ChrisP Ramblings

Forum Spam From lowcostlinks.com

Chrispcritters — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 04:52:07 +0000

Yikes, been seeing a TON of attempted forum spam from email addresses at lowcostlinks.com…

Working a site overhaul

Chrispcritters — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 21:31:42 +0000

Life has been really busy. Currently working on an overhaul to whatismyipaddress.com that should be launched to the public in the next few weeks.

We’re Parents!

Chrispcritters — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 21:24:59 +0000

OK, not really. We’ve been planning on getting a puppy and have been working with a Schnauzer breeder in Texas. On Wednesday we were notified that the mother had her litter of 4 boys and 4 girls. We plan on naming the dog Bailey. We’re started a blog on his behalf: Bailey Belly. Bailey will be talking about his life in the 1st person. He’ll be with the breeder for about 8 weeks before he comes to live with us. Chances are that Bailey will become my company’s mascot and just might find his way onto all our web properties over time… We’ll see…

Continued DB Issues

Chrispcritters — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 18:24:36 +0000

Still having sporadic DB issues. For some reason mysql connections are hanging while “sending data”. Seems to happen for about 2-3 minutes before the connections reset and everything is fine. Need to spend some time trying to diagnose the issue. I think for the time being I’ll do everything possible to limit the number of db connections being generated by the most trafficked pages on the site and see if that help mitigate the issue.

iVampires Clan Codes

Chrispcritters — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 21:35:18 +0000

So, iMob Online for iPhone and iPod Touch seems to have been very popular. They’ve released iVampires now. It’s a MMORG. Basically the same as iMob Online but with a vampire theme. Out of curiosity I’ve quickly thrown together iVampire Codes to see how many people go to these types of sites.

No, don’t comment here — vist www.ivampire-codes.com

Minimum CPM to Justify Advertising?

Chrispcritters — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 00:37:41 +0000

With the decline in the worldwide economy I’ve seen a nasty decline in advertising revenue across the sites that I manage. Many years ago a pulled any ads in new windows (popup, pop unders, etc) because too many users found them too annoying. While those ads format are profitable advertising in general needs to be balanced with user experience.

Where I’m at now is trying to determine what the minimum amount of revenue an ad needs to generate per 1,00o impressions (otherwise know as CPM). While I won’t specifically discuss the CPM here I am willing to discuss the concept.

How much does a reducing in ads on a site increase the visitors afinity for that site? How many fewer ad placements would make the user link to the website, talk about it, or a least bookmark it?

There is another philosphy. Rather than look at each ad placement and it’s CPM, look at the page as a whole. Many sites seem to have done this an when the page CPM gets below a certain amount they add another placement. Looking at a few site here… CNN – 3 ads on an article (I’ve seen more in the past), Yahoo – 3 (more if you include Yahoo Personals, Real Estate), LA Times – 5, Newsweek – 7. I’ve always been annoyed when ad space on a page is more than the article I’m reading.

For the time being I think it’s worth isolating every ad location, demographic, and page, then figure out of there is a better ad that can be located there. I belive that’s good for a number of reasons: ONE – distributes revenue sources, reduces dependency on one advertiser (or network), TWO – increases revenue without increasing ad palcements, THREE – increases ad diversity so hopefully decreases ad blindness, FOUR – increases site exposure to more ad networks or advertisers, possibly increasing competition for future ad space.

In thinking what is best for the visitor fewer, less intrusive, more on topic ads would seem to be the goal.

What do you think?

DB Issues

Chrispcritters — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 21:36:13 +0000

On the whatismyipaddress.com website I’ve got a rolling history of IP address, user-agent, date, and a flag for each visit. Initially user-agent was stored in the table as a fairly long string. After several hundred thousand records I notice significant db performance delays. Since I didn’t really need to know what the user-agent was I started to store a 32-byte hash of the user-agent. This helped till the table exceeded 1.5 million records. Currently the IP address is stored as VARCHAR(15). I’m thinking of switching to storing the ip2long (IP as decimal) as an unsigned INT to see if that makes things faster. MySQL should be able to index an int better than 15 bytes of text.

MacBook Migration Timezone Issue

Chrispcritters — Sun, 07 Dec 2008 00:24:09 +0000

I had an odd issue after migrating from my old 12″ PowerBook to my new MacBook. The timzeone kept defaulting back to GMT. Turns out there was an issue of a directory being locked.

etc/localtime

Renaming the directory per http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=8250795 seems to have resolved the issue.

Issues with OpenX Ad Server

Chrispcritters — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 16:01:13 +0000

For quite a while I was using the old PHPAdsNew ad serving platform. Recently I saw that there was an upgrade to OpenX. I like to be on top of security upgrades so I bit the bullet and upgraded. I had a number of issues with the upgrade and ultimately chose to just wipe everything and start from scratch. After having run the platform for something like to months I’m sad to say that the new product is more steps back than forward. Two of the main issues I have with the platform. (which others have reported)

Runs in GMT time zone and jacks up the time zone for my CMS when run in local mode.
Cannot reset stats.

Unfortunately I’m now in the market for a new ad server platform. I’d like to do a local installation so there is less javascript on my pages, less interaction with a third party, etc. One of the other solutions I’ve looked into, but does not have a intuitive interface, is the Google AdManager platform. Anyone have other suggestions?

The Google Fridge Arrives

Chrispcritters — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 19:12:40 +0000

It was funny. Wednesday afternoon I was reading about someone on Webmaster World who was wondering if they were going to get the “Google Gift” this year.

The Google AdWords Cooler Thinking Mini Fridge

As my wife and I were preparing to have some friends come over for dinner there was a knock at the door. Low and behold… The “Google Gift” had arrived. I wasn’t expecting it.

It came with an envelope with a single sheet of paper certifying that I had “generated 1,000,000 leads using Google AdWords”. When I checked out my AdWords account it appears that I’ve got one campaign that has seen about 1.1 million clicks since I started it.

It’s a nice little token of the efforts that I’ve taken to promote one of my sites. Not sure what I’m going to do with the fridge at the moment. I’m sure I’ll think of something. Suggestions anyone?