tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13236250215449198212009-07-12T18:15:32.881-05:00Musings from the mind of a long-time web entrepreneur in no particular order and for no particular reason.dB Mastershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05066942948999554445noreply@blogger.comBlogger322125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1323625021544919821.post-38307669925060205782009-07-10T12:08:00.002-05:002009-07-10T12:15:23.900-05:00

There has, over the last couple years, been an incredible amount of scam web sites offering people everything from AdSense tips, prebuilt "AdSense optimized" web sites and other various tools promising to start pulling in thousands of dollars a month for doing nothing. These have gone by various names, such as The Google Money Tree, The Google Money Machine, and various other names.many of these

dB Mastershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05066942948999554445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1323625021544919821.post-14134472983591377622009-07-09T09:17:00.007-05:002009-07-09T18:07:47.311-05:00

A little over a week ago I decided, after getting a really cool stainless steel water bottle in the mail from Microsoft, to try their ad system again. I would very much like to see Google AdSense have some sort of competition in the marketplace, so I would really like to see it work. I vowed rto give it a month of my time, and run it as a direct A/B test against AdSense.I have to break my vow in

dB Mastershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05066942948999554445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1323625021544919821.post-11993214672399065612009-07-07T16:51:00.004-05:002009-07-09T09:10:57.711-05:00

I have been very interested the last few months in geolocation for target advertising, visitor identification and the like. I have found it's very easy to get your own database of IP ranges associated with countries of origin with free tools like IP2Nation and other such things. The harder part, it seems, is to get down more granular than that. Those databases start getting very large and costing

dB Mastershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05066942948999554445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1323625021544919821.post-18754023186302076962009-06-30T15:59:00.002-05:002009-06-30T16:08:43.580-05:00

If for no other reason other than boredom, I decided to give Microsoft's advertisment publishing system a try on a real web site. OK, well, boredom and the fact they sent me a real cool stainless steel water bottle the other day.I had previously tried it on a lower traffic site and had terrible results. No money, few ads and generally blown off by the support team. I figured Id' give it a good

dB Mastershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05066942948999554445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1323625021544919821.post-90040907724714791252009-06-06T14:33:00.004-05:002009-06-06T18:40:00.251-05:00

This topic has come near and dear to me since April Fools Day. it was that day in which I got layed off from my position at a small company, which I knew was a risk in when I took it, but a worth while risk that didn't pan out.In previous years I consulted for a long time, with no problems. I never had more than a few days go by between gigs. Today is a different economy, jobs are fewer and

dB Mastershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05066942948999554445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1323625021544919821.post-21224509488356764062009-05-28T17:16:00.002-05:002009-05-28T17:27:59.007-05:00

It seems that the internet is being filled with JavaScript libraries that are freely usable that can make creating advanced, interactive user interfaces quite easy for even a moderately knowledge web developer.Over the last few weeks I have been working a lot with Yahoo YUI and have had a lot of fun and success. The YUI, at the time of this writing) is in version 2.7 with version 3 in beta. The

dB Mastershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05066942948999554445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1323625021544919821.post-31060887771987243912009-05-22T09:12:00.003-05:002009-05-22T09:19:49.588-05:00

One thing that has always annoyed me is the date formats which are considered readable, or often not the format a database understands. In the United States our commonly used date format is MM-DD-YYYY though, when putting it into a MySQL database DATE field, it wants YYYY-MM-DD.Some databases recognize different common formats and add them properly anyway, whther it's using dashes or slashes

dB Mastershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05066942948999554445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1323625021544919821.post-28103082154089047432009-05-02T12:57:00.003-05:002009-05-02T13:09:27.833-05:00

I have been using InfoLinks as my in text advertising prodvider for over a month now, well long enough to get a good look at the system, the revenue, time for the "newness" of it on my site to wear off and watch it start performing as it normally would.I have to say, moving from Kontera to InfoLinks has been one of the best things I have seen in the advertising business in a while. With the

dB Mastershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05066942948999554445noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1323625021544919821.post-1384112981388076102009-05-01T18:39:00.004-05:002009-05-02T05:52:40.907-05:00

A friend recently introduced me to a great Firefox add on; FireFTP. FireFTP is an FTP application that can do most anything a common FTP app can do within a tab of FireFox.I use Aptana for my web development, I was under some time pressure on a project and was whining to a friend about some bugginess I was having with Aptana's FTP/Syncing functions and didn't have time to troubleshoot or fix them

dB Mastershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05066942948999554445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1323625021544919821.post-66031270333861903682009-04-05T13:03:00.003-05:002009-04-05T13:09:48.392-05:00

I was just cleaning up some shelves and drawers in my former office in the basement and found myself packing up a bunch of books for GoodWill donations or some such thing. Many of these books I am given by publishers for review other promotional reasons, some I have bought, none, however, gets used that often. Google works better, and faster, to get me the answers that I need.There are some

dB Mastershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05066942948999554445noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1323625021544919821.post-33178307636049979312009-04-04T18:00:00.003-05:002009-04-05T11:43:21.970-05:00

I just posted an article about me switching my in-text advertising from Kontera to InfoLinks. After quiet a few days, I have to say, InfoLinks is outperforming Kontera by over double in payout. The click through, with the exact same appearance, has double the eCPM and over double the CTR.The popup is much more dynamic and attractive with InfoLinks. I can't say that is the reason the payout is

dB Mastershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05066942948999554445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1323625021544919821.post-35975564682531243182009-03-27T11:46:00.002-05:002009-03-27T11:56:30.752-05:00

I was approached the other day by somebody from InfoLinks, asking me if I was interested in running in text ads on my site. Since I didn't know exactly who they are, assuming they were an advertiser, I replied saying they'd have to go buy ads through Kontera as they ran my in text ads.She then explained they would like me to try theirs and replace Kontera, I did some searching and it appears that

dB Mastershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05066942948999554445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1323625021544919821.post-79122886406248975542009-03-19T08:18:00.005-05:002009-03-19T08:30:04.844-05:00

After months and months of effort I am finally giving up on Clickbank for good. I really, really wanted my project to work, but when the products and related ads simply don't inspire confidence, and Clickbank themselves offers very little in terms of tools to make the most of their ads, it is hard to get anything done.I went so far as to build my own application to manage the database of ads, and

dB Mastershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05066942948999554445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1323625021544919821.post-47633955945147987462009-03-18T08:02:00.003-05:002009-03-18T08:09:36.528-05:00

WordPress seems to be a lightning rod for hacking lately.For information on the latest attacks on this very popular script, check out this article at RedFerret and also get some tools to help you secure your install.This is why I encourage custom apps in many cases. While not everybody has the skills to build one, most blogs could get by with very simple tools and things as complex as WordPress

dB Mastershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05066942948999554445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1323625021544919821.post-30229833258874907812009-03-11T17:45:00.007-05:002009-03-11T18:10:17.892-05:00

Today Google starts it's next level of data mining and personal privacy invasion. Sort of, but I am guessing this will raise some concerns with privacy advocates.Google is now targeting ads in a new way. Any web site that shows Google's AdSense advertisements now put a cookie on the visitors machine and track what other sites that person visits, as long as that site shows AdSense as well. So, in

dB Mastershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05066942948999554445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1323625021544919821.post-55739065194674522122009-03-10T08:39:00.002-05:002009-03-10T08:48:54.893-05:00

People threaten this all the time, we see it almost daily, for sure weekly. Some angry publisher that got disabled comes to AdSense support forums and starts screaming about contacting his lawyer. The poster usually get mocked by others for wanting to sue for a couple hundred dollars.Well, Aaron Greenspan, the founder of Think Computer Corp, decided to do just that, he sued Google and won. He

dB Mastershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05066942948999554445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1323625021544919821.post-34263407549945959022009-03-02T16:49:00.002-06:002009-03-02T17:02:11.514-06:00

As I stated in a previous blog, a couple weeks back, I was approved as part of the first open beta of Microsoft's adCenter Publisher network. I started uber-excited because I need an alternative to Google AdSense, or, at the very least, want one available.I logged in to the control panel and started looking through the tool and it was an impressive array of tools, from banner design rotators to

dB Mastershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05066942948999554445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1323625021544919821.post-91187527257946036992009-02-26T12:16:00.002-06:002009-02-26T12:29:01.585-06:00

On the support forum today I saw posts from so many people with some crazy issues and requesting Google goes to some crazy measures to accommodate them. I don't get this.One publisher says his country is in political turmoil, so he says, and because of that banks are closed and he said Google should consider getting debit card type things for publishers. ANother publisher said his site is small,

dB Mastershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05066942948999554445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1323625021544919821.post-76652228568799474862009-02-25T10:02:00.003-06:002009-02-25T10:10:01.888-06:00

I had an interesting issue today. A coworker had been for the last many weeks/months has been storing incoming faxes in Microsoft Exchange and viewing them as a .tif file that comes as an attachment. Today, suddenly, they stopped working, telling her she doesn't have permissions to create the file and all that.Naturally I assume it's a folder permission thing or some such, I talked to our telecom

dB Mastershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05066942948999554445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1323625021544919821.post-53423090899428561352009-02-25T08:00:00.005-06:002009-02-25T08:18:02.033-06:00

A few weeks back my wife joined Facebook in order to stay in contact with a specific group of people. Days after that I was often getting questions from her about how to do this or that. I really couldn't answer many of them, never having done Facebook.Well, after a few days I figured what the heck, I'll get a Facebook and learn how it works. It'd likely be in my best interest to learn a little

dB Mastershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05066942948999554445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1323625021544919821.post-71182273616635863282009-02-19T08:19:00.003-06:002009-02-19T08:31:55.058-06:00

I am in the process of building a product catalog on a ASP.Net platform and had an interesting issue come up I have dealt with from time to time, but this is the first time in a .Net environment.When the visitor selects all the options of the product they want (size, color, etc) the catalog does a quick inventory check, if it turns out there is inventory in stock it then displays a text field to

dB Mastershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05066942948999554445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1323625021544919821.post-88788184598771016192009-02-15T10:58:00.007-06:002009-02-17T09:24:59.592-06:00

Those of us that frequently help in the AdSense forums are constantly answering the same questions over and over and over again. I plan to use this post to address the most frequent, and ignorant, as I see it.No, AdSense is not a scam.There are a lot of scammers with programs that associate themselves with AdSense, but Google does not endorse any of these programs themselves, and you see them

dB Mastershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05066942948999554445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1323625021544919821.post-29015145895615785212009-02-15T06:38:00.002-06:002009-02-15T09:15:57.761-06:00

I have always been a fan of affiliate advertising, and it seems most any medium or large online e-tailer has some sort of affiliate program available. Heck, even some of the smallest ones do. With that type of situation almost any web site that is really about anything in particular (as opposed to random blogs or personal homepages) can find something related to their content to sell for

dB Mastershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05066942948999554445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1323625021544919821.post-19448325887013195022009-02-14T06:23:00.006-06:002009-02-14T11:27:44.275-06:00

I was recently accepted into the beta of Microsoft's adCenter Publisher program and have been playing around a bit and found some very promising tools available that I have long wished Google AdSense would implement.I haven't actually got to display an ad yet on any web site, but for a good reason; while I was accepted into the program, each and every domain a publisher wants to use must get

dB Mastershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05066942948999554445noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1323625021544919821.post-54343743935742251632009-02-12T05:54:00.002-06:002009-02-12T06:12:35.698-06:00

In trying to help people new to the advertising game, I notice a trend in thinking, and, I can say, I had this type of thinking myself at one point. The truth is, more ads on a web site does not necessarily equal more revenue. This is most especially true if they are all piled at the top or bottom.I go to people's blogs and web sites to check them out on support forums and whatnot, and am amazed

dB Mastershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05066942948999554445noreply@blogger.com0