together produced this hideous form of a human being - something I can only refer to as a joke of genetics, a flaw in creation, a mockery by God himself. Chowmoney.com, which had lived under the veils as an unwanted bastard offspring has finally come out to the world.

Nonetheless, the point is that a very creative and smart person took Johnchow.com and Shoemoney.com to create a merged-parody site and is out there to make some serious cash. Kudos for that, almost as cool as getting head from Monica under the desk.

So over the last several months, John Chow and I have been working together to get his new TTZ Media website set up, and also to get the Ad Banner system set up.

My role in this project was the coding of the whole thing. I started coding the XML API reception system that would parse the XML feed from Shopping.com’s API. After a few banners were created, we moved onto the Adcode generation panel, which by the way is better than Google’s Adsense Code Generator. With extensive use of AJAX, there are 0 page refreshes needed to start and finish getting the ad code you want. All the controls, refreshing is done in Javascript and AJAX. Here are some screenshots of it - more screenshots can be seen at the portfolio page of Synchronous Design & Marketing (which is my new design firm based out of Vancouver BC, and soon to operate in San Jose, Costa Rica).

This ad code generation system, in my opinion, is the most robust one out there. I’ve seen adcode generation platforms all over the place but nothing tops mine.

1. Through a very intuitive CSS/DIV based design, I can expand the sizes of the ads to virtually unlimited number of different sizes.
2. Pretty much every piece of text can be changed in color. Even the link color/hover color can be changed. The background color is flexible too, even though I wouldn’t recommend it as all of the shopping.com thumbnails have a white background.
3. You can change the font face of the ad banner.
4. The adcode is as clean as Google’s Javascript embed code. Some ad codes out there are so messy and hard to read. This code is rather easy to modify on your own without having to come back to the adcode page.
5. The ads give options to enter whatever keyword you would like, so that you have complete control over what kind of ads you show.
6. There is a very easy-to-use ad template saver and loader (once again AJAX, so no page refreshes!!!), as well as an ad channel saver and loader (again, all AJAX). If you’re not sure what AJAX is, please read this article on where to apply AJAX.

Additional features of the banner system include a very intuitive click/view tracking system as well as a click fraud prevention scheme that utilizes IP tracking, Cookie collection and more, while the payment module calculates the payout for the affiliates in a very flexible way that John Chow wanted.

The beta testing for the banner ads were done with some 40+ affiliates, and was successful other than the times when the server went down due to some MySQL engine problems. Of course, the word “Success” is an important one here - the whole point of the beta was to optimize the code so it runs faster and leaner. Now the affiliate marketing system has opened up to the public.

The TTZMedia.com website itself serves as a catalog running off Shopping.com’s XML API. Go to the site at www.ttzmedia.com and see for yourself. You can apply for an affiliate marketing account there as well. The TTZ Media website is still being developed - mainly the front page still needs some more work although the framework is set up, and other cosmetics will change slightly. But the bulk of the programming is done.

This project received lots of help from Paul Butler at its latter stages. I sub-contracted him as a server administrator to help with my poor Linux skills. He helped me set up the necessary extensions in PHP as well as other tweaks on the server required to make this project a success.

Added - Looks like Tyler Cruz did his own review of the TTZ Media system already!

As much as I am a huge fan of facebook in so many different ways including the fact that they provide a cleaner layout than MySpace, require less clicks and page-refreshes than myspace using AJAX, and the fact that they provide an extensible API, some of the recent movies made me frown a little bit.

There are too many god damned applications coming up and there’s way too much stuff on some people’s profiles than there should be. On some of my friends’ profiles, I need to scroll down for quite a bit until I can reach the wall section to write something there. Also some of the applications leave useless updates in the newsfeeds, which means relevant newsfeeds are being pushed back way too faster than it should be. If I don’t log in often I’ll miss even more than I used to.

On the upside, the application boxes adhere strictly to the standards of the Facebook design which means that the look is at least uniform. But nonetheless, I find that it is becoming annoying and too complicated (which is precisely why I never got into MySpace). Of course, it’s still a hundred times cleaner than MySpace could ever be.

Another source of irritation is that there are some applications that are very similar to each other which causes an overlap. As far as facebook users are concerned, this is not a marketplace of competition, but a website for convenient contact with friends and associates. I quite frankly do not care to install both the TravelBuddy Visited Countries as well as the Cities I’ve Visited application (OK, if I hadn’t been so well traveled I wouldn’t have, but since I wanted to show off I added them both anyways).

The applications should be better filtered based on usability and also in consideration of other existing applications. And perhaps imposing a limit on how many applications one user can have would be a good idea to keep things clean as well.

What’s everybody else’s take on this?

I will be travelling this summer quite a bit (more detailes to be disclosed later!) and for starters I had to book a rental car as well as a hotel room in Seattle for 1 night for next week. While I was looking at options through my BCAA membership website (they give me some discounts), my friend told me about www.priceline.com. And no, this is NOT a pay-per-post or a review-me-post. This is simply a review out of my own personal experience, referred to by a friend.

The concept is this - you can either book the hotel at the regular rate (usually for 4-star hotels, over $200 US a night), or you can call your own price.

Here’s how it works : you can select an area (for example, Seatac Airport, or downtown Seattle) and then start the star scale (they tell you what the median price is for that class of a hotel in that region). Once those are selected, you call a price. In my case, I tossed in $100 US as my offer, while the median price was $239. After that, they inform you that there are service charges of $22.xx or so, which brings this to a total of $122.xx.

Now, here’s the exciting catch : once you make the bid, you must put in a credit card # and full personal information, and when you click the button, the system starts searching. If the system happens to find any available hotels within your price bid range/area/star scale, it will automatically book it for you, charge your credit card, and it’s a done deal. You cannot change or cancel your reservation and there are no refunds. For giving you a great deal, you cannot treat this like a generic booking with tonnes of freedom. Oh well, not a bad thing at the end!

So yes, there’s how I scored a room at the Sheraton Seattle for myself for $122 a night!

How can they afford this? I suspect that every hotel has surpluses of rooms and instead of letting them sit at $0 a night, they may as well toss it out at half price without publicly advertising it (which will piss off other customers who paid full price), they give a certain portion of rooms to priceline.com, which brings them some revenue rather than none. Besides, chances are I will be using other services at the hotel (drinks, food and more) so it should be a good way to scoop up some extra revenue for the hotels, while I get a killer deal.