Tag: services | AJdG Solutions

Posted on February 19, 2020February 21, 2020 by Arnan de Gans — Leave a comment

Updates from every angle – Status update on AdRotate Pro

Over the last few months updating AdRotate Professional has not been as easy as it should be.
A ton of things have been going wrong with the update routine for many users. While for others it worked without a hitch. I’m one of those people where it usually works. So it’s a bit hard to find the problem. But here goes.
I took some more drastic measures to actually improve things and not just patch stuff up.

3 Major issues have come to light and have been fixed or will be fixed over the next few weeks.

Posted on December 17, 2019March 8, 2020 by Arnan de Gans — Leave a comment

Why switching to Matomo for website analytics is a good thing

For years I have wondered why the world so blindly got hooked up with Google services and why almost nobody seems to question if that’s a good thing. Nobody I know has any doubts. Reviews everywhere on the internet tell people Google is the best, or at least it’s very good. And if you search for “best way to sync your android phone” or “alternative for iCloud calendars” or something similar, everyone seems to blindly recommend the Google sync stuff – Which also quietly has you use their services afterwards.

Why? It makes no sense… Oh wait, it does. The Google services as a whole work quite well and they work on pretty much every platform and system. Sure, but so do many others. So why choose, and trust, Google?

Like so many others, I recently started to resent companies like Google and Facebook who seemingly just do whatever they want. Dancing around laws and regulations like they don’t exist or matter and the endless lying to their users. I wrote a bit about that in a previous blog post.

Posted on December 3, 2019 by Arnan de Gans — Leave a comment

AdRotate Professional 5.6.4 – Fixed end-dates, more reliable update routine!

This update again focuses on streamlining the AdRotate Professional experience and improves a number of things in the dashboard. But more importantly it fixes the date pickers end dates and localization. We’re reversing to the old system that uses dd-mm-yyyy instead of named months. Another important change is the update routine going forward. More below.

Posted on December 1, 2019December 1, 2019 by Arnan de Gans — 3 Comments

How I reconsidered the use of Google services

Over the years I’ve been using all kinds of online services without thinking too much about it. I’ve been all over social media, forums, online stores. Opening accounts left and right. And for what… For a long time I enjoyed the internet, to be included. Only to get entangled in this magical thing called the internet. It all comes at the low cost of my privacy, only to realize how invasive and unnecessary most of it is.

Many people around me don’t seem to mind at all, and for a while I pondered if I wasn’t making it all up in my head. But if you look closer and understand the tech behind it a little you come to realise what an absurd internet we’ve created over the last 18 years.

Posted on November 21, 2019November 25, 2019 by Arnan de Gans — Leave a comment

AdRotate Professional 5.6.2 – Fixing license woes!

This update focuses on streamlining the license and geo targeting experience and includes a number of bugfixes and tweaks related to those 2 functions. License notifications should now work more clear and reliable.
Geo Targeting has recently moved from using Cookies to Sessions. A number of fixes makes that more reliable and robust.

Posted on September 10, 2019September 10, 2019 by Arnan de Gans — Leave a comment

Don’t let PayPal fees bring you down with PayPal Surcharge for WooCommerce

Recently Paypal once again announced they will raise transaction fees. They also changed their Terms of Service in a way that you as a merchant are more liable for your customers antics, making it easier for them to charge you when trouble arrises (which should occur rarely, if ever. But still, not cool!).
By my calculations many transactions will end up costing almost double compared to earlier this year.

If you use WordPress with WooCommerce as your sales platform not all is lost though. You can easily lessen this costly burden and keep your business afloat more easy. With a simple plugin I’ve created. Read on for more information!

Posted on July 22, 2019July 22, 2019 by Arnan de Gans — Leave a comment

AdRotate Pro 5.4 – Fixing all the things!

This started as a quick patch for deleting Adverts, but once I got going and dove into the code a bit deeper to fix the renaming mistake I made in an earlier update I found a bunch more quirks. AdRotate Geo was acting up again and generally what was going to be a small patch turned into a full update with many tweaks and improvements.

Posted on June 1, 2019June 6, 2019 by Arnan de Gans

Overcoming dongles on modern laptops

With the dawn of USB Type-C and the removal of traditional USB-A ports. A lot of people are stuck trying to use dongles for everything. While many people perceive dongles for laptops such as the MacBook Pro or certain thin laptops from Asus, Hewlett Packard among some others as something stupid or annoying. Others give in to it thinking that’s how things are now.

I see people using dongles for everything while others simply gave up and don’t connect anything. When I got my new MacBook Pro I too had a brief struggle with the concept. But then it hit me…

Posted on May 4, 2019May 17, 2019 by Arnan de Gans

Analytics Spam Blocker version 2.8 – Things actually work now…

Over the last few days I did some troubleshooting for this site in general and came across some issues with the Analytics Spam Blocker API. Which have been resolved today. It took a lot of testing and trial and error. But the new API 2 now actually works.

So, yay!

Sites should now get new blocklists again, and get them reliably. Registration of new users is now also faster and works. For some users the response would be empty or null… Or registration would flat out fail… None of that anymore.

Posted on May 2, 2019May 17, 2019 by Arnan de Gans

AdRotate Pro version 5.1 – Fixes, new Advert Generator and more…

A number of fixes are included in AdRotate Pro 5.1, most notably that graphs now render correctly. Another improvement is that CSS for the header is no longer generated on pageload, but when you save your group. This should speed things up a little.

The transition for rotating adverts in Dynamic Groups has been changed to a fading effect. Please let me know what you think of that and if it’s too slow or fast.

The Advert Generator got overhauled and expanded upon. Image sizes are now detected by AdRotate which lets the Advert Generator create smarter and more complete code. At the same time, the useless HTML5/Flash option has been removed from the Advert Generator. You can just paste your code in the advert instead. Which is faster.