heisel.org

What does CPM stand for?

CPM is a fairly stan­dard unit of mea­sure in the online adver­tis­ing busi­ness. It stands for Cost per thou­sand (the M is the Roman numeral for 1,000). What it’s mea­sur­ing is the cost per thou­sand ad impres­sions. Take heisel.org for exam­ple. For the month of Novem­ber I had a little more than 1,000 page views. If I [...]

November 30, 2008 | Categories: Business, Journalism, Technology

Quoted in Good Morning Silicon Valley

Quoted in Good Morn­ing Sil­i­con Valley - "Pixar com­pletely under­stood that when you write your soft­ware hand-​in-​hand with the cre­ative people writ­ing the story, you are cre­at­ing a rev­o­lu­tion­ary company." Amen.

November 30, 2008 | Categories: Blogmarks

What is an ad impression

I’ve blogged pre­vi­ously about var­i­ous Web ana­lyt­ics terms. Almost all of those would be described as audi­ence terms — they describe how people are view­ing your site. Let’s take a stab at some rev­enue terms, start­ing with: What’s an ad impres­sion? It’s a mea­sure of the number of times an ad is seen by a user. In that sense it’s [...]

November 29, 2008 | Categories: Business, Journalism, Technology

Yesterday’s turkey

Sci­ence is amaz­ing. In my seri­ously novice hands I can take some­thing seri­ously unap­pe­tiz­ing like this: And turn it into this: The before photo is not of a Dune nav­i­ga­tor but is instead our Thanks­giv­ing day turkey breast in brine. For the curi­ous, our menu con­sisted of: Roasted turkey: But we altered the brine to be just sugar, salt, veg­etable broth, peppercorns [...]

November 28, 2008 | Categories: Personal

Giving thanks

For a won­der­ful part­ner in life, For the new space we call home, For the good health of my family, For the safety of my brother-​in-​law, For my chal­leng­ing yet reward­ing career, For the tal­ented group I get to work with on a daily basis, For all the years I’ve had on this Earth, and the years yet to come, For all that and more, I [...]

November 27, 2008 | Categories: Personal

Feed flood: under control in NetNewsWire

I’m a huge RSS addict. If some­thing isn’t avail­able as RSS, then I’m likely not read­ing it, cer­tainly not when I sit down with The Sunday Inter­net. But my time to sit down with Net­NewsWire is lim­ited during the week, espe­cially if we’re in the middle of big projects. There’s noth­ing more dis­heart­en­ing than return­ing to your [...]

November 26, 2008 | Categories: Personal, Technology

Django cache keys: making them safer

I posted some code to make your Django cache keys safer over at Django snip­pets the other day. This code evolved at work over sev­eral months as we encoun­tered a few caching chal­lenges with mem­cache. The first prob­lem was that occa­sion­ally some of our cache keys would be too long. Mem­cache only allows keys up to 250 characters. [...]

November 25, 2008 | Categories: Django, Programming, Python, Technology

Django developer wanted at ajc.com

We’re look­ing for a great Django/Python devel­oper to join our small team at ajc.com. Check out the job post­ing at Django Gigs or at Craigslist. Here are some of the ben­e­fits to work­ing on our team: We’re a small team — but full of great people like Maura and Zellyn Our projects are highly vis­i­ble — if you’ve spent [...]

November 24, 2008 | Categories: Django, Journalism, Programming, Python, Technology

Gmail theme showing incorrect weather

Is anyone else having an issue where their Gmail theme is show­ing incor­rect weather? It’s 11:38 on a Sunday in Atlanta. There are clear blue skies out and the tree theme is show­ing me thunderclouds.

November 23, 2008 | Categories: Technology

Rich in doughy goodness

In honor of a spe­cial someone’s birth­day, there were bis­cuits, home­made but­ter­milk biscuits.

November 22, 2008 | Categories: Personal

Disclaimer: I work at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. The opinions expressed here are my own, and do not reflect those of the AJC, Cox Newspapers, Cox Enterprises nor any other party.

Mail carrier N. Sorenson delivering Christmas mail through the snow. (Chicago Daily News/Chicago Historical Society)