blog.janpiotrowski.de

Heute Mittag habe ich ungeplant eine ganze Menge Zeit auf und mit den Webseiten und Produkten von Yandex.ru (RU, EN) verbracht. Yandex ist das russische Gegenstück zu Google, die dort größte Suchmaschine (>60% Traffic) und eines der führenden Technologieunternehmen. Ich spreche kein Russisch und bin auch nicht auf den von Yandex beackerten Märkten aktiv (RU, KZ, BR, UA, TR), weshalb ich es im Nachhinein sehr interessant fand wie ich eigentlich dort gelandet bin.

Eine kleine Nachverfolgung:

1. @eriklinde posted on Facebook about a new update to his (great!) interactive sheet music website NoteZilla
2. In the comments to this post, he got feedback that the title of the posted piece was wrong (D major vs. E minor)
3. He mentioned that it was wrong before, but he already fixed it on the site, but Facebook seemed to not have gotten this update yet
4. Because I still had the tab of the linked piece on Notezilla open, I noticed that it only said „Notezilla“ for me, without the specific title
5. So I had a look at the sourcecode of the site, where I noticed his use of <meta property=“og:title“ content=“Chopin – Prelude in E minor“ />
6. Maybe he doesn’t know that it would be great to also have this in the normal <title> of the page, so I left it as part of my comment to the update post
7. Scrolling further down on the sourcecode I notice a comment: <!– Yandex.Metrika counter –>
8. As I don’t know Yandex.Metrika yet, and analytics tool are naturally interesting, I google their URL: metrika.yandex.ru
9. After changing the language to English, their „WebVisor“ feature to „Record and analyze user actions.“ looks quite interesting and I sign up for a Yandex.ru account to be able to use Metrika
10. I get a confirmation email to the ‚alternative email address‘ I leave, that leads to a Russian page where I have to enter the password. As this seems like a bug I reply to their support team and let them know so they can fix it
11. Back in Yandex.Metrika I add one of my sites and install the Yandex.Metrika WordPress Plugin so I don’t have to copy/paste any code
    1. On the overview of my sites I notice a little icon with alt text „Site status on Yandex.Webmaster“. So their is also Yandex.Webmaster? Yes, Google gives me webmaster.yandex.com as its URL. Let’s try that while I wait for the first visitor data to appear.
       1. Somehow I end up on https://webmaster.yandex.com and get an ugly SSL certificate error in Firefox
       2. Looking at the details of the error, it explains that the certificate is for lots of domains and subdomains, but not this one
       3. As this is a security problem, I start looking for a feedback address of Yandex.Webmaster. I can’t find one, but on the corporate site (after switching to English again) I discover a link to their Bug Bounty Program for security bugs. I don’t expect a bounty for this report, but they have a nice form to contact their security team.
       4. After typing a short description of the problem and sending it to them, their system answers with a Russian text I translate using Google translate in Gmail and post a snarky comment about on Twitter.
       5. Being in Gmail I remember that I now also have a Yandex.ru email address. So I check out mail.yandex.com – pretty nice
       6. They also seem to have an integrated product Yandex.Disk that is quite similar to Dropbox or Google Docs/Drive
       7. In the header I see some more product links: Yandex.Images, Yandex.Video and Yandex.Translate
       8. I retry the Russian text from the email on Yandex.Translate and the translation is actually better than Google’s – kinda expected
    2. But I remember that I actually wanted to check out Yandex.Webmaster, go there and try to add one of my websites
    3. It doesn’t work because they don’t like the 302 redirect the site does to a subfolder when you request /. As this seems like a reasonable use case to me, I google for „yandex support“ and find their general support and feedback form. Their doesn’t seem to be a specific one for Yandex.Webmaster, so I type a short text and send it to them. They prepopulate the ‚Email address where the answer will be sent‘ field with my yandex.ru address, but also make using my ‚recovery email address‘ an option. Nice touch.
    4. Finally I add another website (via verification with short text file upload using FTP) and can try Yandex.Webmaster. Basically matches Google’s Webmaster Tools
12. Now finished with my detour I return to Yandex.Metrika and check out the data that got collected in the last few minutes after installing the plugin
13. I click through all the standard reports and am really impressed: I discover some really interesting information that I didn’t see that clearly in Google Analytics and other analytics tools
14. As expected, the WebVisor feature is really great: Metrika basically records all interactions of users with the page and offers the option to play them back. It’s like a video of what your users are doing on their visits. I know their are other tools that do that, but I actually never used one and can’t remember them right now.
15. The „form analysis“ feature doesn’t work at first, until I remember that the WP plugin was configured to not count visits by administrators of the blog. Logging out of WordPress fixes the problem, now I can watch users that used a form type and submit it – awesome.
16. While using the feature, I am confused by one of the labels they use, it doesn’t match what the number actually shows. So again I write a short feedback message using their feedback form. Wondering if I’ll get an answer.
17. Done with all the reports, I have another look at the settings for the counter. There is Russian text on some tooltips I would very much like to read, so another feedback/bug report to them. They should know me by now.
18. I’ve seen all of Metrika for now, but I still have the corporate site and other properties open in other tabs, so I look at all the footer and header links there to find their other products:
    Direct is their Adwords, they have their own advertising network that works like Adsense, a keywords tool that also offers Trend’s like functionality, banner ads on their search result pages, maps, weather, news, a browser, an entertainment section, and some more services that are only available in Russian.
19. Only now I notice that the product is actually called „Yandex.Metrica“ while their URL is metrika.yandex.ru. I write another snippy tweet about that. Then I notice that metrica.yandex.com also works and is actually the one they link to internally, so I have to write another tweet (which I only do instead of deleting the old one, because I already wrote this text here).

So, 3 hours after I read about an update to some guy’s webapp on Facebook I looked at basically all their products and am really impressed about this company. Someone was busy cloning Google and Yahoo in the last few years, and this isn’t meant negative. I’m lucky it’s Sunday and I wasn’t expected to do any serious work today, anyway.

PS: Wieso ich das ab der Liste nun auf Englisch geschrieben habe, ist eine gute Frage. War aber zu faul das, als es mir aufgefallen ist, nochmal zu übersetzen. Könnt ja eh alle Englisch. Wenn nicht: http://translate.yandex.com ist ja ziemlich gut 🙂

Ja, scheint noch zu funktionieren. Liest das hier überhaupt noch jemand per Feed?

1. DOSBox: http://www.dosbox.com/
2. Loonies DOSShell: http://www.loonies.narod.ru/dosshell.htm
3. Best Old Games: http://www.bestoldgames.net/eng/

Wohoo!

„Netter Vorspann, kommt jetzt der Film?“

Aber eigentlich wollte ich nur das hier unterbringen:

WoW – World Of Warcraft Dancing Pt1 from austinthemix on Vimeo.

Wo bist du?

http://nickgravgaard.com/elastictabstops/

The solution then is to redefine how tabs are interpreted by the text editor. Rather than saying that a tab character will move the cursor until the cursor’s position is a multiple of N characters, we should say that a tab character is a delimiter between table cells in a manner more reminiscent of how they’re used in tab separated value (TSV) files. Seen in this light, we can see that space aligned files are analogous to the old fixed width data files, and we all know the advantages that delimited files have over those.

Interessante Idee. Anhand des eingebundenen Beispielapplets kann ich für mich sagen, dass ich sowas durchaus nutzen wollte.

Problematisch ist allerdings, dass Files die dafür formatiert wurden in anderen, „einfachen“ Editoren ziemlich bescheiden aussehen dürften. Sieht man ganz gut, wenn man den Text des Applets in einen normalen Editor kopiert.

(via Hacker News)

(via the always great Phlow)

via lostfocus

sich als PC-Arbeiter ausgerechnet den rechten Zeigefinger zu quetschen.