Making the most of Adsense

Taking advice from me on making the best use of Adsense probably isn't a great idea. I have my ad blocks stuffed away in the corner, and my total earnings wouldn't buy me anything from a 99c store... but I came across a couple of little tips that might help.

Use Section Targeting

You can tell Google where to look on your page for the content, in the hope that it finds something interesting and gives you some well targeted ads. It's explained well on Adsense Support, but basically:

Add <!-- google_ad_section_start --> to your page at the start of the content section and <!-- google_ad_section_end --> at the end. You can ignore a navigation section by surrounding it with a similar section which starts with <!-- google_ad_section_start(weight=ignore) -->.

Use Alternate URL

If you have pages where Google show public service ads, you can make better use of them by signing up with AlternateURL. Whenever Google can't give you a paying Adsense block (maybe your site hasn't been indexed yet, or they don't have any suitable adverts for your content), the request is sent to AlternateURL instead. Their paid ads fill the gap until Google start providing paid ads.

I've used both of these tips to update my blog today, I'll let you know if I notice any changes.

Tags: adsense blogging alternate url

No More Switches, No More Lights

Via Digg, the flyer for the original Apple computer.

No More Switches, No More Lights
Compared to switches and LED's, a video terminal can display vast amounts
of information simultaneously.

Short Feed

If you read my last post or two in a feed reader, you may have had a short preview of the post, rather than the entire content. It's not some sneaky new ploy to force you to click through to my site, it's just something Blogger decided to do all by itself. It should be fixed now, and hopefully feed readers will pick up the republished full feed version.

More Free Templates

Having posted about Open Source Web Design in the past, when I found Templates Box, I thought it was worth a link. It's another quality collection of free, ready to use, web site templates. There's also a section for Flash site templates.

If you wanted to see an open design in action, I built my recent Staff Scheduling site for Oriador much faster by starting from an OSWD template.

More Learning Links

As I said in last weeks post, I'm trying to use a little bit of festive downtime to play with some of the books and tutorials that I've collected in recent months. I've picked up a couple of useful looking PHP links, which I thought I'd share.

I've never had to look at PHP before, I haven't needed to do a lot of web scripting, and all my web hosts have been Windows based. The new Dreamhost account I've picked up to learn Ruby On Rails is my first unix based host, so I've been keeping my eyes open for PHP stuff. Good PHP Tutorials looks like it could be a good place to start.

The Symphony Advent Calendar project takes 24 days and 24 articles to build a complete Web 2.0 application using PHP and the Symphony framework.

Micro ISV Digest

A well-fed, Boxing day round-up of last weeks Micro ISV related news and links.

Product News and Announcements

• Kevin Dangoor has a book deal for TurboGears. I've never been quite sure what TurboGears is, but Kevin kindly explains what it isn't.
• 37 signals announced a new product. Sunrise, due some time in 2006, is a CRM system for small businesses.
• Prashant Deva launched his ANTLR IDE a month ago, but the first I heard was on this JoS forum thread. He thinks he needs our advice, but it sounds to me like he's doing just fine for his first month.
• A new startup ISV blog got started, the project is currently code-named Haja, and has something to do with managing project requirements.
• Version 1.3 of DBDesc was released.

Other Links and Articles

• Phil at Seartech raises some good points when he asks why Chimney Sweeps need his software.
• Two brick and mortar style guides to starting a business... One from Particle Tree, another focused on starting LLCs in Illinois.
• Joe Indie does Indie Project Management 101, it's game themed, but all good advice if you're working as part of a team on your startup.
• Wall Street Journal on Working from Home; mostly about the way other people interact with those of us who work from home.
• Ian Landsman wrote a nice piece about choosing ideas, The Practical Entrepreneur. It kicked off a discussion here, and a small follow up about dogfood here.
• The SVN Small Business 101 series continued with No-one starts with a master-piece. A short post from Seth Godin covered a similar topic.
• Dennis Forbes on Build vs Buy.
• Ben, the BugNinja, pulled out all the stops to put together an idea scoring web page. It all started when nj posted his spreasheet to the forum.
• A new Paul Graham essay on Procrastination.

$1.18

That's the revenue generated on one of my Squidoo lenses. It's not a particularly good lens, but it's the only non-zero value I have in my earnings column. It's probably Amazon affiliate revenue, but I guess it could have come from Adsense.

Anyway, the reason I mention it, is because of Alex Bendig's latest Codesnipers post, Start-up Myths?

Towards the end of the post, Alex suggested the possibility of using affiliate programs as an alternative revenue stream to support him through his product development. It's obviously possible to generate revenue from sites with affiliate links to ebay, Amazon, Adsense etc. CafePress adds another dimension to the idea.

The question to me is whether this will work for Alex as a sideline, when what he actually wants is to spend more time doing product development. I get the feeling that if I let myself take affiliate marketing seriously it could easily become a time sucking addiction... Is that because I think I'd feel under constant pressure to expand and improve my content, or is it just the pull of the dark side?

Pure Joy - Festive Grow

Few things online could make me as happy as finding a new Grow puzzle to play with. The latest is a special festive version, much simpler than all the previous games (there are only six different items to work with), but every bit as glorious.

If you haven't played any of the previous Eyezmaze Grow games, this is a great place to start. The small number of items makes it much easier to figure out than the previous games. All you have to do is add the six items to the tree in the correct order to produce the ideal solution.

If this gives you the taste for more, try Grow, Grow RPG, and Grow Cube.

Trying something new

When I hit a patch of low productivity, I find it helpful to take some time out to try learning something new. It gets me in the right frame of mind to actually get something done, and also I think it helps if I have no previous experience to compare it to. I get self critical when I'm not really getting anywhere, so it's good to have no idea how effective I'm being.

This time I decided to try running through some of these managed DirectX tutorials that I found via the Orb software blog. Sadly, the managed DirectX installation doesn't seem to have worked. At this point I have a choice, I could spend the rest of my learning time tearing my hair out and cursing the day I ever picked up a keyboard until I get it working, only to have no time left to actually try any of the tutorials, and consign them to the someday/maybe folder of doom. Or, I can find something else to play with. I feel like I'm being a bigger man by finding something else... I've had too many of these supposedly helpful restorative exercises turn to frustration and futility. I've had a couple of Flash books sitting in my Safari account for a while now, so I'm going to give them a look.

If you're also looking for something to learn, you might like OpenCourseWare.

Staff Scheduling site

Following on from last weeks blog post, I've launched a new product site for Oriador, with a strong emphasis on "staff scheduling software", rather than on the word "rota". I'm going to try sending some Adwords traffic that way, and I'm going to be keeping a close eye on the logs, to see if there's any noticable change in the number of international downloads.

The product name is still Oriador Rota, so the new site might still be a little bit confusing to an international audience, but hopefully less so than the existing product pages. Depending on what happens when traffic starts landing on the new pages, I have a few options in mind for naming and consistency.

I'm not completely settled on the new site design, but I've tried to listen to some of the advice I was given, and I thought it was important to get something up. My next mission is to spend some quality time with Wink and put a flash demo together. Anything I learn from the new site, or like about it, I'll also be retro-fitting to the existing oriador.com pages.

New Site: Oriador Staff Scheduling.

Micro ISV Digest

This weeks Micro ISV launches and updates, with a few relevant blog posts thrown in.

Product News and Announcements

• Ruby on Rails went 1.0.
• Art Affair is software for the business side of art. Looks like an interesting niche product, and it was discussed at length on the Jos Forum last week.
• LookLater hit 100,000 bookmarks, and Doug announced a new product, Gozenta, which is a live web site statistics service. I'm really looking forward to seeing this one come together, if his productivity on LookLater is anything to go by, it could quickly become an exciting and useful product.
• Helpspot hit $10,000 in sales after about six weeks on the market.
• Neville Franks released a new version of Surfulator, with some cool looking new features.
• BugNinja took a look at the latest Yahoo Mail beta, and like what he saw.

Other Blog Posts and Links

• FAMFAMFAM Icons, a free Icon set, suitable for use in commercial projects. I've looked for something like this for a long time, thanks WorkHappy.
• Bob Walsh wrote about lessons learned writing a book.
• The second part of the small business 101 series on the 37signals blog dealt with Cash Flow. Not quite as good as the first part, but worth a look just to see NumSum in action, if you haven't already.
• Seven Lessons learned in year one from Strangebrand.
• KC launched the Anonymous blog at Codesnipers, open to anyone out there who wants to get something off their chest, or who wants to ask a question of the Codesnipers community.
• Dennis Forbes on Adoption, Functionality and Usability. I often set the time on my VCR, always have, I wonder if that makes me special.
• PC or not-PC, should you wish your customers a merry christmas?
• An abrupt but fun question and answer session from A Shareware Life.
• Typepad went AWOL.

Oriador Staff Schedule?

It's looking that way.

I've wondered for a while about the international relevance of the word "rota", and after this discussion on the JoS forum, I see that the situation might be much worse than I had ever thought. Even though I'd realized that most of the world probably wouldn't be searching for "staff rota" as their first choice, it hadn't really clicked with me that even if they did find our software, the word "rota" could be confusing or distracting.

So, my plan at the moment is to launch a new site for Oriador Staff Schedule, and run that side by side with the existing site for a while (it'll probably be months before I start seeing any traffic from the search engines anyway). The new site will link to the same installation package for now, but come the next release, there will be two different versions (same product, different labels). I'll figure out where to go from there based on what happens with the new site... possibly a situation where the Oriador site becomes primarily focused on staff scheduling, while preserving the rota themed pages for existing links.

As most of the traffic here on my blog comes from outside the UK, I'll be updating the links here to refer to the new site, rather than the Oriador Rota one.

In case you've never heard the word before, a "rota" is basically just a staff schedule, timetable or roster.

Update: I've launched a basic new site for the product, with less of a UK feel, and with staff scheduling software as the primary keywords: Oriador Staff Scheduling.

Something up with Typepad?

What's going on? I've been to 3 or 4 of my regular blogs this morning and they seem to have gone back in time. They've all dropped the last couple of entries, reverting back to about a week ago.

Check out Seth Godin's blog or the Big Picture Small Office blog. Of course, it'll probably be fixed by the time you read this!

More gaming QA lessons

After the Madden bug with the seven inch tall player, King Kong is released on the Xbox 360 without ever having been tested on a regular TV. Apparently, if you're not using HDTV, the game is far too dark to play.

Squidoo

My Codesnipers post this week is all about Squidoo.

Read: Squidoo: Enter the Lensmaster

I was having a little trouble getting it, but I eventually decided that it is a good thing, because it makes it extremely to build, publish and maybe even make money from web pages on any particular topic. It basically enables experts to share knowledge more easily.

I haven't really decided what to do with it myself. I tried creating a few lenses, and I've been rolling a few ideas around, mostly for tutorials, overviews or resources for my products. But do I really have time to maintain more web pages?

While I'm talking about Squidoo, I hit a problem with my flood lens at the weekend, I wanted to edit it, but whenever I switched to Edit mode, all but one of my modules disappeared. It was confusing, everything else was there in the published version for anyone to view, but when I tried to edit it, it was gone. I just figured out how to fix it this morning. Somehow, an empty draft version of my lens had been created, so whenever I went to edit, I was seeing the draft version. If you click on Discard Draft, it reverts to the published version.

I wish I'd known that before, because I'm convinced that something similar happened when I was building another lens, in that case I ended up starting from scratch.

And while I'm mentioning Codesnipers, KC has just introduced a new feature, the Anonymous blog. If you've got something you want to get off your chest, or want to ask a question of the community, it might be what you're looking for. Only Rants or Open Questions are allowed, and submissions are moderated prior to posting. Vent away.

Update: The Squidoo draft thing happened to me again on another lens, I don't think I've even used the drafts feature more than once. Anyway... Squidoo's Discard this Draft button is looking like an important tool.

Update 2: Clearly the whole democratic Lensrank thing isn't quite working as well as it should just yet... this lens is ranked #1 of all the 6,000+ lenses at the time of writing, despite having absolutely no content (unless they're trying to make a point that the more you add to a lens the worse it gets, and that therefore, an empty lens is a happy lens :)). Ah, the joys of beta testing.

A Happy Accident?

I had a great meeting yesterday with an experience resourcing manager about Oriador. His enthusiasm for the product was really satisfying to see.

What surprised me a little, is that they aren't all that interested in the staff scheduling side, that's all pretty much predetermined elsewhere. What's really got them excited is using Oriador Rota for resource management. Their work is regulated and has safety implications, so they need to have people with very specific skills at any given time. If they're short, they have to bring someone in to do it. Oriador shows them quickly and visually if they already have someone working who could do the job, maybe he's been allocated to a less expensive or difficult role, and they can then save money because they don't need to bring in extra or even agency staff. When he told me that as soon as the software saved them bringing in one or two unnecessary people it would already have paid for itself, I realised that I should probably put more effort into marketing it for this kind of thing.

I was reminded of Duane's very early Codesnipers piece, Pave the Cowpath. I'll be watching what happens when they roll out the software to a trial area early next year and get some real live data up and running, and I'll be following behind paving every cowpath I can! I've had suggestions of similar potential for the software in project management, so hopefully I can find the keys to unlocking that too.

Oh, I'm probably being a bit hard on myself calling it an accident, it's not like it all just happened without me noticing, but it certainly wasn't entirely expected, or anything like a priority. It's definitely happy, though.

Micro ISV Digest

The week's Micro ISV news and my pick of the relevant blog posts.

Product News and Announcements

• Squidoo moved from private to public beta.
• Bill Rayer launched a new beta version of Ubercode
• LookLater continues to develop, with private RSS feeds, tagging, and bookmark import/export among the new or updated features this week.
• Yahoo bought del.icio.us.
• Another Micro ISV went live, Barbary Monitor launched, a tool for monitoring site or network availability.
• Phil of Seartech software launched a blog about his ISV. His first product is for chimney sweeps, and, as I'm sure he's heard quite enough Mary Poppins gags, I'll restrain myself.

Blog posts and Links

• Ian Jones finished his first week working for himself on his Micro ISV, he expected more, but it sounds to me like he'll do just fine.
• Darren Rowse of Problogger knows a thing or two about making money from blogging, here he posts 11 tips for driving traffic to your blog.
• Joe Indie posts on Writing Intuitive Software, it's gaming themed, but relevant.
• Small Business 101 from 37signals, this could definitely be a series to watch.
• Also from 37signals, Don't Scale: 99.999% uptime is for Wal-mart. The pragmatic approach to availability, and something budding Micro ISVs should probably take note of.
• 24ways is an advent calendar of web development tips to impressing your friends, one each day for the rest of the season.
• J from NGEdit posted his experiences of Adwords and click fraud. In J's case the potential impact was a few bucks here and there, web host AIT are leading a class-action suit against Google, claiming they've lost $500,000.

From the Forums

• A great discussion of the benefits of, and best techniques to use for, online demos and tutorials, kicked off by Andy Brice's Wink experiment.
• Ian gave us an update on his Notify360.com experiment.
• Bob Walsh joined Eric Sink as a new host of the Business of Software forum.

Xooglers

I just found the Xooglers blog via Diggdot.

It's a place where former Google employees can get together and rant or reminisce. I've only read a post or two, but I'm definitely going to find the time to go back, it looks like they have some great stories to tell.

The End?

Is the Wall Street Programmer done?

Update: Nah, he's back.

Buying a Video Game

Ever wanted to own a video game, I mean really own one?

Games publishing giant Acclaim went belly-up last year, and now all their games are up for auction. I'm not really sure what publishing rights actually gets you, (could you produce a new game in the franchise?), and I'm assuming you wouldn't actually get any code or anything to go along with it... and the minimum offer that they're accepting is $5000.

Ah well, it's probably not as interesting as it sounds, but it is rare to see a large company stripped bare and it's once prized assets offered to the highest bidder.

via: Press The Buttons

New Template

Finally, after months of officially trying to get around to it, I've replaced my blog template. It'll probably need to undergo a few tweaks over the next couple of weeks, but all things considered it feels pretty good.

The Blogger templating process wasn't exactly painless, for a few reasons:-

• IE vs Firefox differences. For some reason, when using the Blogger preview, everything seemed fine in IE, but messed up in Firefox. When I eventually uploaded the blog to go live, Firefox was fine, but IE was doing all kinds of weird stuff.
• More Preview issues. When I was using IE and previewing the blog, CSS image padding was just completely refusing to work. It was working fine in Firefox and Dreamweaver, and it even worked perfectly in IE once I uploaded it to the site, but something strange was happening on those preview pages. That wasted a lot of my time.
• FTP issues. Getting Blogger to publish my entire blog without failing turned into a major chore.

Hopefully now that I've ditched the lighthouse I'll feel a little more free to make regular changes and improvements. If you notice anything stupid happening, please let me know. The only issue I'm aware of is that the permalink versions of very narrow posts change the width of the main content column.

Network Admin Mischief

Via diggdot.us, a novel approach to removing a bandwidth hog from a shared net connection.

I notice that his IP in the ntop interface changed into a name. His windows
machine was spewing Netbios packets with his computer name in it. For the sake
of his privacy, I’ve changed the name, but let’s say it was “smith-laptop”. So I
pick up my cellphone and call the front desk at the hotel and as for Mr. Smith’s
room.

I wish I'd been a fly on the wall in the target hotel room.

Royalty theft

From the Wall Street Programmer, someone set up a CafePress store to sell merchandise for his site... watch out for your face on a CafePress mug!

Micro ISV Digest

A roundup of the Micro ISV news and relevant blog posts that caught my eye this week.

Product News and Announcements

• FireFox 1.5 was released.
• Ian launched a quick, opportunistic new Micro ISV, Notify360.com, an Xbox 360 availability notification service.

Blog Posts and Articles

• Over on Search Engine Guide, Jennifer Laycock is doing and blogging a great experiment on running an online business, 30 Days to profit.
• Kathy came back: A new post on Creating Passionate Users about modeling and planning product differentiation using graphic equalizer style sliders. I can't believe her sliders didn't go up to eleven, too easy?
• A series of Success and Motivation articles from Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks, but also a tech entrepreneur.
• Ian Landsman on Help is for Experts, I'd never really thought about it that way, but it certainly seems true.
• Creating a Games Company from Download Squad, contains a lot of links to free or affordable tools for software development and graphics.
• Mike Morris posted his Tradeshow toolbox advice, great stuff.
• Dennis Forbes on incestuous blogs about blogs in Blogs will eat themselves... oops.

The Lists

Forget Cyber Monday, last week should have been the unofficial week of the list. I was finding lists everywhere I turned, even my fellow Codesniper Rusty got in on the act. Here are some of my favorites.

• What Not to Do by John Osher. 22 great tips for startups.
• 10 Questions to ask yourself when you're small from Life Beyond Code.
• 10 Rules for web startups from Evan Williams.
• If you're considering Ajaxamafing anything, 10 places to use Ajax might be a useful read, as might Ajax gotchas.

Anything Else

Only Pandora, music on tap, just tell it the name of a song or a band you like and it generates a custom channel to play similar music. Easily the coolest site I've found in a long time.

Sources (aside from the sites already linked): MicroISV, Seth Godin's Blog, Work Happy, Nick Hebb.

Finding an Xbox 360

Hot off the JoS forums, ian has a super fast, super opportunistic new Micro ISV.

Notify360.com is a subscription service (a free service is available, you just have to wait a few more minutes for your notification) for tracking down Xbox 360s as they go on sale at online retailers. The service monitors the stock levels, and sends you email notifications any time they go on sale.

I think it's a great idea, and from the Micro ISV perspective it really shows how quickly you can get things up and running, if you keep it simple and find the right target.

Xbox 360 Availability Notification Service.

That Pesky Web Browser

So, as I said yesterday, I think I have Web Helper Browser where I wanted it to be earlier in the week.

I made a very stupid mis-diagnosis and even immortalized it in Wednesday's post. I was firmly under the impression that the Flash music bug only occurred on some games, and that I'd already fixed the rest. I'd tried to track down what was happening, and I was sure that there was some kind of difference there that I couldn't see. That makes it all the more embarrassing to have to admit that I was completely off track, and that I'd missed a much simpler way to differentiate; the music only stopped playing if it was the only/last browser window.

I don't understand how I missed that, especially as it was my first thought last week when I first started looking into it. It's complicated by the way the software saves web content, but I should have spent more time testing to see if my gut feeling could have been right.

For this update, I've also activated some beta image saving options which I developed earlier in the year. When the time came for me to hand over Web Helper Browser and focus all my efforts on Oriador Rota, the work on these features wasn't ready, so they got left on the shelf. I really needed that split, I was having a hard time getting anything done, I couldn't focus... at the time I couldn't really tell the difference between a few days work and a few months. I think it had a lot to do with the year I'd had on a personal level, we've been very transient since losing our house to the flooding, our dealings with the insurance company hadn't gone smoothly, and the combination of all that with a few other things had just got on top of me. The last thing I needed was to be drowning in code! As things stand today, the 3-4 month break from Web Helper Browser has really helped me out, Oriador Rota has been developing nicely, and it looks like we might be able to move back home in the next couple of months.

Despite this little nostalgia trip, I'm not planning on shifting my attention back to Web Helper Browser for any longer, my focus still has to be Oriador, but I feel much happier about where Web Helper Browser is today than where it was when I left it last time [We're trying to decide what direction to take the product in, and Neil is taking over development responsibilites. I think there might be room for the browser as part of a more complete knowledge base solution, it was originally built around a server database idea, but only time will tell].

Back to the latest update, to activate the new beta options, you need to go to the Tools -> Browser Options menu, and click Enable Recommended Beta Options. I think the best way to see it in action is to use the Browser Automation feature, go to the first page of a series of web pages, a tutorial or manual is good, email is another option. Right click on the "Next" link on the page, and select Follow Links like this from the menu. From the dialog, choose one of the Save to files options, pick a filename, and check the Save Images box. The browser will work it's way through all the web pages in the series, either consolidating them into a single html file, or creating a series of files with an index, and saving the images in a subfolder.

Okay, now back to Oriador.

Let me try this one again

As I said in yesterday's post, I've been working on Web Helper Browser again this week. I seem to have covered everything I wanted to cover, so I've uploaded a new version. More on this tomorrow.

Best. Site. Ever.

I just found Pandora via Seth's Blog. It plays music, and it's awesome.

You type the name of an artist or a song, and it just plays stuff it thinks you will like. It bases it on things like tonal comparisons and vocal types, but the important thing is that it works like a dream, it's simple, painless and free.

Check it out... you won't be disappointed.