DEVTRENCH: Web Development from the Front Lines

Ever get the feeling that an operating system just has it out for you? Every time I use a mac I just think that the thing is trying to butt heads with me. Macs also have a tendency to burn up around me. It’s true, in the past month, 3 mac laptops at work have fried. Scary stuff.

Today I was trying to install MODx on a mac OS X server, and I just had a hell of a time getting it to work. In fact, it still doesn’t work. I scoured the Mac friendly MODx forums for a hint of anyone else with issues but all I could find were posts about how people switched to Macs and just love them. Puke.

Apparently, no one else has server issues on a Mac like I do, and they are really bad ones. Here are the issues I encountered

MODx related:

• Files don’t get included
• Some AJAX stuff is just broken because data is returned with extra spaces at the front of it???
• Caching doesn’t work
• Errors in the document parser class

Server Setup Related:

• Apache is just all different than in a LAMP setup so I spent quite a while just trying to find things like httpd.conf
• PHP was set up to log errors, but hell if I know where it was logging them to (log_errors was set to on, but error_log was set to nothing). I set the error_log to a location, and created the file, but it took me a while to figure out that the file needed to be in the same group as apache so that it could write to it
• MySQL had socket connection errors, this is because apple decided to change the default location of mysql.sock from /var/mysql/ to /private/tmp/. Idiots.

I guess that is my biggest problem with the way the OS is set up on a Mac. Its like Linux, but they’ve changed the location of everything just enough to piss you off. This is one of the reasons why I switched to a PC when OS X first came out. I’d been a die hard Mac user for about 10 years, but it was just so frustrating to try to get used to the way the screwed up Linux. That and the whole File Browser, which just doesn’t jive with me. And the way they smell. Yuck.

Anyway, I probably should have prefaced this post with, I didn’t set up this server myself, so I’m dealing with someone else’s first try. And it’s cool if you like macs, I have tons of friends who are mac users, but that doesn’t mean that Macs don’t hate me, and that I don’t hate them.

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.

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.