Category: Technical Discussions

December 7, 2005 / Technical Discussions

Making Adsense Ads relevant on a blog

I received this email today from a blogspot user

Sarah, I’m hoping you have advice for me about my Blog. On my “homepage” Business & Technology Reinvention the adsense ads have low relevance to the content on the page. But when I open an individual post the adsense relevance is excellent (for example Winning Against Big R&D Spenders)

Given that most of my traffic comes to my home page I’m concerned that the low relevance ads dilute the focus of my Blog. Do you have any advice or suggestions to improve?

David

Google, via it’s MediaPartners bot and Googlebot, are very effective at reading a page, nutting out the essence of it and returning the correct ads.

They seem to have a blindspot, though, when it comes to blogs which use Blogger or Blogspot blogs – as these seem to attract more than their fair share of ads for other blogging systems.

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December 1, 2005 / Technical Discussions

Is Open Source Hindering the Development of Commercial Software?

November 28, 2005 / Technical Discussions

Bash, KSH and Perl

I’ve been coding PHP for +5 years now, and it’s great. But from time to time you have to delve into other languages and systems and “get stuff done”.

This post is going to list the resources I’ve found most useful – as a guide for others and as a bookmark collection for myself.

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November 16, 2005 / PHP & Web Development

Google gets Analytical

If you’ve read this blog before you’ll know that I’ve just launched RealState and am building up the functionality. It’s early days, and the domain is sandboxed so I’m not terribly anxious about how much traffic it gets – not yet anyway!

But I was thinking that I should put WebAnalyse onto it so that I have some tracking and I stumbled over another blog talking about Google Analytics. I shuddered at the thought of Google getting into the hitcounter game, it seemed like such a backward step. And I usually like to control my data but Google is trusted, surely they won’t shut up shop and leave me statistics-less?

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November 16, 2005 / Technical Discussions

Windows Tip: Turn off automatic folders search

I help support an old application for a large multinational company. It’s having issues and we’re working hard to work out how to make it’s life easier. While reviewing some of the issues Windows might be having on the desktop we discovered that the standard install (aka “build”) had “Automatically search for network folders and printers” turned on.

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November 15, 2005 / Technical Discussions

Skaffe.com melts down?

November 11, 2005 / PHP & Web Development

Rollyo delivers a new web search

Rollyo have released a workable form of their search tool. I found it first looking for a custom search engine and their tool is one step in the right direction. It’s really only good for having a search between grouped sites, or between friends (with a limit of 25 sites per rollyo group) – but it’s a bit of fun. Here’s mine:

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