Loud Baking

In my last post, I said I would start posting more frequently after being absent for a while and here I am, 7 days later, with no posts to show.

I haven’t been procrastinating, nor have I been making more changes to the application’s plan, no - I was recovering from an unexpected surgery!

Aside from affecting the project’s timeline, this hospital stay gave me time to take a couple steps back from the development/planning side of things. Time I spent refreshing my memory with books like Building Scalable Web Sites (by Cal Henderson) and Prioritizing Web Usability (by Jakob Nielsen and Hoa Loranger).

A couple of the things that got either setup, approved or coded during my absence:

1. New company (legal documents, bank account, etc.)
2. A new Google Adwords API account (GAA) - never heard back from them concerning the old account’s inquiry.
3. A new Yahoo! Search Marketing API (YSMA) sandbox account.
4. 75% of the data cleansing classes we need.

Lesson of the day:

Early in the development process, having a detailed plan (no matter if you know that delays will occur), combined with taking action on simple third party requests (placing orders, registering accounts, etc.), helps keeping things rolling when you encounter unexpected events or delays.

One of the things I hate the most when developing an application is counting on 3rd parties to deliver or reply on time. Be it freelancers, API developers or sometimes your own partners (banks, lawyers, etc.). In this case, it’s the API developers. A couple days ago, I emailed Google for some help on finding ‘My Client Center’ link under the ‘Account’ tab in my Adwords account. After waiting 4 days, when I finally received an email from their support team, I was excited, but not for long. Even though I had sent a specific request, explaining that I have already received my developer token but couldn’t log to my developer account, all I got back is a quick-reply style of email with the instructions on how to apply for a developer token! Looks like when you’re Google you can permit yourself everything from late replies to stupid staff.

Anyhow, this obviously affects the development of a vendor class I wanted to finish, but nothing that could stop me from moving on and pushing it back a couple of weeks. In the worst case scenario, if they just tell me that my developer token is not valid anymore (inactivity for a long period is the only reason I could think of) and since they don’t give out developer tokens anymore, I will find myself obliged to completely scrap that feature from the application. It sucks, I know, but that’s the price to pay when some of your features depend on 3rd parties I guess.

On the positive side of things, everything has been going according to the initial timeline with a couple of improvements to be made on the design and finalizing the teaser page for early invitations.

Been pretty busy lately with csstester.com which is soon to be launched, finalizing stuff, etc.

I know, I know - I should only be concentrating on one application at a time, but that ain’t my kind. Am not smarter or anything, I just get bored too fast from working on the same thing project every single day, all day.

Anyhow, back to the reason for this post, Google AdWords API and the awful experience I had so far.

Back in early 2006, I had applied and received my developer token for the API (which Google stopped distributing as of October 2006). Developer token, email account to which the token was emailed and password in hand, I head to the login page. To my big surprise, Google replies back with a message along the lines of:

This account does not exist

Ok, so you emailed me a developer token and an API key in a separate email, to that exact same email address I am using to access my account, but you don’t believe I have an account. Great!

Since my developer email access is not the main admin access to the account, I log with my other email and invite the email Google had sent me the developer token to. A couple steps after, I am logged into my account using the developer credentials.

According to AdWords’ welcome email, I am supposed to find a ‘My Client Center’ link under the ‘Account’ tab.  But nothing there.

I go looking for help, reading pages and pages of information I could have skipped for the time being, but couldn’t find any kind of help about the issue I was having.

Last resort: email Google.

It’s been nearly 12 hours, and still no reply. One would have believed that between their  free meals or exercising, someone could have a look and just fix that in my account.

Waiting…