A Few Site Updates

These posts are mainly for me to help keep track of changes to the site and in some cases to share techniques I’ve used to create and manage the site. Similar entries may be found in my blogging category archives.

Tonight’s upgrade includes some minor changes and one fairly major change.

I changed the default color scheme back to the almost pure white scheme; given the weather here it just seemed appropriate. I did add a splash of color via the use of a small background image, courtesy of squidfingers. Besides that, I added back the border around the date element. I don’t recall removing it on purpose, and do think it helps break up the page. Given that I rarely post more than once a day, it also serves somewhat as a post separator.

And the other thing? Oh, I signed up for, and was accepted into, Google’s AdSense program. Yes, this means I can plaster the site with ads. No, I’m not going to do that.

I did it for a couple of reasons. One, just because I wanted to see if this site would be accepted into the program and two, because I’m curious about this technology and wanted some hands-on experience. I’m alread seeing some interesting results.

I decided to place the first ads on the permanent entry page that exists for every post on this site. AdSense tries to target the ads for the reader based on the content of the page being viewed, and so by placing the ads on specific content pages, there’s a good chance of getting relevant ads. So far, on some travel and cooking pages the matches have been quite related to the posting. On other pages it seems the default ad is for blogging products. Yes, my page views are up a bit as I’ve been clicking around just to see what ads are served with what articles.

The other part of the experiment is to see if this even makes any sense. I don’t get that much traffic, so this may be just a learning experience. Speaking of, the setup was trivial, with a good variety of ad sizes and colors to choose from. I chose the least intrusive ad I could find, and place it after the body of a posting and before any comments. Seems reasonable; I suspect most folks will be like me and not even see the ads after a while as the mind just learns to filter stuff like that.

The other part of my thinking is that most of my traffic is from google, and to specific content pages. Why not provide a potentially relevant ad to someone who’s already looking for info on a specific topic? That’s why I chose the permanent individual archives first. I may add an ad to the frontpage, but I’m not sure about that yet. My side-panels are already quite full, thank you, and I’m not about to put up a large banner across the top of the page. My feelings about the category and date archives is somewhere in-between. For now the permalink ads are active and we’ll see where it goes from here.