To maximize the free storage capacity of my account, I completed all the basic installation steps (earned me 250 Mb), then I connected my Dropbox account with Twitter to get 500 Mb. I could have got more free space if I had a Facebook account or was a student.

What’s left to enlarge your capacity is referrals. To speed up this process, and following the steps of others, I setup an AdWords campaign (all of this triggered by a post on Hacker News).

I only targeted the French audience because I feared the HN post would have temporarily inflated the cost of English keywords. Here are the daily stats of my campaign:

And here are the ads I created:

The paused ads above are those which didn’t invited the user to install the Dropbox desktop client. And the latter action is absolutely required to unlock the bonus capacity.

And if your interested in all the details involved, here is a keyword report.

At the end it costs me 31.77€ to get 8Go of additional Dropbox capacity trough referrals:

That’s not cheap, but was a fun hack and a great excuse to learn how to use Google AdWords. And next time I know what I’ll do with those AdWords coupons I regularly give away…

Ayant déjà bénéficié d’une offre similaire, je ne peux pas l’utiliser. Je transmet donc le code donnant droit à cette réduction à la première personne qui m’en fait la demande. Déposez simplement un commentaire sous cet article sans oublier d’indiquer votre mail.

A noter qu’après le 15 Novembre 2010, la valeur de ce coupon tombe à 50€, et reste valable jusqu’au 31 Décembre 2010.

But since this blog moved from one location to another in the last past years, I doubt everyone use the right URLs. This update is a good opportunity to check that you are using the “official” feed URLs:

• For blog posts: http://kevin.deldycke.com/feed
• For blog comments: http://kevin.deldycke.com/comments/feed

In the future, I plan to support these URLs only. So please update your feed aggregation settings !

Malheureusement, je ne peux pas l’utiliser car j’ai déjà un compte AdWords. En effet, le bon en question n’est valable que pour les compte AdWords créés il y a moins de 14 jours (et dont l’adresse de facturation est située en France). J’offre donc ce bon d’achat au premier qui m’en fait la demande sous la forme d’un commentaire (n’oubliez pas de renseigner votre adresse mail).

A noter que ce crédit promotionnel garde sa valeur de 75€ jusqu’au 28 février 2010. Passé cette date, le bon reprends une valeur nominale de 50€, et expire définitivement le 31 mars 2010.

D’après la brochure, ces bons ne sont utilisables que si les conditions suivantes sont réunies:

1. le compte AdWords à été créé il y a moins de 14 jours,
2. l’adresse de facturation associée au compte est localisée en France,
3. le bon d’achat est utilisé avant le 31 décembre 2009.

Ca fait beaucoup de conditions donc je doute que les gens se bousculent, d’autant plus que je suis loin d’être le seul en France à recevoir ce genre de pub…

Alas, there is no such plugin for any other platform except “Windows XP and later” (according the official website) and Macs (as read on the official blog). So it’s a quite sad news for us Linux users. Indeed, I’m confident about a future seamless integration into the free software ecosystem, as the Gmail’s video chat is based on a stack of open (or soon-to-be, according the recent controversy) standards and protocols: XMPP/Jingle, h264/SVC & RTP.

Anyways, that’s not the main purpose of this post.

I just wanted to point out an update that was not reported by the news: as soon as it was officially made available for the public, the brand new video feature was released for Google Apps’ Gmail too.

Not only that, Google also backported to Apps’ Gmail the much awaited HTTPs option that allow you to force secure encryption of your sessions:

These two updates are quite interesting to note. I long as I remember (and I might be wrong), Google Apps components were always out-of-sync with their legacy equivalent. So this maybe a sign of change in a really good direction for Google Apps users !

This is the patch I apply on each Zenphoto I install and upgrade. This little hack add Google Analytics tracking for all users except administrators.

Why ? As you can see in ticket #441 in Zenphoto bugtracker, there is no intention of adding support of GA in Zenphoto, even as an optional plugin. Hence my tiny hack. And for the non-admin stuff, I like having unbiased statistics: on low-audience websites, administrators can generate more traffic than legitimate users (if not all…).

Here is the downloadable patch file, and its content:

diff -ru ./zenphoto-orig/zp-core/template-functions.php ./zenphoto/zp-core/template-functions.php
--- ./zenphoto-orig/zp-core/template-functions.php  2008-08-15 07:43:05.000000000 +0200
+++ ./zenphoto/zp-core/template-functions.php 2008-08-16 17:08:03.000000000 +0200
@@ -147,7 +147,16 @@

    echo "<li><a href=\"".$zf."/admin.php?logout$redirect\">".gettext("Logout")."</a></li>\n";
    echo "</ul></div>\n";
- }
+ } else {
+    echo "<script type=\"text/javascript\">
+var gaJsHost = ((\"https:\" == document.location.protocol) ? \"https://ssl.\" : \"http://www.\");
+document.write(unescape(\"%3Cscript src='\" + gaJsHost + \"google-analytics.com/ga.js' type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E\"));
+</script>
+<script type=\"text/javascript\">
+var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker(\"UA-XXXXXX-Y\");
+pageTracker._trackPageview();
+</script>";
+  }
 }

 /**

This patch was generated from a Zenphoto v1.2 and will likely not work with any other version.

Do not forget to update the dummy Google Analytics account ID above (UA-XXXXXX-Y) by yours.

And finally, to apply the patch, invoke the classic patch command:

patch -p0 < ./google-analytics-tracking-for-non-admin-users.patch