tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13236250215449198212012-02-16T08:56:52.763-06:00Musings from the mind of a long-time web entrepreneur in no particular order and for no particular reason.dB Mastershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05066942948999554445noreply@blogger.comBlogger3771100tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1323625021544919821.post-4352828510968129742012-02-07T07:48:00.001-06:002012-02-09T06:49:42.058-06:00

That delicate balancing point has now been reached. On a few of my web properties, the OpenX Network has now trumped, or is close to trumping, Google AdSense, in terms of revenue. While this event has been a long time in the making, it is still surprising, and somewhat of a bitter pill to swallow for somebody like me who has long been an AdSense advocate and fan. A few months back I posted an

dB Mastershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05066942948999554445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1323625021544919821.post-51083458896778607072011-12-08T06:48:00.001-06:002011-12-08T07:00:07.247-06:00

This was kind of a neat little find I just stumbled across. A little bookmarklet that you can drag to your linkbar in your browser and have an ever-present link to analyze any web page for the basic on page SEO requirements. This little bookmarklet looks at title, meta description, meta keywords, checks how many images have alt tags and how many links have title tags, looks for heading tags, the

dB Mastershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05066942948999554445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1323625021544919821.post-12214443878282492172011-11-22T08:38:00.001-06:002011-11-22T08:42:13.457-06:00

As of this morning, or, well, midnight last night, Yahoo was disabled it's Site Explorer tool. This is unfortunate, because it was a great tool for many reason, which are really kind of feudal to discuss now. Due to the merger with Bing, and Yahoo is now linking their Site Explorer page to Bing Webmaster Tools, which is fine, those tools are very functional as well. As posted on the Site

dB Mastershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05066942948999554445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1323625021544919821.post-68394171925576005252011-11-12T13:12:00.001-06:002011-11-13T16:03:31.959-06:00

Every web site has them, there is virtually no eliminating them, but high bounce rates can be an indicator of either poor content quality or poor usability. First, what is bounce rate? Well, the bounce rate is the amount of visitors that are single page visitors, or, the visitor leaves on the same page they enter. This means they find you, click through, look and then leave. What this tells you

dB Mastershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05066942948999554445noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1323625021544919821.post-68790546746497116312011-10-19T07:22:00.000-05:002011-10-19T07:29:31.282-05:00

A lesson I learned as a new parent is that there are great uses for a DVD ripper/cloning application that does not include piracy...that lesson is, kids wreck stuff. So, when I buy my kids DVD's of their favorite movies, I have copied them, and given the copies to the kids, when it's wrecked, create another, and repeat as necessary. Years ago this was much easier to do, but over the years,

dB Mastershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05066942948999554445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1323625021544919821.post-19881029800072608612011-10-16T13:00:00.000-05:002011-10-16T19:19:03.371-05:00

Much talk has been floating around the net for a while now regarding the Google Panda update. I've seen many ripple effects from it trickling through AdSense as well. I figured it's about time to cover the topic a little bit. Google has massive impact on the search engine landscape, and every update they make to their systems is always big news, because it affects everyone online. By and large

dB Mastershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05066942948999554445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1323625021544919821.post-31020191471952124282011-10-15T12:51:00.002-05:002011-10-15T13:41:58.106-05:00

It seems from AdSense's support forum and various other sources around the intertubes that there has been a serious housecleaning to the AdSense publishers list. There are a lot of angry publishers in various places crying everything from "but I didn't do anything wrong" to "it's racism, because I am from an Asian country". A very few of these claims, from what I have seen and tried to help

dB Mastershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05066942948999554445noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1323625021544919821.post-79110018801836530732011-10-14T15:28:00.001-05:002011-10-14T15:28:15.557-05:00

This is a kind of neat little addition to Google Analytics. I am enjoying the integration of AdWords, AdSense, and now, Webmaster Tools, into Analytics. It make a single stop shop for a lot of reports and information that otherwise requires visits to multiple places. Google's big thing of late, seems to be the sharing of data between their applications, and I very much welcome the effort.

dB Mastershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05066942948999554445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1323625021544919821.post-56336629219824212592011-09-20T15:01:00.001-05:002011-09-20T15:01:43.415-05:00

InfoLinks users should really be aware of this, as it could affect publishers that use other ad system, so, in case some aren't I am making note of it here. InfoLinks has recently announced a few new types of revenue generating ads. I have opted out of most of them because they have, by and large, been pretty worthless forme personally. First was the "related links" bars, which was fine,

dB Mastershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05066942948999554445noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1323625021544919821.post-43318328563797310352011-09-15T10:47:00.002-05:002011-09-15T10:48:27.588-05:00

Fun day, though the first comment in this post is going to be that most everything of relevance is protected by the non-disclosure agreement I am under, so I can not, and will not say any specifics. The day started with a bus ride out to the GooglePlex in Mountain View. Cool place, we had a great breakfast, good breakout session, I was in the AdSense breakout which was very informative, and we

dB Mastershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05066942948999554445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1323625021544919821.post-22219454552499578322011-09-14T07:28:00.002-05:002011-09-15T10:48:39.625-05:00

Well, one of the first things they reminded us is that we all have signed current NDA agreements, so while I can talk about the summit, I can't share some things. One thing I can share is that I am typing this blog post on the brand new Samsung Chromebook I won at the summit. The summit has been a lot of fun, not only for the information I have learned but the people I have met. The fellow

dB Mastershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05066942948999554445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1323625021544919821.post-34836255958853613442011-09-12T08:47:00.000-05:002011-09-15T10:48:56.867-05:00

I am taking off today for the Global TC Summit at the Google Headquarters. This summit is a collection of trusted "TC's" (Top Contributors) within the Google support forums and product testing efforts. I have been selected as a contributor for the Google AdSense, and have held the Top Contributor title for a couple of years, and hope to learn some cool things about other Google products as well

dB Mastershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05066942948999554445noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1323625021544919821.post-78907514756625274712011-07-31T19:03:00.004-05:002011-08-01T07:26:04.751-05:00

In the last year or two, it has become an increasing easy task to save money on home entertainment and communications. A few years back MagicJack came along, which charges about 1/10 of what the phone company does for a land line phone...considering land line phones are of increasingly less value since more people have cell phones, this is a viable alternative.The other issue that needs

dB Mastershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05066942948999554445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1323625021544919821.post-17685102423497443142011-07-20T06:56:00.004-05:002011-07-20T07:05:14.035-05:00

My place of employment uses Google Apps, my personal domain I have on Google Apps, I have a Gmail account that predates both, and many clients that I occasionally need to log in to are on Google Apps. Now, Google launches a "multiple login" feature, which I assume was done in part to facilitate Google+ to some extent, but, regardless of the reason, they did it.Their challenge is that once Google

dB Mastershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05066942948999554445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1323625021544919821.post-48753595441778862662011-06-09T18:19:00.007-05:002011-06-09T18:45:15.759-05:00

JavaScript is a great, often very quick, client side language that has the power to allow you to do a lot of cool things without trips to the server and back. That makes it very useful for a lot of things, but, also makes it very fickle, because it is client dependent. OK, we all know that already...so I'll move on.Working with dates (and time, but time is not part of my post this time) can be

dB Mastershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05066942948999554445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1323625021544919821.post-82190964948222536552011-05-24T19:53:00.004-05:002011-05-25T11:33:31.558-05:00

We've all been there, walk into a project that involve some sort of data aggregation, reporting, analytics or some such thing and thought "easy, no problem" only to later realize the data you are to query against is basically an Excel Spreadsheet tossed into a single database table, and over the years has evolved into a table with hundreds of thousands, in not millions of rows that have just been

dB Mastershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05066942948999554445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1323625021544919821.post-16332803469109822372011-05-17T06:08:00.010-05:002011-05-17T08:05:52.202-05:00

Yeah, IE6, old news, 5+ years old, you'd think it wasn't a problem, but alas, it is still around 10% of the average usage, and in some b2b situations, much higher if you are dealing with a web app that has corporate clients that still have it installed across their network.The later is the issue I am working with. Combine that with the fact that we are also using a lot of AJAX and floating divs

dB Mastershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05066942948999554445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1323625021544919821.post-88441664420566214552011-05-12T05:54:00.001-05:002011-05-14T08:21:11.547-05:00

So, as everyone has likely heard, Google announced the final release of it's new laptop, Chromebook, during it's developer conference this week. For educational institutions, they have contract plans for $20 a month, and for business it's $28 a month. These contracts include various services, and hardware upgrades periodically. The prices for consumers varies from $349 to $499 depending on

dB Mastershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05066942948999554445noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1323625021544919821.post-35245885582615406332011-04-29T13:41:00.002-05:002011-04-29T14:00:23.734-05:00

OK, so, I was forced into creating DTS packages to use on a legacy system that I know darn well we are going to upgrade in the next couple years at some point. The boss' reasons were sound, from his vantage point, at this juncture we didn't have resources to learn SSiS, or upgrade from our current database, SQL Server 2000, I get it, so, I have to get over my personal opinion and do what I am

dB Mastershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05066942948999554445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1323625021544919821.post-84439756187033021562011-04-28T09:25:00.006-05:002011-06-10T06:18:08.391-05:00

Well all know there are hundreds of ad systems out there, and very rarely does any system have a new spin that is worthy of any real note, but this one is kind of cool. VigLink is a new system with a cool twist that makes covering a lot of ground very simple. VigLink was founded by, and is financially backed by, some big players in the industry.The concept is a good one. Your average ad publisher

dB Mastershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05066942948999554445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1323625021544919821.post-62224888652523266032011-04-22T17:53:00.002-05:002011-04-22T18:10:39.006-05:00

I have, in my time on the AdSense support forum where I am a Top Contributor, seen many, many publishers that throw up AdSense and forget about ads, expecting they'll get rich, or, at least make money. After they don't, a predictable series of events ensues.They come to the AdSense support forum ion one of two frames of mind, either asking what they can do to improve things, or angry and kicking

dB Mastershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05066942948999554445noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1323625021544919821.post-38749759121008786772011-04-22T06:01:00.003-05:002011-04-22T06:49:27.768-05:00

So, I have, for the last few months, been dealing with an increasing amount of spam on one of my more popular forums. After yet another posting for knock-off Ugg boots, I finally had enough and started investigating options for controlling this mess.I found, during my investigation, a site that aggregates spammer information from a community of people like me, this wek site is Stop Forum Spam.

dB Mastershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05066942948999554445noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1323625021544919821.post-10764475620628733362011-04-21T07:12:00.004-05:002011-04-21T09:30:07.098-05:00

So, back in November I took a job (actually full time, real job for the first time in a long time) doing PHP/MySQL development for a company that thrust me into the world of Mac. I was sure I'd be in for days or weeks of getting up to speed and worried about disappointing my new employer, so I was nervous, which is kind of foreign territory for me. As they were also into open source freeware and

dB Mastershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05066942948999554445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1323625021544919821.post-34626547912234945432011-04-21T05:50:00.006-05:002011-04-28T12:52:40.734-05:00

Since I have acquired a lot of audio and video from various artists, as I do run a music web site for independent home recording musicians that make great tunes, and my daughter has purchased an iPod, I have grown to have increasing interest in efficient media management.I have really gained a shining for Media Monkey, ot is a very capable, very powerful, and very easy to use, media management

dB Mastershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05066942948999554445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1323625021544919821.post-65178392650474621782011-04-20T06:17:00.003-05:002011-04-20T06:27:47.174-05:00

I really need to get back into the habit of posting on a regular basis, I've been slacking in that department with starting a new job and such. The whole time I have been beta testing the new Chrome notebook.Overall, while I like the idea, and I do use it a lot (when the networking works) there are some real annoyances, and some poor design decisions on the part of Google.My number 1 complaint is

dB Mastershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05066942948999554445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1323625021544919821.post-16060785637928914572010-12-15T18:40:00.003-06:002010-12-15T18:52:10.130-06:00

Well, it arrived today, as I was chosen to be part of the pilot program, and I was told I could talk about it at will, so I will.Nice little package, it came in a cleverly designed box, at least I thought. The unit itself is quite simple. Basic black, no logos, designs or anything on the cover. I didn't measure but it appears to be around a 13 inch screen or so (I am sure I could look up screen

dB Mastershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05066942948999554445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1323625021544919821.post-52529365370980963632010-09-21T08:58:00.003-05:002010-09-21T09:11:42.629-05:00

Over the last couple months I decided to test out this so-called "Smart Pricing" that Google mentions and publishers always blame their poor performance on.What Smart Pricing is, in a nutshell, is a way to label your account as a high performer, low performer or anywhere in the middle. If you have channels that earn nothing, or have very low eCPM or CTR, it can mark your entire account as less

dB Mastershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05066942948999554445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1323625021544919821.post-30859987734131301042010-08-21T14:23:00.004-05:002010-08-21T14:34:40.509-05:00

I had, for a long time been a big fan of Chitika's ad system. They had a unique niche' of targeting search keywords of visitors to your site that got there via a search engine. For a long time it was a nice little supplemental revenue stream that targeted just visitors that found you via searches. of course, there are non-targeted, more sweeping options to, but they were not nearly as effective

dB Mastershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05066942948999554445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1323625021544919821.post-30382442406208740252010-07-04T16:34:00.002-05:002010-07-04T16:41:27.841-05:00

For a long time I have preached about using only text based ads within Google AdSense...and I would still stand behind that given the same stats at that time...the revenue and CTR statistics proved it out. However, in the last few weeks or months, Google has brought on many more ways to fill their image and flash ad pools. They have brought on some third party ad suppliers and provided more ad

dB Mastershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05066942948999554445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1323625021544919821.post-76825121198241310082010-05-25T12:42:00.004-05:002010-05-25T12:53:17.605-05:00

I have been knee-deep in Wordpress development for the last couple of months. Overall I have been very impressed with it. The admin interface is very intuitive, very interactive with wise use of AJAX interactivity, a very complete line of available "widgets" ("modules" in Drupal terms), themes are pretty easy and logical to develop, or customize, online documentation is good and the user

dB Mastershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05066942948999554445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1323625021544919821.post-91260240676211440202010-04-13T09:31:00.005-05:002010-04-13T10:46:46.159-05:00

I have stumbled across more situation where companies are pitted in the "Drupal or Wordpress" decision making situation...and it seems the decision is often pretty evenly split between the two.I have been working with Drupal for quite a few months now, and have been knee-deep in Wordpress for the last many weeks getting a good look at it, and now, I can see why it's a tough decision.Drupal it

dB Mastershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05066942948999554445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1323625021544919821.post-81251625569288511532010-04-08T09:39:00.002-05:002010-04-08T09:47:33.476-05:00

When most people think of "search engine friendly URL's" they are simply thinking of removing querystrings and rewriting them into the URL. However, there are more options that can help a great deal. This Blogger tool is a good example of it, how the title of the post is actually in the URL, thereby placing good keywords in the URL to be indexed.This is possible with Drupal as well, and it is

dB Mastershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05066942948999554445noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1323625021544919821.post-50652066906483275912010-03-12T09:58:00.004-06:002010-03-12T10:08:59.377-06:00

Everyone goes through this at some point. You are rebuilding your web site, using a new platform, new programming language and new navigational structure. This creates new URL's and new extensions to filenames. In releasing this new web site, all your previous search engine listing will now result in 404 page not found errors.Whaddya do?If you are hosting on an Apache server, there is this cool

dB Mastershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05066942948999554445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1323625021544919821.post-90475955101669177222010-03-10T09:25:00.003-06:002010-03-10T09:32:43.396-06:00

We see people day in and day out complaining about their AdSense ads not being relevant to their content. I'd like to briefly touch on this subject and maybe help some folks.The first problem, and most likely, is if you have just posted your ad code and are disappointed by the lack of relevancy. You have to understand, once you post your code, it makes a request from AdSense's system for the

dB Mastershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05066942948999554445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1323625021544919821.post-45232170647475970332010-03-01T08:46:00.003-06:002010-03-01T08:54:52.818-06:00

It seems to me that most folks look at forums as a lousy place to publish ads for the revenue of a web site. I think, the reason so many people believe this is for a number of reasons...the majority of the reason, I think, is because people won't do what is necessary to make it successful.The vast majority of people running forums use some open source script such as PHPBB, Simple Machines, or

dB Mastershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05066942948999554445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1323625021544919821.post-11531419149735098822010-02-17T05:30:00.005-06:002010-02-17T07:48:25.074-06:00

I have been a big fan of the Mollom module for Drupal. Mollom is an anti-spam module that heps ward of known bad submissions and registrations through Drupal user input forms.The module had an update a few days back, I installed it into one of my Drupal multisite installs and kind of forgot about it yesterday. 1 to 1.1 upgrades usually aren't something that has a lot of changes in it for

dB Mastershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05066942948999554445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1323625021544919821.post-10336003326068278602010-02-16T08:34:00.002-06:002010-02-16T08:40:02.018-06:00

This is a somewhat interesting, and also disappointing, thing to find out about the Google AdSense program. I can't say my finding would hold true for everyone, or is actually a fact in their systems or perhaps just dumb luck for me.A few months back I switched from using the standard AdSense system to manage my ad spaces to using the Google Ad Manager. The Ad Manager allows AdSense to be used as

dB Mastershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05066942948999554445noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1323625021544919821.post-51795529879494238212010-01-13T09:47:00.002-06:002010-01-13T10:00:18.867-06:00

An application that I am building is using a lot of popup layers to manage content for ease of use and navigation. I had the urge to not only pop up a layer with a content administration form in it, but also disable the background behind that popup to prevent any interaction with links and buttons behind that layer.I have never had to do that manually before, as I have used JavaScript libraries,

dB Mastershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05066942948999554445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1323625021544919821.post-28076135901824411052009-12-30T12:31:00.003-06:002009-12-30T12:45:54.003-06:00

I read an article this morning indicating that Microsoft is taking the threat posed by OpenOffice seriously. I see this as wise on their part...for a company that has a history of being late to take some things seriously, most notably, this new fangled internet thing, which back in the 90's it they staggered and wimpered to make any serious effort with their web browser, which I suspect is only

dB Mastershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05066942948999554445noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1323625021544919821.post-17468323908542247312009-12-22T07:44:00.004-06:002009-12-22T08:07:10.062-06:00

I am sure it comes as little surprise from the direction of my posts lately that I have been up to my nose in Drupal management and development. With that I have found some tweaks and quirks of the system I am trying to document, partly for my own good later on for reference, and partly for anyone else that has the problem and may find this blog.Most recently I have developed a Drupal based site

dB Mastershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05066942948999554445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1323625021544919821.post-78991612670322954232009-11-09T07:42:00.004-06:002009-11-09T07:57:19.488-06:00

I have been working with Nodewords quite frequently of late in an effort to get some real SEO in the Drupal environment. Without the Nodewords module, this is virtually impossible. As discussed in an earlier blog, Nodewords is a single source for customizing meta descriptions on a page-by-page basis, as well as site verification for Google Webmaster Tools, Yahoo Site Explorer and Bing Webmaster

dB Mastershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05066942948999554445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1323625021544919821.post-34300864671411818602009-11-06T07:40:00.009-06:002009-11-06T17:57:53.267-06:00

For a recent project we (myself and the other developer on this team) have been told we need to build a graphical charting engine. I had used a few Flash based charting tools before, but the other developer found a new one I hadn't seen before; Open Flash Chart. This made yesterday afternoon a rather enjoyable, productive, and amusing time.Before getting into the amusing piece, I have to say,

dB Mastershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05066942948999554445noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1323625021544919821.post-88889734005423044702009-11-05T09:53:00.006-06:002009-11-05T10:17:33.168-06:00

I have recently been tasked with setting up a new web site for a client that has all their current web sites and applications housed in GoDaddy servers. I have worked within their environment before and it's always been pretty straightforward, so I had no real worries.I chose for them, as I had frequently lately, to use Drupal as the core CMS for the project. Drupal core fit their needs well and

dB Mastershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05066942948999554445noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1323625021544919821.post-28626281413493614492009-10-31T13:21:00.002-05:002009-10-31T13:36:36.080-05:00

I am not exactly sure when this happened, but it finally did...InfoLinks finally went multisite...I had asked for this months and months ago after they approved a second site for me, they actually suggested I sing up for a second account. What? Yeah, a second account, that would be a lot of fun to get reports from and all that.Well, in logging in a few days I noticed they finally added the

dB Mastershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05066942948999554445noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1323625021544919821.post-17427934381544165652009-10-09T10:18:00.005-05:002009-10-14T14:12:03.331-05:00

Drupal, as my posts can probably show, has kind of been the focus of my latest projects. While I have built and still have, a couple of my own CMS systems, Drupal has proven very useful for me in a few situations, and I have been growing quite adept to working within it and getting the most from it.The weakness with many CMS systems, natively, is lack of search engine optimization (SEO)

dB Mastershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05066942948999554445noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1323625021544919821.post-77752344422219692292009-09-25T17:12:00.003-05:002009-10-09T10:18:23.448-05:00

When running Drupal in a multisite configuration, handling the crontabs for each domain can be a hassle to maintain, especially if you are running a large install, with many, many clients, clients and domains coming and going and the like.This can be pretty easily managed with a file simple lines of PHP. The goal of this code is to create a file that will look in the "sites" directory and see the

dB Mastershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05066942948999554445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1323625021544919821.post-27913138501713747482009-09-19T09:40:00.003-05:002009-09-19T10:36:21.675-05:00

For the last few months I have been using Google Ad Manager to manage my Google AdSense ad spaces across my web sites and it's been very nice. I like the sleaker code of Ad Manager and the increased control of placements and slots, but until recently I have not used it for third party ads, even though I knew it had the capability...or, that it was actually it's main selling point.Using Ad Manager

dB Mastershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05066942948999554445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1323625021544919821.post-49683232326414813462009-09-18T09:09:00.004-05:002009-09-18T09:15:20.904-05:00

As a frequent visitor of the Google AdSense support forum, we see, every day, people coming in complaining that Google has ripped them off. Saying they paid $2.00 (or so, prices vary) for some CD full of AdSense ready web site they can just deploy and start making money with. Then, 7 days later they see a $79 charge (again, prices vary) from a company that isn't Google.These services are not

dB Mastershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05066942948999554445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1323625021544919821.post-63009870737348474902009-09-16T05:05:00.003-05:002009-09-16T05:14:22.651-05:00

Yesterday Google announced "Web Elements", which, in a nutshell is the brilliant and innovative concept of syndicating news content from their database to your web site.Oooooooo, what a unique idea, it's only as old as, I dunno, RSS feeds.RSS feeds do have a couple drawbacks, those being that you need to have either a feed reader to read them easily or have some technical knowledge to parse them

dB Mastershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05066942948999554445noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1323625021544919821.post-50465293582579760062009-09-08T07:07:00.005-05:002009-10-09T10:17:54.520-05:00

In recent weeks I have been working with a friend setting up a web site/web service as a business idea. We decided on Drupal as a base for the project due to it's apparent adaptability to multisite configuration, meaning, one code base can run multiple web sites. First we tried it on the DirectAdmin control panel, as it's my personal choice. It turns out DirectAdmin has some limitations when

dB Mastershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05066942948999554445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1323625021544919821.post-9156461095236327432009-08-29T19:34:00.009-05:002009-08-30T10:56:45.414-05:00

I joined Facebook somewhat reluctantly months ago to simply understand the security and how it works since my wife had joined and started asking questions. I have, like many others, since become somewhat addicted, and enjoy it. I have been looking into basic security measures since I have found so many old friends whose profiles were completely open for public viewing, so I could browse all their

dB Mastershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05066942948999554445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1323625021544919821.post-65459177148785425652009-08-24T07:33:00.004-05:002009-08-24T07:42:05.841-05:00

Over the last few days, of course while I go on vacation, I find out traffic to my most successful web site dropped by about 2/3. Being on vacation I had communication limited to hotel rooms morning and night and during those times I do as much as possible to talk to my host, other site admins, run trace routes and so on.Come to find out, after 3 or 4 days that the problem is a huge internet

dB Mastershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05066942948999554445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1323625021544919821.post-16368311279486623882009-08-18T07:36:00.004-05:002009-08-18T08:49:20.956-05:00

I was chatting with a new friend yesterday that is in a very common dilemma. He has put a lot of time and effort into a web site, see's traffic increasing, and would like to find a way to get a little payback from all the time and energy that it takes to keep it going. In a conflicting emotion, he hates ads being splattered all over web sites and doesn't want to do that.Ad publishing guilt isn't

dB Mastershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05066942948999554445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1323625021544919821.post-70856066892184362152009-08-17T07:23:00.002-05:002009-08-17T07:37:19.542-05:00

As I stated in a previous post, I did recently join the eBay Partner Network. This system is a way for a web site owner to publish ads on their sites for auctions that are currently running on eBay and get commissions for referral sales.The tools themselves are pretty cool, they have a lot of options for using their web services via the supplied API, Flash ad generator, link rewriting and more. I

dB Mastershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05066942948999554445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1323625021544919821.post-71394083157526903452009-07-19T06:49:00.005-05:002009-07-19T08:12:03.254-05:00

I had previously discussed a very cool geoLocation web service that I had started using for reasons of visitor control, as the web site had been experiencing problems in a very localized area.I recently came upon another use for this service that may inspire webmasters of a very real, and wise use of such information.Increasingly, the key to running successful advertising on your web site is to

dB Mastershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05066942948999554445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1323625021544919821.post-38307669925060205782009-07-10T12:08:00.002-05:002009-07-10T12:15:23.900-05:00

There has, over the last couple years, been an incredible amount of scam web sites offering people everything from AdSense tips, prebuilt "AdSense optimized" web sites and other various tools promising to start pulling in thousands of dollars a month for doing nothing. These have gone by various names, such as The Google Money Tree, The Google Money Machine, and various other names.many of these

dB Mastershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05066942948999554445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1323625021544919821.post-14134472983591377622009-07-09T09:17:00.007-05:002009-07-09T18:07:47.311-05:00

A little over a week ago I decided, after getting a really cool stainless steel water bottle in the mail from Microsoft, to try their ad system again. I would very much like to see Google AdSense have some sort of competition in the marketplace, so I would really like to see it work. I vowed rto give it a month of my time, and run it as a direct A/B test against AdSense.I have to break my vow in

dB Mastershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05066942948999554445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1323625021544919821.post-11993214672399065612009-07-07T16:51:00.006-05:002009-07-19T07:09:51.074-05:00

I have been very interested the last few months in geolocation for target advertising, visitor identification and the like. I have found it's very easy to get your own database of IP ranges associated with countries of origin with free tools like IP2Nation and other such things. The harder part, it seems, is to get down more granular than that. Those databases start getting very large and costing

dB Mastershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05066942948999554445noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1323625021544919821.post-18754023186302076962009-06-30T15:59:00.002-05:002009-06-30T16:08:43.580-05:00

If for no other reason other than boredom, I decided to give Microsoft's advertisment publishing system a try on a real web site. OK, well, boredom and the fact they sent me a real cool stainless steel water bottle the other day.I had previously tried it on a lower traffic site and had terrible results. No money, few ads and generally blown off by the support team. I figured Id' give it a good

dB Mastershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05066942948999554445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1323625021544919821.post-90040907724714791252009-06-06T14:33:00.004-05:002009-06-06T18:40:00.251-05:00

This topic has come near and dear to me since April Fools Day. it was that day in which I got layed off from my position at a small company, which I knew was a risk in when I took it, but a worth while risk that didn't pan out.In previous years I consulted for a long time, with no problems. I never had more than a few days go by between gigs. Today is a different economy, jobs are fewer and

dB Mastershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05066942948999554445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1323625021544919821.post-21224509488356764062009-05-28T17:16:00.002-05:002009-05-28T17:27:59.007-05:00

It seems that the internet is being filled with JavaScript libraries that are freely usable that can make creating advanced, interactive user interfaces quite easy for even a moderately knowledge web developer.Over the last few weeks I have been working a lot with Yahoo YUI and have had a lot of fun and success. The YUI, at the time of this writing) is in version 2.7 with version 3 in beta. The

dB Mastershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05066942948999554445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1323625021544919821.post-31060887771987243912009-05-22T09:12:00.003-05:002009-05-22T09:19:49.588-05:00

One thing that has always annoyed me is the date formats which are considered readable, or often not the format a database understands. In the United States our commonly used date format is MM-DD-YYYY though, when putting it into a MySQL database DATE field, it wants YYYY-MM-DD.Some databases recognize different common formats and add them properly anyway, whther it's using dashes or slashes

dB Mastershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05066942948999554445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1323625021544919821.post-28103082154089047432009-05-02T12:57:00.004-05:002009-10-31T13:37:24.204-05:00

I have been using InfoLinks as my in text advertising prodvider for over a month now, well long enough to get a good look at the system, the revenue, time for the "newness" of it on my site to wear off and watch it start performing as it normally would.I have to say, moving from Kontera to InfoLinks has been one of the best things I have seen in the advertising business in a while. With the

dB Mastershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05066942948999554445noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1323625021544919821.post-1384112981388076102009-05-01T18:39:00.004-05:002009-05-02T05:52:40.907-05:00

A friend recently introduced me to a great Firefox add on; FireFTP. FireFTP is an FTP application that can do most anything a common FTP app can do within a tab of FireFox.I use Aptana for my web development, I was under some time pressure on a project and was whining to a friend about some bugginess I was having with Aptana's FTP/Syncing functions and didn't have time to troubleshoot or fix them

dB Mastershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05066942948999554445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1323625021544919821.post-66031270333861903682009-04-05T13:03:00.003-05:002009-04-05T13:09:48.392-05:00

I was just cleaning up some shelves and drawers in my former office in the basement and found myself packing up a bunch of books for GoodWill donations or some such thing. Many of these books I am given by publishers for review other promotional reasons, some I have bought, none, however, gets used that often. Google works better, and faster, to get me the answers that I need.There are some

dB Mastershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05066942948999554445noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1323625021544919821.post-33178307636049979312009-04-04T18:00:00.004-05:002009-10-31T13:37:47.498-05:00

I just posted an article about me switching my in-text advertising from Kontera to InfoLinks. After quiet a few days, I have to say, InfoLinks is outperforming Kontera by over double in payout. The click through, with the exact same appearance, has double the eCPM and over double the CTR.The popup is much more dynamic and attractive with InfoLinks. I can't say that is the reason the payout is

dB Mastershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05066942948999554445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1323625021544919821.post-35975564682531243182009-03-27T11:46:00.003-05:002009-10-31T13:38:06.430-05:00

I was approached the other day by somebody from InfoLinks, asking me if I was interested in running in text ads on my site. Since I didn't know exactly who they are, assuming they were an advertiser, I replied saying they'd have to go buy ads through Kontera as they ran my in text ads.She then explained they would like me to try theirs and replace Kontera, I did some searching and it appears that

dB Mastershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05066942948999554445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1323625021544919821.post-79122886406248975542009-03-19T08:18:00.005-05:002009-03-19T08:30:04.844-05:00

After months and months of effort I am finally giving up on Clickbank for good. I really, really wanted my project to work, but when the products and related ads simply don't inspire confidence, and Clickbank themselves offers very little in terms of tools to make the most of their ads, it is hard to get anything done.I went so far as to build my own application to manage the database of ads, and

dB Mastershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05066942948999554445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1323625021544919821.post-47633955945147987462009-03-18T08:02:00.003-05:002009-03-18T08:09:36.528-05:00

WordPress seems to be a lightning rod for hacking lately.For information on the latest attacks on this very popular script, check out this article at RedFerret and also get some tools to help you secure your install.This is why I encourage custom apps in many cases. While not everybody has the skills to build one, most blogs could get by with very simple tools and things as complex as WordPress

dB Mastershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05066942948999554445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1323625021544919821.post-30229833258874907812009-03-11T17:45:00.007-05:002009-03-11T18:10:17.892-05:00

Today Google starts it's next level of data mining and personal privacy invasion. Sort of, but I am guessing this will raise some concerns with privacy advocates.Google is now targeting ads in a new way. Any web site that shows Google's AdSense advertisements now put a cookie on the visitors machine and track what other sites that person visits, as long as that site shows AdSense as well. So, in

dB Mastershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05066942948999554445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1323625021544919821.post-55739065194674522122009-03-10T08:39:00.002-05:002009-03-10T08:48:54.893-05:00

People threaten this all the time, we see it almost daily, for sure weekly. Some angry publisher that got disabled comes to AdSense support forums and starts screaming about contacting his lawyer. The poster usually get mocked by others for wanting to sue for a couple hundred dollars.Well, Aaron Greenspan, the founder of Think Computer Corp, decided to do just that, he sued Google and won. He

dB Mastershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05066942948999554445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1323625021544919821.post-34263407549945959022009-03-02T16:49:00.002-06:002009-03-02T17:02:11.514-06:00

As I stated in a previous blog, a couple weeks back, I was approved as part of the first open beta of Microsoft's adCenter Publisher network. I started uber-excited because I need an alternative to Google AdSense, or, at the very least, want one available.I logged in to the control panel and started looking through the tool and it was an impressive array of tools, from banner design rotators to

dB Mastershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05066942948999554445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1323625021544919821.post-91187527257946036992009-02-26T12:16:00.002-06:002009-02-26T12:29:01.585-06:00

On the support forum today I saw posts from so many people with some crazy issues and requesting Google goes to some crazy measures to accommodate them. I don't get this.One publisher says his country is in political turmoil, so he says, and because of that banks are closed and he said Google should consider getting debit card type things for publishers. ANother publisher said his site is small,

dB Mastershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05066942948999554445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1323625021544919821.post-76652228568799474862009-02-25T10:02:00.003-06:002009-02-25T10:10:01.888-06:00

I had an interesting issue today. A coworker had been for the last many weeks/months has been storing incoming faxes in Microsoft Exchange and viewing them as a .tif file that comes as an attachment. Today, suddenly, they stopped working, telling her she doesn't have permissions to create the file and all that.Naturally I assume it's a folder permission thing or some such, I talked to our telecom

dB Mastershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05066942948999554445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1323625021544919821.post-53423090899428561352009-02-25T08:00:00.005-06:002009-02-25T08:18:02.033-06:00

A few weeks back my wife joined Facebook in order to stay in contact with a specific group of people. Days after that I was often getting questions from her about how to do this or that. I really couldn't answer many of them, never having done Facebook.Well, after a few days I figured what the heck, I'll get a Facebook and learn how it works. It'd likely be in my best interest to learn a little

dB Mastershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05066942948999554445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1323625021544919821.post-71182273616635863282009-02-19T08:19:00.003-06:002009-02-19T08:31:55.058-06:00

I am in the process of building a product catalog on a ASP.Net platform and had an interesting issue come up I have dealt with from time to time, but this is the first time in a .Net environment.When the visitor selects all the options of the product they want (size, color, etc) the catalog does a quick inventory check, if it turns out there is inventory in stock it then displays a text field to

dB Mastershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05066942948999554445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1323625021544919821.post-88788184598771016192009-02-15T10:58:00.007-06:002009-02-17T09:24:59.592-06:00

Those of us that frequently help in the AdSense forums are constantly answering the same questions over and over and over again. I plan to use this post to address the most frequent, and ignorant, as I see it.No, AdSense is not a scam.There are a lot of scammers with programs that associate themselves with AdSense, but Google does not endorse any of these programs themselves, and you see them

dB Mastershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05066942948999554445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1323625021544919821.post-29015145895615785212009-02-15T06:38:00.002-06:002009-02-15T09:15:57.761-06:00

I have always been a fan of affiliate advertising, and it seems most any medium or large online e-tailer has some sort of affiliate program available. Heck, even some of the smallest ones do. With that type of situation almost any web site that is really about anything in particular (as opposed to random blogs or personal homepages) can find something related to their content to sell for

dB Mastershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05066942948999554445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1323625021544919821.post-19448325887013195022009-02-14T06:23:00.006-06:002009-02-14T11:27:44.275-06:00

I was recently accepted into the beta of Microsoft's adCenter Publisher program and have been playing around a bit and found some very promising tools available that I have long wished Google AdSense would implement.I haven't actually got to display an ad yet on any web site, but for a good reason; while I was accepted into the program, each and every domain a publisher wants to use must get

dB Mastershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05066942948999554445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1323625021544919821.post-54343743935742251632009-02-12T05:54:00.002-06:002009-02-12T06:12:35.698-06:00

In trying to help people new to the advertising game, I notice a trend in thinking, and, I can say, I had this type of thinking myself at one point. The truth is, more ads on a web site does not necessarily equal more revenue. This is most especially true if they are all piled at the top or bottom.I go to people's blogs and web sites to check them out on support forums and whatnot, and am amazed

dB Mastershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05066942948999554445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1323625021544919821.post-63942739968042157732009-02-06T07:50:00.002-06:002009-02-06T08:11:14.678-06:00

I have heard the name Clicksor so much lately I figured it's in my best interest to try it out and see what it's made of. Initially I was simply pleased because they had a real, honest to goodness approval system. You apply, wait a few days, they check out your site and all that. One thing that makes me immediately skeptical is any system that you just sign up and start placing ads when you're

dB Mastershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05066942948999554445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1323625021544919821.post-65034256407607158642009-02-05T10:36:00.003-06:002009-02-05T10:54:26.500-06:00

After waiting far, far to long, I decided to finally dive in to Google Ad Manager during a redesigning of one of my bigger web sites. Ad Manager is Google's web based advertising management system, that, as one would expect, works with AdSense accounts quite well.Ad Manager allows the easy creation of ad code, obviously, that's it's primary task for the average AdSense user, but, beyond that it

dB Mastershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05066942948999554445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1323625021544919821.post-40376553627793171632009-02-04T11:31:00.004-06:002009-02-04T11:48:11.408-06:00

Well, now, I'd hate to be the ONLY blogger on earth that doesn't say something about the much publicized, very controversial new release from the great and powerful Google.Latitude is the name of Google's latest infringement on our privacy in their never ending quest to know everything about every one at all times from anywhere, er, I mean, latest software release.Latitude is, for all practical

dB Mastershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05066942948999554445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1323625021544919821.post-76336448929242753972009-01-30T15:01:00.004-06:002009-01-30T15:16:37.599-06:00

According to an article published a couple days ago on IT World, the fourth quarter of 2008 saw a 1.1% spike in click fraud as reported by Click Forensics. In the 3rd quarter of 2008 the fraud rate was 16%, in the fourth quarter it was reportedly 17.1%.Click fraud is the #1 threat to the pay-per-click advertising model that so many advertisement publishing systems use, and has resulted in drastic

dB Mastershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05066942948999554445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1323625021544919821.post-65779880189600699312009-01-27T08:41:00.003-06:002009-01-27T08:58:15.219-06:00

I have grown to consider AJAX the Flash of the new century. It took a while but most people finally learned where and when Flash was effective, and Flash itself grew and adapted to make up for many of it's shortcomings. While it still has it's issues, and people still over use it at times, it has reached a place of acceptance with most folks to some degree.Then comes AJAX. AJAX, like Flash, is

dB Mastershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05066942948999554445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1323625021544919821.post-2835130532722536462009-01-24T06:44:00.005-06:002010-08-21T14:35:46.783-05:00

After one week of reporting, I figured I'd spend a lazy morning comparing reports. This has proven very enlightening.I placed Chitika to take advantage of search engine generated traffic (it's strength according to them) in a place that was otherwise filled with Tribal Fusion ads. These ads were placed as filler ads to replace AdSense placements in an effort to try a new strategy I talked about

dB Mastershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05066942948999554445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1323625021544919821.post-17842114236817239872009-01-23T07:01:00.004-06:002009-01-23T07:18:30.876-06:00

With the continued plummeting of advertisement space values on the web, I have started re-evaluating my main web sites placements and designs, and in addition, more finely tuned the channeling within the most popular areas of the web site(s).In the process of doing this, I figured it would be as good of a time as any to more my ad management into the Google Ad Manager, as I have wanted to for

dB Mastershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05066942948999554445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1323625021544919821.post-9932206522800106842009-01-22T07:57:00.003-06:002009-01-22T09:41:44.530-06:00

It was reported yesterday that Google has, due to continuing keyword value drops, will stop selling ad spaces for newspaper publication based web sites. This is not the first move they made in cost cutting measures Google has made regarding their AdSense system.Google, overall seems to feel that the model itself is still sound, I tend to agree with that based on the system itself, the problem has

dB Mastershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05066942948999554445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1323625021544919821.post-25288594904141300192009-01-21T07:42:00.005-06:002010-08-21T14:36:00.022-05:00

As previously stated, I have decided to give Chitika a try, and see how it performs for me. Much to my surprise, while obviously something that won't get me a giant step toward an early retirement, it appears to be a realistic alternative to maximize a certain segment of my web audience.The click through rate (CTR) appears to be decent, in the first 5 days of stats the CTR is around 1.5% or so

dB Mastershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05066942948999554445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1323625021544919821.post-51943463441603377172009-01-20T15:27:00.002-06:002009-01-20T15:39:28.130-06:00

I got into an interesting conversation with a friend regarding buying ads, and since he knew I played the advertising game, he asked me about it. I told him that I really don't know much about buying ads, as I never do that. He acted somewhat surprised.I have been in this gig for over a decade, and I have a few successful web projects, a few unsuccessful ones and a few in the pipeline at any

dB Mastershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05066942948999554445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1323625021544919821.post-42839883855171385992009-01-20T10:26:00.002-06:002009-01-20T10:47:37.085-06:00

I have been hit by the economy in regards to my ad revenue. Revenue has dropped, but, not only that, click through rates (CTR) have dropped. Revenue drops I can handle, I understand the economics of the business world, of which advertising is a big part of.The CTR though, that's another matter. While it can be a truth that in tough times people are clicking less ads because they are not looking

dB Mastershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05066942948999554445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1323625021544919821.post-46719308598690670492009-01-17T10:27:00.006-06:002010-08-21T14:36:18.658-05:00

I have heard a lot about Chitika over the last few months, but, never paid it much mind, and kind of wrote it off as another garbage, untargeted, CPM type advertising system. With AdSense revenue continually falling, I am much more open to trying out new things, so I figured it was time to dig in and see what it's all about.It turns out they actually have a very interesting new product in their "

dB Mastershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05066942948999554445noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1323625021544919821.post-12737046996110752232009-01-16T09:20:00.003-06:002009-01-16T09:38:15.855-06:00

The internet just preys on people's greed, and in ways, it's so incredibly easy to do. Every day new scams pop up, jus yesterday I heard about the "Google Money Tree", I hadn't seen that one before, and another one growing popularity is the "Net Pride Kit". There was also the "Google Money Machine", "Google Money", and many more.Most of these scams play on well known names, or well known products

dB Mastershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05066942948999554445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1323625021544919821.post-84303073151643144632009-01-15T09:43:00.003-06:002009-01-16T09:18:12.908-06:00

Many times I have seen people sign up for Google AdSense only to return to ask for support because the resulting adds are too targeted and they want to loosen up the keyword restriction. Essentially they want to change it from contextually targeted to contextually complimentary; which, I suspect, would be a much more difficult thing to develop due to the number of directions one could take "

dB Mastershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05066942948999554445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1323625021544919821.post-81319785091558860682009-01-14T07:44:00.003-06:002009-01-14T08:00:40.563-06:00

I've been hearing it for months, people complaining about ad revenues declining for online publishers. I've been pretty fortunate, myself, and have maintained a pretty even bottom line, with last year, 2008, actually being a record year for ad revenue, but, noticing a small decline in November and December from AdSense, and various affiliates, while Tribal Fusion and Kontera seemed to be holding

dB Mastershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05066942948999554445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1323625021544919821.post-22654603057717936782009-01-13T09:26:00.006-06:002009-01-13T11:01:36.240-06:00

This isn't a lecture post, this is a question post. I have been so used to developing in Classic ASP, that I looked at the primary advantage of stored procedures as a security measure. It gave me the ability to declare and define the input variables by data type and size. With PHP I counteracted this by creating functions to check the input integrity.Today, however, I am doing more and more with

dB Mastershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05066942948999554445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1323625021544919821.post-7356291053542646572009-01-09T07:17:00.002-06:002009-01-09T07:51:45.787-06:00

Some wise man, somewhere, was quoted saying "if it's not three places, it's no place", in regards to data. There is a lot of truth in that. For all computer users, backups are important, and especially important for businesses. Backups of financial data, employee data, email data stores, document archives, and more are essential.Many companies have tape drives, or entire servers dedicated to

dB Mastershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05066942948999554445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1323625021544919821.post-78416113039261941842009-01-08T08:04:00.004-06:002009-01-08T09:43:56.131-06:00

I have had the rather new challenge of learning Exchange, managing users, distribution lists and the like with the departure of the guy that built the original infrastructure at the small company I work for. To this point I have had only minimal experience dealing with Exchange.I am learning how to set up distribution lists, add members, remove members and so on. That is all pretty simple stuff.

dB Mastershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05066942948999554445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1323625021544919821.post-27045784311586003842009-01-05T18:25:00.004-06:002009-01-05T18:46:50.382-06:00

Welcome to 2009, God willing, may it be a year of a resurgence of the global economy, but I doubt it. I am suspecting it'll take a couple years to straighten out the mess creates by the "have's" and "have more's" of lending and big industry. No doubt coming at our expense.After all this time of dropping home values, layoffs, bankruptcies, financial fraud and more, people trying to monetize their

dB Mastershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05066942948999554445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1323625021544919821.post-54516404370775326732009-01-03T11:17:00.002-06:002009-01-03T11:29:59.455-06:00

I always enjoy this time of year, and not just because I get a few well deserved days off of work, but, mostly because everybody else has a few well deserved days off work. The last few days of the year and the first few of the next I always see traffic spikes, ad revenue spike, message forum activity is at a high and everything good that comes with running a web site.It's a good idea, if you are

dB Mastershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05066942948999554445noreply@blogger.com0