tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13236250215449198212008-05-15T05:32:57.550-05:00dB Mastershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05066942948999554445noreply@blogger.comBlogger124125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1323625021544919821.post-22495102969354029082008-05-13T07:16:00.005-05:002008-05-13T07:29:56.738-05:00

Time and time again I see people at ad publishing discussion forums ask the forum how they can improve their earnings. More often than not, the problem is not the ad design, placement, the ad system being used or anything like that...the problem is generally the site itself. A good percentage of the time these posts come from people that put up a site about Forex trading, earning money at home

dB Mastershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05066942948999554445noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1323625021544919821.post-80824655751207645692008-05-06T13:01:00.002-05:002008-05-06T13:14:21.630-05:00

Topic of the day, the importance of analytics in the right hands, and their possible uselessness in the wrong hands. We have been starting to debate the site width we want to target in our designs. Naturally, we start talking analytics, and surprisingly, I find that the site I am now working on isn't tracked at all, so first thing is getting it hooked up to Google Analytics or something. However

dB Mastershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05066942948999554445noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1323625021544919821.post-27094474163214194412008-05-06T06:45:00.003-05:002008-05-06T06:51:19.061-05:00

Finally, Google changes AdSense for Search to use the Custom Search Engine (CSE) technology. I have long felt that CSE was far superior to the AdSense for Search system. AdSense for Search previously had minimal control over the customization of the landing page (only allowing a logo of your site and some color options) limited layout options for the form display and the like. It also required

dB Mastershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05066942948999554445noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1323625021544919821.post-10877033275359552562008-04-28T08:49:00.007-05:002008-04-28T09:09:44.258-05:00

It's not an uncommon problem these days. Google is seemingly cracking down on AdSense abusers. One the whole, I applaud the effort and enjoy few things more than seeing deserving people getting their account taken away. That said, it does seem some people are being banned for unknown reasons. While I give Google the benefit of the doubt and assume they have unseen reasons for banning the accounts

dB Mastershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05066942948999554445noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1323625021544919821.post-38540493726982035302008-04-23T19:11:00.002-05:002008-04-23T19:20:56.595-05:00

This week starts off with a heavy sigh...not due to anything I have done, but due to things that are thrust upon me. I have had my head buried in a project for weeks, trying to wrap my head around the existing system and figuring out how to best integrate the new enhancements I am creating. We have met with some of the internal sponsors of the project who gave us some direction, but their wants

dB Mastershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05066942948999554445noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1323625021544919821.post-2678351528131640342008-04-16T14:10:00.004-05:002008-04-18T18:50:17.415-05:00

Web services are a great tool to share data across many data sources within a single organization, even if the owners of the different sources don't want to give others direct access to the data. Typically these services share data via XML documents. The requesting service sends a small XML request in the expected XML schema to the service, the service parses the XML, gets the necessary data,

dB Mastershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05066942948999554445noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1323625021544919821.post-86728087717892606792008-04-16T08:34:00.003-05:002008-04-16T08:43:22.133-05:00

I have been digging through an application that I am working on at my current contract and found some amazingly unoptimized code. The traffic on this application is increasing, performance is decreasing, I am between direct task requests so I am diggin further in to the guts of the system to try to tweak some more performance out of it. Time after time I am seeing 2, 3 or more queries in a row

dB Mastershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05066942948999554445noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1323625021544919821.post-60283223136758714192008-04-14T13:12:00.005-05:002008-04-28T14:46:02.835-05:00

Upon the launch of their new control panel, the Rubicon Project ad serving system also opened themselves to public beta. I have found the experiment thus far to be interesting. It's a very sophisticated system, the ideas behind it are quite cool, and while this may not mean much to many, it looks cool. That said, it's been a few days now and the revenue generated by it is not that impressive.

dB Mastershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05066942948999554445noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1323625021544919821.post-29917783624095695182008-04-13T09:29:00.005-05:002008-04-14T06:35:37.433-05:00

I was approved sometime last week to participate in the TribalFusion ad system. I was pretty excited because, unlike Google AdSense, AdBrite, Bidvertiser and the like, Tribal Fusion actually has a serious approval process, which I know many people are rejected by, so, being approved made me fell pretty good. I got an email that asked for my response to a couple questions to get the process

dB Mastershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05066942948999554445noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1323625021544919821.post-38745123521894430932008-04-11T13:38:00.002-05:002008-04-11T13:46:58.854-05:00

With any custom channel in your AdSense control panel you can set up the channel as "targetable". What this means is that advertisers can select, rather than by keyword, by placement, to target their ads. So they can outrightly buy placement in your web site. I have read in a few "Black Hat AdSense" type information eBooks, web sites and the like, that they say to not ever use this feature. I

dB Mastershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05066942948999554445noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1323625021544919821.post-53436492739858855732008-04-11T08:34:00.004-05:002008-04-11T15:00:18.234-05:00

There has been lots of angry people on the AdSense forum lately complaining about being disabled, not getting their "owed" money and the like. Many times (though not always) I looks at the sites that got banned and know why, sometimes not. There are basically two emails that Google send out to notify a user of being disabled; one is for invalid clicks, and the second is the generic "your site

dB Mastershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05066942948999554445noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1323625021544919821.post-7305264000396507532008-04-08T06:26:00.004-05:002008-04-08T06:57:08.739-05:00

The Rubicon Project is another ad serving system that claims to monetize your web site better than others by over 50 other ad networks and giving you the best ad in the pool. Supported networks include Google AdSense, AdBrite, Shopzilla and dozens of others. The project is currently in beta, and I applied for one of my smaller sites, but still with respectable enough traffic to get accepted. I

dB Mastershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05066942948999554445noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1323625021544919821.post-75351533093970054292008-04-07T07:13:00.002-05:002008-04-07T07:25:24.921-05:00

While this advice could well apply to most any aspect of life, I am concentrating more on your web presence than anything else. In the message forums I frequent I see so many people putting so much effort into figuring out how to game "the system" (the system being whatever system the forum is pertaining to...search engines, ad systems, etc) that they are actually spending more time than it

dB Mastershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05066942948999554445noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1323625021544919821.post-60153086269332121302008-04-03T12:44:00.004-05:002008-04-03T12:47:55.493-05:00

I have been seeing these little back and forth buttons on one of my sites for quite a while, but I have now read that they did put them into mass release across the system. In ads that these buttons appear in the user can click the buttons to flip through additional groups of ads. The publisher will not make revenue on the buttons themselves, but it does give the visitor the option of whether or

dB Mastershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05066942948999554445noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1323625021544919821.post-25906007811837159562008-04-03T06:56:00.004-05:002008-04-03T07:08:26.153-05:00

Hierarchtical structures are always a hassle...they are easier to deal with if you know they are a specific depth, as you can do them with a series of inner joins, but if they are allowed to be of an unlimited depth, that doesn't work. Recursive query structures are limited in earlier version of SQL Server, though in 2005, as I understand it, they have gotten better, but many haven't upgraded yet

dB Mastershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05066942948999554445noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1323625021544919821.post-38217703797363555062008-03-31T06:29:00.003-05:002008-03-31T06:37:34.056-05:00

SEO Book has released a FireFix plugin that will report rankings for any web site in Google, Yahoo! and MSN Live search engines. Right off the bat I would suggest that Ask should be added, but that's just me. If Ask was added to it, it'd then cover the four search engine I actually care about. The purpose for creating this tool was the authors not wanting his ranking checks being aggregated by

dB Mastershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05066942948999554445noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1323625021544919821.post-29116705357633057322008-03-30T19:34:00.005-05:002008-03-30T20:09:05.087-05:00

That is one of the all time best lines I ever heard from a client. This client was a partner in a successful internet business back in the mid 90's in a very niche' business. She was constantly saying to me "this worked last time, it will work this time" and other very nonsensical statements. As hard as I tried to explain that the internet business place is different today, and as diplomatic as

dB Mastershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05066942948999554445noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1323625021544919821.post-74070832882914907392008-03-27T05:27:00.003-05:002008-03-27T05:38:21.116-05:00

This seems to be an area of debate among some developers, especially scripting language developers, such as ASP, PHP or that sort of language. Whenever possible (which is most of the time) I prefer stored procedures for a number of reasons, highest on the list is security and performance. As much as I hate splitting tiers of logic, SQL and scripting logic are two areas that are very different

dB Mastershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05066942948999554445noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1323625021544919821.post-35194479517531585482008-03-26T07:11:00.003-05:002008-03-26T07:17:38.638-05:00

I've been in many different roles over the years, from a one-man show to a part of a larger team. Both have their pro's and con's and both have things to get used to. A team of developer can be a great thing, not because you can get more done with more people, but because of the built in support system that is possible with the right dynamics between the team members. One thing to avoid is

dB Mastershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05066942948999554445noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1323625021544919821.post-83527216943694276442008-03-20T07:50:00.003-05:002008-03-20T07:57:47.795-05:00

My wife and I have serious differneces of opinion on this subject, and it was a subject of discussion on my talk radio station this morning. It got me thinking about IT work and college educations. I started doing web work as a hobby/interest before classes were widely available, and degrees or certificates were not even a thought in educators minds. Fast forward over a decade, I am doing pretty

dB Mastershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05066942948999554445noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1323625021544919821.post-34953995861375005052008-03-19T18:05:00.003-05:002008-03-19T18:17:56.003-05:00

I got in to an interesting bit of banter of a forum today that sparked the need for a blog posting. The topic at hand in the discussion started when one person said "SEO is a myth" and I immediately said "sorry, your wrong!" and an interesting conversation ensued. As it turns out, we were actually arguing the same point, but coming from different angles. His point was that SEO firms are a

dB Mastershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05066942948999554445noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1323625021544919821.post-40052133680330213052008-03-19T07:21:00.005-05:002008-03-19T07:33:27.930-05:00

Too many times I walk in to a new job and their main complaint is performance problem with their web site. Often, when a web site is new, and has relatively low traffic, poor coding practices and structure doesn't really have much impact on the visitor experience. But as the database grows, visitors increase and the server and site is put under greater demand, performance issues start to make a

dB Mastershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05066942948999554445noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1323625021544919821.post-73149174130945127272008-03-19T07:11:00.002-05:002008-03-19T07:20:13.042-05:00

I have recently changed the web site at http://www.common-adsense.com/ to sell it as an eBook. I have so much information there, and had so much more to ad, that rather than maintain it as a static web site, I decided to put all my knowledge and experience into this Common AdSense eBook. The book is over 30 pages long at this time and is selling for an introductory price of $15. It has

dB Mastershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05066942948999554445noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1323625021544919821.post-1792922744960396612008-03-17T09:16:00.006-05:002008-03-17T09:41:14.510-05:00

Most anybody that has worked with a database understands that almost every table has a "primary key" that acts as an address at which to find a given record. It's a unique identifier of a specific record that makes it quick and easy to find it. It's called an "index". What many newbies to databases don't understand, or at least fully appreciate, is that there is another type of index that can be

dB Mastershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05066942948999554445noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1323625021544919821.post-16310568835139536232008-03-17T07:51:00.002-05:002008-03-17T07:57:23.313-05:00

According to Google's Official Blog, they have finally completed the acquisition of Double Click. Time will tell if this proves to be a good thing or bad thing. At face value it can't be a bad thing, as Google faces many challenges with their current AdWords/AdSense advertisement system. However, I am not sure DoubleClick is really the answer. It seems to me that one trobuled system purchasing a

dB Mastershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05066942948999554445noreply@blogger.com