Web Development Blog

I just finished watching the first episode of TAC and I think it is going to be a pretty interesting show. I live in Lincoln NE, where it is being filmed, so it is pretty cool to see my hometown as the backdrop for this show.

My first impressions were that I expected a little bit more professional production (the opening credits were really bad), but overall the people involved and challenges they are facing are very interesting to me. There were no affiliate marketing secrets revealed in this first episode, and I guess time will tell if it holds true that some will be. I think a major factor in this show will be the fact that a new show will air every day. The players seemed very reluctant to talk knowing that that their competitors might know their plans the very next day.

So we’ll see how it goes, I know I’m looking forward to tomorrow at 1:00

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Category: Announcements | Comment Here » | 443 views | Posted: July 2nd 2008 01:20 am

Tonight was the Google Ad Manager Nebraska People Making Money Online meeting presented by Tigh and Jeremy at the new SMG offices here in Lincoln. It ended up being the best meeting that I’ve been to yet because only 5 of us were there (Jeremy, Tigh, Browie, some dude, and me)…it made for a nice small group. I’m not sure if people just couldn’t make it or if they couldn’t find Jeremy’s new digs. I have to admit, it is pretty hard to find if you don’t already know where it is.

Anyway, I learned the ins and outs of how to manage ad campaigns with Google Ad Manager. Really though, the interesting thing was learning how Jeremy and Tigh manage ads for shoemoney.com. They take a simple approach to ad management and offer different ad slots for 30 or 90 days for a flat fee. IMO, CPM or CPC is just too complex for a small operation to manage so it really makes sense for bloggers and small companies to manage their ads this way. The only thing that I really didn’t know how to do yet was to rotate ads in a group you just add the ad slots to the same placement. You could use this technique to rotate different adsense variations or show different ads in the same slot (just add multiple ads to the same slot).

The Ad Manager presentation was great but the best part of the meeting for me when it was was over and we just talked about a bunch of stuff for the next hour or so. We talked about Jeremy’s new project, fighters.com, his old project nextpimp.com and a lot of stuff he’s done between the two. I’m not going to share in detail what I learned because frankly my head still spinning a bit from all of it. I guess the biggest thing I learned was that traffic drives $$$ so if you are in development for the cash you’d better pick something that is going to generate a lot of traffic. That’s not really any kind of secret but it just really hit home for me tonight.

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Category: General | Comment Here (1) » | 542 views | Posted: June 27th 2008 01:03 am

After upgrading to Wordpress 2.5.x one of my favorite features has to be the automatic plugin updating. But today, one DEVTRENCH reader alerted me that a certain download wasn’t working. Well, as it turns out, none of the downloads that use the wp-DownloadMonitor plugin were working. Seems like the new automatic upgrading system changes the way that plugins can be made and after doing the auto upgrade of this plugin it ERASES your old download files with no warning! Of course if you read the README file for wp-DownloadMonitor it says it all in there, but you don’t exactly get that information when clicking on upgrade in the Wordpress interface.

From the README file:

= Upgrade instructions from v2.0.6 =

Due to the new wordpress update system, the upload directory can no longer be within the plugin folder; wordpress deletes it. Therefore the plugin directory is now the uploads folder in the wp-content folder. ENSURE YOU MOVE DOWNLOADS HERE BEFORE UPGRADING! The plugin will convert the urls to the new directory on activation.

This is stupid, and I was lucky, because I did a backup before upgrading to WP 2.5.1. And BTW, it does not convert the urls - I had to do that manually in the database.

So, I think I’ll be a little more careful about using the automatic plugin updates from now on and be doing a backup first.

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Category: General | Comment Here (2) » | 649 views | Posted: June 4th 2008 08:38 am