During the last couple of years, a series of architectural patterns for web design software have consolidated and become popular through frameworks , which facilitate the development and maintenance of these systems. Simultaneously, servers had increased accessibility and reduced costs. Creating a web project became a far easier, faster and cheaper thing to do. However, for the project to succeed, there is still one obstacle that is not easy to overcome: scalability.

boo-box has successfully conquered this obstacle and currently has its infrastructure set up in layers capable of being interwoven horizontally, and that are sufficiently robust to serve thousands of requests per minute. Throughout this post we will present some of the practices currently in use to guarantee a good performance from Communications Systems for Social Media such as Ruby, MERB, CouchDB, Thin, Nginx, Beanstalkd.

» Continue reading “boo-box system’s web server infrastructure”

Hi! My name is Dirceu and as a boo-box ninja I’ve come to announce some big news:

It is now possible to use more than one tag in our product search system. This was already possible with the widget on the fixed list, but now the function is available both in the virtual shopping window and directly through the API. The tags need to be separated by commas, for example:

» Continue reading “News in search of products and API!”

The boo-box tool was born from a mix of Web Services and ecommerce APIs, links with affiliate codes in HTML, libraries, frameworks and plugins in free code. Without these open source tools we would not have been able to create applications that have been helping over 1,000 content originators to earn more (and more objectively) with what they publish on the web.

In November 2007 we released boo-api, which allows developers to use our infrastructure to search for offers in any of the ecommerce retailers with which we are integrated. Our intention is to develop, for the community, knowledge that we gained using their tools.

» Continue reading “Working together with the developers’ community”

So, how did you do on the test?

What this video really demonstrates is how we tend to not pay attention to secondary matters when our attention is focused on one main subject.

Online advertising has been increasingly treated as a ‘secondary matter’ that has to vie with specific content to grab users’ attention. Flashy banners, pop-ups that block content, sponsored links, such as AdSense; all try to guess what the user is searching for, all vying for space and attention with the content of your web site.

It is inevitable that, just like in the video, these ‘secondary objects’ will be overlooked by the majority of people, or that, in those cases where they do manage to grab attention, they tear the focus away from what’s truly drawing the user: content. (If you had been paying attention to the “moonwalking bear” you probably would have missed the number of passes!)

» Continue reading “Banners, pop-ups, AdSense, SEO and your content”

Hi, I am Wendely Leal, a ninja-developer from boo-box, and it’s a pleasure to announce that now we have a JSON API.

This is a common and modern way to transport data between web applications. With JSONP you can do cross-domain requests through JavaScript.

The access is almost the same way as our XML API (check out the release post):

Examples:

To use it with jQuery, put “/jsonp:=?” at the end of the URI. Example:

See a practical example on http://boo-box.com/labs/jsonp/.

Have fun, and if you have any trouble or suggestions, contact-us by tech@boo-box.com.

• boo-box in video, changing the way to market in on-line videos
• Platform portability, expanding content monetization boundaries
• Now offers can be sent to e-mail
• New partner programs

boo-box in video launched on November 10th

boo-box in video enables anyone to monetize embedded YouTube videos using partner affiliate programs. It is an easy and fast 4 step process:

1. Select the embedding code or the URL of the video.
2. Click on the boo-box icon on Firefox (or bookmarklet for IE, Safari and Opera and everything else)
   
3. Type a tag and test it
   
4. Apply or copy into your platform (blog, site, social network profile, e-mail…)

Our solution was developed with 3 things in mind:

1. Minimize interruption of the video: the recommendations are displayed only if the audience chooses. The video continues playing while the audience is browsing the recommendations.
2. Monetize the distribution: the publisher keeps all the money from the affiliate commission/fee.
3. Make marketing really relevant: the publisher chooses what is going to be displayed.

» Continue reading “News from boo-box team”