Advertise with LastHalo

Hi all,

It's been awhile since the last update here on this blog. All has been going well so far. We're getting more members each and everyday. Thank you so much for all your support!

As you all already know earlier, we are currently serving advertisements (so far only Google Adsense) for free LastHalo users. With the increasing membership of this free service, we would like to open this advertisement opportunity to anyone who's interested. In other words, we would be willing to serve non-Google Adsense ads on the LastHalo popup panel.

We would be opening three 460x80 pixels slots for sale on LastHalo's popup header. These slots would be displayed on a random basis, using a random number generator. Statistically, all three slots would get an equal chance to be displayed whenever the popup is loaded. By doing this, we would ensure that your advertisements would get more attention as visitor would get to possibly see different advertisements when they load the page. This advertisement space, once purchased, is all yours to explore upon. We accept all kinds of submission as the banner ad, as along as we decide that it is appropriate and unobstructive. We would still like to keep LastHalo usable for all users.

For the introductory offer, we are happy to provide this service at a special introductory rate of USD39.00 per slot per 30-day. If you choose to get all three slots (so you can capture 100% of the pageviews), we are happy to offer you all 3 slots at a discounted rate of USD110.00!

By advertising with LastHalo, your advertisement banner, when displayed, is guaranteed to be the ONLY advertisement within the popup window. This means no worries on advertising side-by-side with your competitors. As the popup gets about a few thousands pageviews per day, this would ensure that your banner would be seen by a significant amount of visitors per day. On top of that, as the banner are only displayed with user intevention (by clicking on the individual entries at the LastHalo sidebar), this would ensure that your advertiments would not be easily ignored.

Act now, before the slots are sold out!

Contact us at lasthalo@uzyn.com to place an order or for further enquiries or negotiations.

LastHalo Premium is Live!

Good news! We are pleased to announce the launch of LastHalo Premium which we have been promised to release in awhile.

LastHalo Premium is actually created as a token of appreciation to all LastHalo users kind enough to have made donations to help us keep LastHalo alive. We think that it is only fair if the donors get a little extra from the free users.

With LastHalo Premium, you would not only enjoy LastHalo ad-free, you would also enjoy all the freedom of customizing how LastHalo should look like on your site. For example, instead of the usual vertical list, you could make LastHalo a horizontal list, or even make LastHalo as a drop-down list!


Horizontal LastHalo


Drop-down LastHalo

All these are made possible with LastHalo Premium. View other samples here.

If you have been a happy LastHalo user thus far, why not give a little something back to us by signing up for LastHalo Premium for as low as $1/month and get a little extra from us?

For the free LastHalo users, you can still enjoy the free LastHalo service for free. We'll always be happy to continue to provide free service to all users.

Check out LastHalo Premium section if you haven't already done so!

Switching Host

The current host has had really bad uptime for the past few weeks.

We're currently in the process of switching over to the new host which we hope would be much more reliable.

There should not be any down time in the moving process so you are safe to keep LastHalo running on your site.

:)

Ad-Supported

We are sorry to announce that all the free version of LastHalo would now be ad-supported. This is due to the rising cost of server maintainance fees which has exceeded the amount of donations we are able to get from the users.

However, in order to keep the integrity of our users' layout, the advertisements would only be shown in the popup window when the comments link are clicked, along with the full comments from haloscan. Please understand that we are trying our best to make it as unobstructive as possible.

We hope that all of you would understand and would continue to support LastHalo. Note that only clicking on the comments from the sidebar would show the advertisement along with the full comments while clicking on the comments link on the individual blog entries still would free from any LastHalo's advertisements.

However, if you have been a happy LastHalo user thus far and would like to keep your LastHalo ad-free as it has been for the past 10 months, we are happy to keep LastHalo ad-free for members who donated to help maintain the server cost. Please refer to this posting for more information.

The premium accounts of LastHalo would be launched very soon. This time we promise that it would be happening in less than two weeks. We have completed about 70% of it. Not only that they would be ad-free, users of premium account would also gain full freedom to customize the sidebar, which means you could even make LastHalo a drop-dwon menu listing the latest comments from your blog!

For the users who have donated, you would be receiving an email from us as soon as the premium section is launched so you could log into your premium accounts.

For the time being, we are still offering the premium account subscription at the special pre-launch rate of USD 8/year (usual rate after launch would be USD 12/year). So do sign up soon to obtain your premium account at a discount.

Thank you for your support on LastHalo.

Updates Coming Up

Just a short notice to all the users of LastHalo. I would like to thank you all for supporting LastHalo for using the service since its launch more than half a year ago. So far the service has proved to quite popular and useful among the bloggers.

As you may have noticed, LastHalo has been slow on updates for awhile now. The reason is because I was very busy with my school work and some various projects that I was doing. I'm currently in my examination period, which means that holidays would follow!

This December, expect to see updates on LastHalo, and expect to see the long-awaited premium members' section coming with extra features.

Thank you for your patience and support.

Yours,
U-Zyn

For new users, please refer to the simple and straight-forward LastHalo installation instructions.
Like the service? Please help by making a small donation.

LastHalo v0.5: Caching

With the rising popularity of LastHalo, the script's request rate (by users' sites) is now hundreds of requests per minute. It can easily reach thousands per minute in a matter of weeks.

With so many requests for LastHalo, that would subsequently request the latest updates from Haloscan's server, Jeevan, the owner of Haloscan, has asked me to implement caching for LastHalo.

With this release of LastHalo, I have implemented caching for LastHalo requests.

What this basically means is that, LastHalo will only request the latest updates from Haloscan server once every 15 minutes. Hence, this would mean that you would not be able to see the last comments immediately. There will be up to 15 minutes of delay for you to see the comments made within the cached period.

With requests rate so high, this would have to be implemented sooner or later. LastHalo would not want to strain Haloscan's server too much with this feature.

Thanks for your understanding.

For existing users, you do not have to do anything on your side. Upgrading of LastHalo script is done automatically from LastHalo's server.

For new users, please refer to the Installation Instructions on how to install LastHalo on your blog.

v0.4 Beta Launched: Blog Post Title Retrieval Enabled

With the addittion of the 'Blog Post Title Retrieval' feature to Haloscan's feed, I'm happy to incorporate the feature onto LastHalo.

LastHalo's user who has had the post title retrieval feature turned on on Haloscan would get see the corresponding post title pops up when mouseover a link at LastHalo's sidebar.
(For information on how to enable the feature on LastHalo, please refer to Jeevan's post on this thread.)

Here are a couple of changes for LastHalo v0.4 Beta:

• LastHalo now displays the corresponding blog post title if a user has enabled the blog post retrieval feature on Haloscan.


• LastHalo would automatically try to determine if a user has had the blog post retrieval turned on to prevent displaying of meaningless numerical post ID if a user has not enabled the blog post title retrieval feature.


• The foreign language special characters should now display correctly on LastHalo's sidebar.


• Optimization of LastHalo's code. LastHalo should now load faster than before. It now only needs a more stable server with a higher bandwidth quota to serve the increasing load.


• User can now view the most recent post title from LastHalo's Development Blog by mousing over the "Powered by LastHalo's" link.

Thanks for supporting LastHalo.

For new users, please refer to Installation Instructions.

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Attention: LastHalo's bandwidth has increased tremendously for the past few months. If the traffic continues to increase at the current rate, the author would not be able to maintain LastHalo soon solely from his own savings. Please help by donating to support LastHalo, especially if your site gets huge amount of traffic (> 500 visits per day). In exchange for your donation, the author is willing to provide the donor with a premium account when it is launched. On top of that, with the extra fundings, LastHalo would be able to be hosted on a more stable server with a higher bandwidth quota.

Please read this post for more information.

Blog Title Popup

I spent a lot of time incorporating Haloscan's latest feature - Blog Title Retrieval onto LastHalo with a nice mouseover popup using OverLIB.

Only to find out that it messes up certain users' blog skins when I launched it.

I had to take it down in order to save LastHalo's users' blogs' layout.

If anyone has any suggestion on how I could present the blog title in a nice way without using OverLIB or any chance of messing up any current user's blog layout, please let me know.

LastHalo Bandwidth Exceeded, Please Help

LastHalo's bandwidth has been exceed for the month of August a few moments ago. Although it's only a few hours away from September, hence a bandwidth coutn reset, I've increased LastHalo's bandwidth quota by a little to accomodate for the final few hours of the month of August. Sorry for those who have experienced some down time.

However, I would like to let the users know that I would not be able to financially support LastHalo's bandwidth beginning the next month of so if LastHalo's bandwidth continues to increase at the current rate.

Therefore, I would like to kindly request for donation from LastHalo regular users, especially those whose sites have thousands of visitors per day. It's a little something that you could do to help support this free service and to encourage me to further develop and improve this service.

As a token of appreciation, if you donate USD 8 or more, I am willing to upgrade your LastHalo account to a premium account for a year, starting from the date when the premium account becomes available. As stated in my earlier post, the proposed price for a premium account would be USD 12 per 12 months, thus this would act as a token of appreciation of users who contribute to the early development of LastHalo. Please send me an email, to lasthalo@uzyn.com, if you are donating USD 8 or more, stating your Paypal user email, amount donated, your Haloscan username and your website (if you're willing to let me know). I would send you a thank-you reply and take down your name for the premium service. When the service becomes available, I would send you an email informing you about it and your login info. However, you are free to donate any amount you wish from USD 1 onwards. Every contribution counts. I would be highly grateful if you would donate.

Last version update of LastHalo has been of months ago, I am sorry for my lack of updates for the LastHalo project as I have been rather occupied with my work and my studies. As I'm now working from home, I have more time now to resume the development of LastHalo.

For your information, here are the proposed features for premium account:

• Higher LastHalo requests limit per day
  LastHalo free version would have a restriction on requests per day in the future. I'm sorry as I have to implement this restriction. It is unfair for most other users for certain high traffic blogs make thousands of requests per day, consuming a hugh chunk of bandwidth allocated for LastHalo like it is now. By being a premium member, you would be getting a much higher requests limit per day.
  
  
• More freedom to customize the codes.
  Premium users not only get to choose to display the list of comments in 'ordered' or 'unordered' form and specifying the prefix and postfix for each comment like it currently is, they get the freedom to customize every single lines of codes to be displayed. That means premium users would be able to insert customized HTML tags making the last comment list a drop-down menu or even a horizontal list.
  
  
• Ability to customize or even remove the acknowledgement line: "Powered by LastHalo"
  
  
• Migration of LastHalo to a more stable server with high bandwidth quota.
  Anyway, this is the reason why I have to ask for donation - to pay for hosting fees.
  
  
• More to come as I can think of.
  Please email me for suggestions if you would like to request for a certain feature.

Thank you very much for reading this post. Please donate to help me support this free service. I'm currently developing it and paying for the bandwidth from my own pocket money. I'm a university student and I'm working part time to support my daily expenses. Please donate if you have been using LastHalo for some time and would love to see LastHalo being continued. It would be sad to see LastHalo being taken down for my inability to financially support the hosting bills.

Every contribution counts.

Thank you very much for your support on LastHalo so far.

Haloscan's Blog Title Retrieval

I have been notified that Haloscan has added a Blog Title Retrieval feature to its feed. For those of you that have enabled the new feature, the current version of LastHalo has a slight problem parsing the feed, I would fixing it later tonight. Sorry about the delay.

This would mean that for users who have enabled the blog title retrieval feature, they would get to display the blog title for the corresponding comment.

Thanks Haloscan for implementing that.