Web Development Blog

That’s right, Adsense sucks — at least it does on this blog anyway. I’m sure that others are doing very well with it, but on this blog, the ads are not targeted very well, and no one clicks on them. I’m thinking that the readers of this blog are like me and are just to savvy to click on Google Adsense ads.

I’ve been controlling my ads with OpenAds for the past 3 weeks and its been very enlightening to see the stats. The stats say that the Text Link Ads ad gets clicked on about 1/3 to 1/4 of the time that it is shown, while the Adsense ad gets clicked on less than 1% of the time. This says a lot about the readers of this blog, like they are interested in how to make money online, or text links, or are web developers who, like me want to get links to their sites. I also think it speaks to the relevance of Adsense on the blog. I’ve been trying for 3 months to get more relevant ads on this site and have tried everything I know how to do, but I still get ads about trenching and other things that I know wouldn’t interest anyone coming here. This annoys the crap out of me, and since I’m pretty sure it annoys the crap out of you too, there won’t be any more Adsense ads on the site. In fact, I’m even removing them from all older posts as well. Its just not worth the effort at this point, and I really only want to display stuff that people aren’t annoyed by.

I came to this conclusion after listening to the podcast on the last post. I hear Shoemoney say over and over again not to monetize a site until you get good traffic, and that ads in body content are just bad. I’m starting to believe more and more what he is saying and he’s inspired me to try to connect with my readers (you) more instead of annoying them to death. If you haven’t listened to that podcast yet, I highly recommend it. Maybe it will inspire you to do something positive on your blog!

So, is this the end of monetizing this blog? Sorry, no. I’ve been using this blog as a platform to bring web development ideas that work for almost four months now, and have also been using it to train myself in how to increase traffic to a site as well as how to monetize a site. And while this is not a make money online blog, I think it will always be an experiment in monetizing a website, and this change reflects that experimentation. In fact, there may be a point in time that Adsense does work for this site, but until that time arrives…no more Adsense.

P.S. Other changes going on: I’ve been placing an image in every post that is a graphical representation about what I’m posting about. I was afraid to make this image the same size as the adsense ad because I thought that would look bad, but now that there is no adsense, these images will be smaller now (250×250). Yeah!

And thanks to Internet Babel for letting us know that the rest of the videos for the Shoemoney/John Reese interview are up.

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If you haven’t seen/heard this interview yet, you have to check it out. This is definitely the best Shoemoney interview out there and possibly the best interview about making money online that I’ve ever heard. It’s really making me do some deep thinking about what my goals for this site are and if I should even be trying to use adsense on this site. Below is the first video on youtube, the others are here. InternetBabel only has 7/10 videos up so if someone knows where to get the last parts, please leave a comment.

If you want to check out a great blog, since finding this video I’ve been reading internetbabel.com. Check it out, here’s a post about John Reese if you don’t know who that is (ever heard of BlogRush???). This is a good example of how youtube can help bring awareness to your blog.

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I’ve been creating a php application that runs from the command line and I have a few tips that I’ve learned from my adventures.

• If you’ve installed php before, and reinstall it, make sure what version of php you are using from the command line by checking out your environment variables in windows. This happened to me today when I realized that I was actually using a version of PHP that I installed a year ago (and forgot about), and not the new WAMP version I just installed.
• Make sure you are using the right php.ini file. If you are using WAMP, then the php.ini file that apache uses is in the apache /bin folder (not the php.ini in wamp/php). The php cli will use the first php.ini it can find in the windows path environment variable. In my case, this was an old version in another php directory I set up. Once I deleted that, it used the version in the /wamp/php directory.
• You can use mail() on windows in the CLI -to set this up use the fake sendmail for windows hack. Make sure you set the php.ini settings both the php.ini that apache uses and the php.ini that the CLI uses (if they are different).
• Running applications from the CLI is fun because there is no maximum execution time. Just think of the possibilities. I’m writing a script that parses RSS feeds and searches for keywords in the titles. I can parse 1000 rss feeds in about 10 minutes using Magpie RSS. I’ll post this script if anyone is interested.

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