Web Development Blog

I haven’t blogged for the past week and for good reason…my wife had our third kid on Thursday the 17th and I pretty much didn’t turn on the computer for 10 days. Olivia was born at 7:56am, the same time as our son was born.

For those of you that don’t know, babies are really cool, especially when it comes around the third time. Unlike the first time where I pretty much freaked out for nine+ months, this time felt really natural and fun. And when you’re not freaking out, you can really take time to enjoy the new baby. It’s fun when you are prepared for it Honestly I never really pictured myself as a dad when I was growing up (I thought I was going to be an Artist!), but it has turned out to be the second most enjoyable thing in my life (second to being married to my wife).

So while we were enjoying our new baby, our van was hit in the parking garage of the hospital. No note, no report, nothing. I couldn’t believe it. Basically what happened is someone scraped the paint off the bumper and put a pretty good dent in the side panel near the rear light. I talked to the hospital security and they said that since it was a hit and run they had to call the police. So then I got to wait for 40 minutes for them to show up and basically tell me it’s bad luck. I wanted to ask the officer if they had the Lincoln CSI Unit on the case, but I pretty much knew the answer was no.

Once we got home I took the next week off for vacation to help my wife with the new baby and our 2 other kids. It was nice to get away from work and just be at home (I work at home so that pretty much means no computer).

We purchased a new camera, an Olympus Stylus 840, for this occasion because our old camera, a Kodak, had terrible red eye when taking pics. I really like the new Olympus, it’s a great camera. Our old camera used an SD card, while the new one uses XD. I thought I was a-ok since my card reader accepts both, but when I put the XD card full of photos of our new baby girl into the reader, it wouldn’t read it. When I placed it back into the camera it said there were no pictures!! I scrambled to find the usb cable and plugged that into the camera and computer. It was able to load that way, but over half of our pictures were gone! I about put my fist through the wall, but since I did that a few months ago I went outside and hit my car a few times (it’s good to get your anger out, right?). Well, thanks to my wife calming me down and , I googled for some way to get the photos back and found PhotoRec. It worked, thank you Jesus (and Christophe Grenier)!!

That pretty much wraps up all of the excitement for us this past week. I’m slowly getting back to the grindstone..

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I signed up for Google’s new Ad Manager about a month ago and received my invitation to join the program last week. I finally got around to playing with it tonight and have to say that I’m pretty impressed. All of the ads on this site are now set up with Ad Manager and it uses less javascript code to do it!

I have to admit that I’m fairly retarded when it comes to putting ads on my site and when I tried OpenAds (now OpenX) a few months back, I was thoroughly confused by how it was set up. I got the thing to work, but I really didn’t get how it worked if you know what I mean. Google Ad Manager really makes the complicated process of placing and selling ads on your site much easier. Obviously, you don’t have to install any software since it is hosted by them, and all that is required is the ability to follow directions and cut and paste (perfect for my bad ass ad skillz).

I really like the tutorials and walk-throughs they have integrated into the interface. When you start, it literally walks you through creating your first Ad Spot, Placement, and javascript code. Really nice work on the part of the team that created this. It’s so easy to use that I think Shoemoney is right when he said, ‘The bottom line is that they are going to destroy OpenX and everyone like it with this product.’ It’s the perfect solution for someone like me that doesn’t have the time to run my own ad server, but I still want the ability to display Adsense and sell ad space at the same time.

I haven’t gotten into figuring out how to sell ad space yet, but I’m sure there is a tutorial for that as well. I don’t even know if there is some kind of marketplace set up for that, although it seems like there is since you can opt to allow advertisers to see your placements. That is the next thing I want to look into!

So is it worth it? Yeah, I think it is. I now have one interface to manage Adsense and have the possibility of easily selling that same ad space to other publishers. Once I figure more of this out I’ll post my thoughts again, but right now I’d say that this is the perfect tool for people who need a no hassle ad manager.

To sign up for Ad Manager you have to request an invitation.

If you have signed up for Ad Manager, I’d like to know what your thoughts are…

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I saw on twitter that doshdosh has a wordpress.com account so I thought it would be fun to sign up for one just to see what it is like. I’ve always come at WP from the self hosted side of things and thought that the wordpress.com version would suck. I was pleasantly surprised that it does not suck. You can do pretty much anything you can do on a self install except have your own theme (looks to me like you can pay to have your own css). There are lots of things that you can upgrade (ie pay for), and that is how they make money…that was always a mystery to me before.

DEVTRENCH’s Wordpress Dominion

I still wouldn’t recommend blogging at a free host/blog tool, but at the very least you can use your account to get some links, I guess.

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