I just love how polite the blog comment spammers are these days. All the comment spam I get starts of with phrases like:

Very interesting! I liked it!
i like your blog. it is a very interesting one.
You have some really cool stuff at your site. I’m sure gonna come back here.
you have a very talented and skilled writting. i had a great time reading your comments.
Excellent! I enjoyed reading your material.
I really am impressed by your site. Very original
Nice post. I’ll return.
A very friendly site. Have a nice day!
Your website is wonderfull. I’ll come visit again.
Great blog. It’s nice to be here!
hi. just letting you know that i enjoyed your site.
Two thumbs up!!!
Some friends told me about this site, and now i’m glad they told me about it.
I’m asking myself: How can it be that I’ve never ran through your site before? It’s a great one!

Then that leads into lines of complete gibberish:

to Roll Grass you should be very Lazy
White Boy is always Industrious Pair
Greedy, Memorizing, Greedy nothing comparative to Superb
when Cosmos Compute Circle Hope
Big Soldier becomes Industrious Cards in final
when Round Destroy Grass Kill
Loose Anticipate Steal – that is all that Chair is capable of

In fact, now that I am looking at all this spam at once it is very obvious to see the underlying template that is being used. Almost all of the spam I am getting follow this format (this is on my WordPress blogs, not here):

Author : (some random name)
E-mail : (some random email address that doesn’t look suscpicious)
URI : (some popular URI like www.theonion.com or www.usatoday.com)

Comment:
(personalized friendly greeting such as the above) (complete gibberish) (URL #1 they are pushing) (More complete gibberish) (URL #2 they are pushing)

It is quite likely that I am the last blogger on earth to notice this.

No related posts.

I’m sure everyone has that one blog that when they see a new entry in their aggregator they jump right to it. For me that blog is Waiter Rant.

Non-technical, but brilliantly written, the blog evokes memories both good and bad of my own time as a ranting Waiter.

Here is the full text from Waiter’s “introduction”:http://waiterrant.net/?p=7 to his blog from April, 2004:

bq(quote).. There are many books about waiting tables penned by frustrated authors and wannabe loser actors, so why should I add my tiny voice to the fray? Because all of these treatments are milquestoast pussywhipped stories written so as not to offend anyone. I read these books and I get a sneaking suspicion that the author is afraid he/she will be found out and lose their job. Inhibited bullshit. Fuck that.

I will remain anonymous so I can tell people what this job and working in the great American “service economy” is really like! All I will say is I am a waiter in a high end restaurant in the NYC area. The stories are true but some of the names have been changed to protect the innocent ( and my self form litigious customers!).

I can pretty much point to any of entries to show off his brilliance so I’ll just post to his last one, Treasure:

bq(quote).. The husband grabs the wine list out of his wife’s hand. “I’m very knowledgeable about Italian wine waiter,” he snorts, “We don’t need your help.”

“Very well sir,” I reply, struggling to keep my voice even, “I’ll come back when you’ve made a decision.”

The man studies the wine list for five minutes. He finally orders a bottle of our cheapest white, a Vernaccia, which retails for $10. We charge $24.

“An excellent choice sir,” I lie.

“I want it now,” the man snaps.

“Okey dokey asshole,” I think to myself.

After I take orders from two other tables, field several phone calls, and void an item for another server, I bring the man his wine. Nothing like anticipation to keep your customers riveted.

“Your Vernaccia sir,” I say, presenting the bottle.

Read the whole article, it’s hard to do it justice through a quote. Waiter captures dialog like few writers on the web. There must be a book deal on the horizon.

No related posts.

A couple of years ago Six Apart, makers of the blogging software Movable Type, “announced”:http://www.sixapart.com/about/news/2003/07/aboutcom_powere.html that “About.com”:http://www.about.com was using Movable Type to manage all of their sites. This was a huge deal at the time for the young company.

Today Matt Mullenweg “announced”:http://photomatt.net/2005/12/07/about-switching/ that About.com was switching over to WordPress. Ouch.

I’ve been a Movable Type user (and plugin developer) for 3 years and a WordPress user (not on here yet) for a few months and I can honestly say I like WordPress way more. It’s just so damn elegant.

No related posts.

I’ve officially sold my soul to the devil. I’m now a spam blogger.

Well, not really. At least I don’t think so – I guess you’ll have to tell me if I am. In my never ending quest to try out more weblog technology and to benefit from the fact I can host multiple domains on my Dreamhost account (ok and to try to make some money), I’ve setup (or more accurately started to setup, because I have a lot of work to do) blogs called “All Knives”:http://knives.itemblogs.com and “All Tools”:http://tools.itemblogs.com where I post daily on the two subjects.

I’m using WordPress for the sites and I must say I really, really like it. In fact at this point I dare say I like it better than Movable Type. It’s really slick.

So why can I write on these spam blogs (I really should stop calling them that) every day and I can barely write on here a few times a month? Well I’m actually writing a couple weeks worth of articles at a time and then post-dating them. WordPress handles that well except I’m still having trouble getting the pings to Pingomatic happening when I went.

So what am I writing about? Well, yesterday’s article was on the “Battle Axe of Gimli”:http://knives.itemblogs.com/2005/11/11/battle-axe-of-gimli/ but that’s a pretty bad example because there is really no original text on my part. That was I think the 10th article I had written in a row and I was getting tired! A better example would be the one about my “Swiss Army Knife”:http://knives.itemblogs.com/2005/11/04/swiss-army-cybertool-41-translucent-pocket-knife/ although reading it now I have to admit it’s pretty lame.

There really is no end to my shamelessness.

No related posts.

I’ve been using Technorati a lot lately. Things there have really improved since I wrote in Dissing Technorati that their “veneer was starting to crack.”

I was reminded of this today when reading Steve Rubel’s Ten Technorati Hacks article. Some good ideas there.

I’ve been trying to use Feedster as well but that’s pretty much useless. I wrote over two years ago “Unless Feedster stays true to its roots and reverts to focusing on blogs it will slowly become irrelevant.” And that’s really what has been happening.

Another useful article to read is how to incorporate Technorati Tags in your Movable Type blog.

Kudos to Technorati. Useful features and performance vastly improved.

No related posts.

Since the end of 2002 I’ve run this website from a machine in my basement. In the past year I’ve had outages due to a power failure that went beyond my UPS (of course while I was on vacation), a blown CPU fan, a blown motherboard and of course numerous Camcast outages.

For those reasons, and that we will be finishing our basement this winter, I needed to outsource the hosting of “johnsjottings.com”:http://www.johnsjottings.com which I have done now by switching to “Dreamhost”:http://www.dreamhost.com today.

I completed the cut over at 5:43 AM this morning. At 5:45 AM I left for a trip to Chicago. So, of course it wasn’t perfect and there will be some odd things for awhile, but all in all it seems ok. I think at this point the only issue is I still have to get some plugins installed.

I will say it is odd to not have a server running at home anymore. But I’ll get over it – performance is already noticeably improved and I like not having to worry about it anymore. I’m impressed with the power of MySQL and Perl that I could seamlessly move from a Windows machine to a Linux one without batting an eye. I did learn some things that might be valuable to others considering such a move and I’m hoping to write it up sometime soon.

Give me a week or so, if you notice anything odd after that let me know.

Thanks.

No related posts.

Do you know this man? The Motley Fool “said”:http://www.fool.com/news/commentary/2004/commentary04112401.htm “No one person represents the wretched excess of the Internet stock bubble” like him. He came to fame in 1998 when he put a $400 target price on “AMZN”:http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=amzn when it was trading at around $200 and only a couple of weeks later it broke through his price target. A bit later he was kicked off of Wall Street during a regulatory investigation, not admitting guilt but still paying out a huge fine. Or as he “describes”:http://slate.msn.com/id/2104656/sidebar/2104665/ it, “my Wall Street career was not uneventful.” That would be putting it mildly.

Well, it’s Henry Blodget and he has recently joined the blogging ranks, laying anchor at his blog Internet Outsider. Google seems to be his current topic of interest. Of course “his call”:http://slate.msn.com/id/2104656 on GOOG so far has not been so good, warning from the beginning that it was more like gambling than investing. It is possible he may get the last laugh there, but I doubt it.

Despite that, I say worth subscribing.

No related posts.

I haven’t been paying much attention to this web site this year, and as a consequence the revenue I am generating from it has declined significantly. Not that I was making much from it, as you’ll see below, but every little bit counts. I’ve been able to maintain a pagerank of 6/10 according to my page rank checker despite my lack of new content but I am not taking advantage of it as best I could. I did a redesign at the beginning of the year and made one fatal design decision that had the biggest impact on my revenue, other than not writing as much as I should. The image you see here is a heat map from Google which suggests best placement for Adsense ads. In my redesign I placed my Adsense ads in a vertical strip to the lower right of my content. As you can see from the heatmap that is the very worst place to put it!

I will be slowly moving away from that placement but in the meanwhile I have made a different change, adding an Amazon ad and an Adsense text link ad to the bottom of each article. The Amazon ad uses the keywords I have defined for the article (which the tags use as well). Got the idea from Joe who has implemented a similar solution but has made it more user friendly because he handpicks which books show. I don’t have the time for that, particularly since I wanted to get these out to some of my older articles where I generate good traffic, however I did try to make this less obtrusive for my loyal readers (rather than people coming via search, which is where I get most of my revenue anyway) by not including the ads in my syndication feeds.

Of course I implemented this using my tips from Using Adsense Channels in Movable Type – here are some more Adsense tips if you are interested.

Here is an accounting for the revenue this site has generated since I incorporated ads:

* – 2005 results estimated based on current daily averages.^

The Amazon revenue is from their Associates program. As I have mentioned before I am also selling stuff through their Marketplace program and my results so far there are $360.61 in sales in 2004 and $718.53 in sales in 2005, but of course I don’t consider that web site revenue. Still, if you are looking to make a little money on some of the books and software you have lying around Amazon is a much better way to sell it than eBay, in my opinion.

My goal for 2006 is to improve upon my 2004 numbers (I would like to dismiss 2005 as an aberration). I will achieve this goal by increased Amazon ads, improved placement of Adsense ads along with additional ads, and more good content. And hopefully I can do this in a way that is not bothersome for those of you who stop by here occasionally. As always, feedback welcomed.

No related posts.

My boss volunteered me to be a member of our new corporate blogging policy committee. First meeting is tomorrow. Yes there is a lawyer on the committee. Yes I am going to try to limit the legalese. I guess depending on the outcome of the policy I may be able to write more about my experiences with this. We’ll see.

As I “wrote”:http://www.johnsjottings.com/archives/2002/12/11/weblogs_work.html way back on December 11th, 2002, I started this weblog because I saw potential in the medium for use in business and I wanted to learn more about it. Almost three years later and I finally get to start putting a bit of that knowledge to work.

No related posts.

A few days ago Dave started to leak the rumor that something big was going on in the weblog world. Today it’s become official as announcements have started to come out about how web companies are coming together to address the serious problem of comment spam in weblogs.

The solution is support of the “rel=nofollow” tag to links added to comments on weblogs. The thinking is that any link that the owner of the site did not add themselves, i.e. in comments, should not be trusted and as such should not be included in calculating pagerank at Yahoo, Google, and other search engines.

Am I insane to think this is a really bad idea?

First of all, it isn’t going to solve anything. The spammers will still throw out their automated scripts hoping some shit sticks, and stick it will because not everyone is going to implement this.

Secondly, one of the reasons why weblogs do so well in Google is that many of us build relationship links through sites by adding constructive comments on related posts. This interlinking of sites through comments (good comments, mind you) is an appropriate way of judging the value of both the site the comment appears on and the site from which the commenter comes from.

The “rel=nofollow” tag solution is throwing the baby out with the bath water! Fix the damn problem instead.

Speaking of which I have gone from many, many spam a day to one or two a week just using a simple template change that the spammers still haven’t picked up on. Sure they will at some point but silence is so sweet for now. Use a page rank checker to see if this has impacted you.

[UPDATE] – I don’t usually agree with Andrew Orlowski but he nailed it with his comment on Russell’s post. I feel the same way. But to date I’m in the minority from what I’ve seen.

No related posts.

Technorati has released today a new feature called tags which allows one to further categorize the web. Mix Flickr and Del.icio.us tags with weblog tags and you get a Technorati Tag page, which looks like this which is the page for the tag technorati.

The basic premise is you tag your articles just like people tag pictures in Flickr or links in Del.icio.us. The best writeup I’ve seen of this new feature is at Corante.

I thought of two ways I might want to do this in my Movable Type implementation. The first was to leverage Brad Choate’s Key Values similarly to how I do for customizing AdSense channels. That would mean I would need to add a string like “tag=tagsubject” to the extended entry of my articles. The advantage is I would get a targeted tag. The disadvantage is it is more metadata to enter for each new entry and it wouldn’t account for the hundreds of older entries.

So since I am already entering keywords for each entry (which get used in my inline Google links) I decided to just use those for the tags. This way I don’t have to change my posting habits (other than to use better keywords) and each of my older entries will already have that metadata.

At the bottom of each of my entries is a list of Technorati tags, which are dynamically generated based off the keywords in the entry. Here is the code I used to build that list:

my $keywords = “<$MTEntryKeywords$>“;
my @split_keywords = split(/ /, $keywords);
my $split_keyword;
foreach $split_keyword (@split_keywords) {
print ‘‘.$split_keyword.’ | ‘;
}

Thanks to Ben Hammersley for the keyword parsing code. Obviously you need another Brad Choate plugin, PerlScript, to pull this off. Yes, I know I am a bit of a computer geek, but I can’t help myself, I love figuring out problems like this. You don’t have to be a geek to enable this for your site, it is pretty simple.

I agree with Corante – this is a big day for tagging.

[UPDATE] – I have overflow hidden in that code snippet so to see the truncated line simply highlight the code with your mouse and copy to your editor.

[UPDATE 2] – Took me awhile to notice I had the URL screwed up. I was wondering why my tagged pages were not appearing. Fixed.

No related posts.

One of these days I’ll actually do something with an idea before someone else does. With my redesign I’ve been going through some of my older posts making sure everything looks OK and I was re-introduced to a few things I had written that with the benefit of time looked pretty good.

In my 8th post, on Dec. 11th, 2002 (wow it’s been over two years already) I wrote:

bq(quote).. The second area where I see opportunity is in developing a quick and dirty project management control center where project updates are communicated to anyone who cares to visit. I have worked with a number of consulting firms on some major projects and none of them have added any value to me in terms of providing such a thing. What happens is they have the stock Word docs or Excel sheets with status reports and those get shipped around once a week and maybe even stored in a file system somewhere – but it’s nothing inspiring or particularly useful to me.

If you are a consultant and you are trying to show me why I pick you over someone else show me how you can quickly, cheaply and easily improve the project communication for yours or all of my other projects and I will give you my business.

On February 4th, 2004 “37signals”:http://www.37signals.com/ “launched”:http://www.37signals.com/svn/archives/000542.php a project management application called “Basecamp”:http://www.basecamphq.com/ which is pretty much exactly what I was calling for over a year earlier. It’s a beautifully designed site and my small testing using the free trial tells me they are really on the right track.

Damn, missed that one.

No related posts.

“Six Apart acquires Live Journal”:http://www.sixapart.com/press/weblogging_software_leader_six_apar.shtml in their next step to world domination. Dave “speculates”:http://archive.scripting.com/2005/01/06#ventureCapital101 on an IPO in the future. Well duh. Their VCs didn’t invest all that money without an exit strategy and the exit strategy that provides the 100 bagger they are looking for is an IPO. That’s 100 times their initial investment. Why do I say that? Because a VC is looking to make 10 times their money and the way they do it is to invest in 10 companies knowing 9 will implode and hoping one is a home run. Least I think that’s the way it works. Maybe “Brad Feld”:http://www.feld.com/blog/index.php can write something about that if he hasn’t already.

Why “Jay”:http://www.jayallen.org/journey/2005/01/six_apart_acquires_livejournal seems to be “annoyed”:http://www.blogherald.com/2005/01/06/sixapart-ipo-speculation-starts/#comment-10181 that Dave would say an IPO is in Six Apart’s future is beyond me. It’s obvious. Having been through an IPO with a company not that much bigger than Six Apart I’m jealous as hell.

Maybe those of us who helped float Six Apart by paying for those licenses could be rewarded with a handful of IPO shares.

No related posts.

This posting is a community experiment started by “Minding the Planet”:http://novaspivack.typepad.com/nova_spivacks_weblog/2004/08/a_sonar_ping_of.html to see how a meme represented by a blog posting spreads across blogspace, physical space and time. It will help to show how ideas travel across blogs in space and time and how blogs are connected. It may also help to show which blogs are most influential in the propagation of memes. The original posting for this experiment is located at: Minding the Planet; results and commentary will appear there in the future.

Please join the test by adding your blog (see instructions, below) and inviting your friends to participate � the more the better. The data from this test will be public and open; others may use it to visualize and study the connectedness of blogspace and the propagation of memes across blogs.

The GUID for this experiment is: as098398298250swg9e98929872525389t9987898tq98wteqtgaq6
2010920352598gawstw98qwrt189849813907azq4 (this GUID enables anyone to easily search Google for all results of this experiment). Anyone is free to analyze the data of this experiment. Please publicize your analysis of the data, and/or any comments by adding comments onto the original post at Minding the Planet; Note: it would be interesting to see a geographic map or a temporal animation, as well as a social network map of the propagation of this meme.

INSTRUCTIONS

To add your blog to this experiment, copy this entire posting to your blog, and fill out the info below, substituting your own information in your posting, where appropriate.

(Note: Replace the answers below with your own answers)

# I found this experiment at URL: “http://kalsey.com/blog/”:http://kalsey.com/blog/
# I found it via “Newsreader Software” or “Browsing or Searching the Web” or “An E-Mail Message”: Newsreader Software
# I posted this experiment at URL: http://www.johnsjottings.com
# I posted this on date (day, month, year): 01 August 2004
# I posted this at time (24 hour time): 23:00:00
# My posting location is (city, state, country): Woodbury, Minnesota, USA

OPTIONAL SURVEY FIELDS (Replace the answers below with your own answers):

# My blog is hosted by: Myself
# My age is: 38
# My gender is: Male
# My occupation is: IT Director
# I use the following RSS/Atom reader software: Bloglines
# I use the following software to post to my blog: Movable Type
# I have been blogging since (day, month, year): 06 December 2002
# My web browser is: Firefox
# My operating system is: Windows XP

No related posts.

Many webloggers have incorporated Google’s AdSense into their weblogs as one of the new ways to make money online – it’s a simple, relatively unobtrusive way to generate a little bit of secondary income. Until recently it was impossible to know which pages were generating revenue but with the introduction of channels a few months ago Google opened up a whole new way to look at the data. Channels allow the AdSense user to see exactly what pages are the biggest revenue generators, but until now such insight had been unavailable to the average weblogger. This article shows how you can use channels to pinpoint which articles or other pages on your weblog are generating the most revenue.

Who should read this article

I am a Movable Type user and as such have written this article specifically for Movable Type. However the concepts should translate to any other weblogging tool so in general any weblogger that has been approved for the AdSense program should benefit from this article.

Requirements

The approach outlined in this article has been tested using both Movable Type 2.661 and 3.01D. Two plugins are used – Brad Choate’s Key Values and Regex. Obviously you must be approved for Google’s AdSense program.

Installing the Key Values plugin

Brad Choate’s brilliant Key Values plugin offers a simple way to extend the built-in fields of Movable Type. We will be using this plugin to insert the unique channel id into any article. Before I go on to describe exactly how to do that you should make sure you have this plugin installed. I won’t rewrite Brad’s installation instructions here so please get it installed before continuing.

Brad’s Regex plugin is not needed unless you use the MTIfExtended tag in your template – see below for an example.

Creating the channels

Most webloggers have a main page with the last n articles, various archives pages and individual article pages. I suggest creating one channel for your main page, another for each archive type you have, a default channel that will be used for individual articles where you have not specified a channel and one for every article you want to monitor. Take care, however, as Google currently limits you to 50 active channels. What that means is you will want to keep tabs on a subset of your articles – probably the most heavily viewed or the ones you put the most effort into. Wouldn’t it be nice to see your hard work paying off by seeing exactly how much revenue a specific article is generating for you?

Follow Google’s directions for creating a channel. Below is an example of what part of your code might like look. Here 0123456789 is the unique channel id you will be inserting into your template or articles.

google_ad_width = 728;
google_ad_height = 90;
google_ad_format = “728x90_as”;
google_ad_channel =”0123456789″;

Create a channel called “Main Page”, one called “Archives”, one called “Default Article” and then two or three more representing a few test articles. Be sure to use descriptive names.

Adding a channel to an article

I’m going to jump ahead of the game just a little to describe how you are going to be adding this channel data to some of your articles, then we’ll proceed to making the template changes necessary to support this approach.

The channels called “Main Page”, “Archives” and “Default Article” will all be used within your templates as you will see below. However the channels you created for individual articles will actually be entered in the article itself, in the MTEntryMore field (the Extended Entry text box of the Movable Type edit screen).

Here is an example of the simplest case were you don’t actually use that field for your article so it only contains the key/value pair:

And as you can see if you do actually use that field adding the channel isn’t much different:

At this point you may be saying to yourself, “I don’t want that crap to show in my article.” Ah behold the magic of the MTKeyValue plugin. With the appropriate template changes nobody will be the wiser.

Template changes

Now that you have your channels created and you know how to add the individual ones to your articles you will need to edit a few of your templates. There are two considerations here. The obvious change is that you need to change each template that contains the Google AdSense code to point to the custom channel for that page. Then, because of our overloading the MTEntryMore field we need to make sure the channel data is stripped from that field when it is displayed in any template.

Let’s start with the simplest change. One of the channels you created was called “Main Page”. Go to the template (default name is Main Index) that contains the AdSense code that is displayed on your main page, assuming you have the ads showing there, and simply update the AdSense code to include the channel id. It will look just like the code fragment above that came straight from Google. At this point you really haven’t done anything too tricky. Whenever a user clicks an ad on your main page that will register the click through to the Main Page channel. If your site is like mine where most people arrive through a search to an individual article then it is likely you won’t see many hits from the main page. Still, the point of this article is that you can begin to find that stuff out!

Do the same thing for your Archives channel and your archives templates. You can either use the same channel for all your archive types or if you are interested in seeing whether a particular archive type does better for you then obviously you can create multiple archive channels. Keep in mind the 50 channel limitation, however.

To this point we haven’t done anything very dynamic but that is about to change. I think the real value to this approach is the granularity – seeing your revenue at the article level. Let’s take a look at the changes we need to make to your Individual Entry Template (default name is Individual Entry Archive). The first thing we need to do is again make the change to the Google AdSense code although this time we aren’t just entering a simple channel id. Here is what mine looks like:

google_ad_channel = "<mtkeyvalues></mtkeyvalues>
<mtkeyvalue default="0123456789" key="channel"></mtkeyvalue>";

(That should all be on one line). The opening and closing MTKeyValues is the container tag for accessing the key/value data via the MTKeyValue plugin. The MTKeyValue tag is saying “if there exists a key named channel then use that value, otherwise use the default value of 0123456789.” This value would be a real number, the number you generated for your Default Article channel above.

At this point your work with the channels is done. In fact if you stopped right now you would have access to your custom channels and if you looked at the source for a couple of your test articles you would see the correct channels being used. However there is one problem. Remember the “channel=0123456789″ line we put into the Extended Entry? You need to tell Movable Type to strip that line out when it builds your site. That data needs to be invisible to the reader. Here’s how to do that.

In your Individual Entry Template you should have a section that looks something like this:

<$MTEntryBody$>
<$MTEntryMore$>

All it’s doing is printing out the Entry Body and then the Extended Entry right after it. That’s what you want but you just want to make sure your key/value pair doesn’t show u That’s easy:

<$MTEntryBody$>
<mtkeyvalues></mtkeyvalues>
<$MTEntryMore$>
;

The MTKeyValues tag does all the work and automatically strips the key/value data out so what’s left is just whatever you had in the Extended Entry field. All I did here was wrap the <MTEntryMore> tag with the <MTKeyValues> tag and you should simply repeat that across all of your templates that reference the MTEntryMore field. Don’t forget to fix your RSS templates.

One thing I ran into on my main page template was the code that hides the Extended Entry text from the user. The logic of that code is quite simple – “if there is no extended entry data then just show the body of the article. If there is extended entry data then show a clickable link that when clicked will display the extended entry data.” The code itself looked something like this:

<mtentryifextended></mtentryifextended>
… do stuff …

If you’ve been paying attention you probably have figured out the problem. If I have an article that doesn’t use the Extended Entry field other than to insert a channel id then my code would think there is an extended entry and display the link – but there would be nothing behind it because the MTKeyValues tag had stripped the key/value out. Here is how I (with some help) worked around that:

<mtkeyvalues></mtkeyvalues>
<mtentryifextended></mtentryifextended>
<mtifmatches expr=”[MTEntryMore]” pattern=”m/\S/”></mtifmatches>
… do stuff …

The MTIfMatches tag comes from the Regex plugin. You only need that plugin if you have this unique situation.

At this point you should be good to go.

Where to go from here

The first thing I need to point out is that you will not immediately see the impact of your work. Channel data seems to be two or three days behind so have some patience – it will take a little bit of time before you start seeing the channel data in your reports.

In this article I’ve given you a framework for incorporating Google’s AdSense channels into your weblog for the purpose of better understanding where exactly your revenue comes from. Because of the limitations of the number of channels you can create, however, you will need to apply some logic to which articles you flag and you will need to keep that up to date as you add new articles – fortunately Google makes it very easy to inactivate channels so you can control that completely within Google without having to go back to your old articles. Simply leave the channel data there.

If you have any trouble getting this implemented please leave a comment below or email me and I’ll try to help.

I hope you have found this article useful and can use this approach to tweak your site to increase your AdSense revenue. If you feel you can quantify an increase in revenue as a result of this article then I would greatly appreciate any donation you feel is appropriate. Please click on the button below to throw some love my way.

Thank you and good luck.

More AdSense Tips.

No related posts.

Via Google Blogoscoped my first review:

“I just saw <www.johnsjottings.com>. This explains why <www.7nights.com> put up a link to this page. What a high-quality page! If only my friend’s company would have an awesome page like that. The URL has 28 characters. That’s just the right size. The page contains 202 links, a superb amount. The color scheme is very balanced. Gorgeous. Well, I expected the creator to succeed. Supreme.
(…)
There are 53,697 characters in the HTML source, which is a great length for frequent users. It must have taken many years to finish the page.
The HTML is valid. Seeing John’s Jottings, I’m simply full of respect. This web page is the voice of a generation.”
– Maria Shaw, Web Now!

I bet she’ll really like the redesign.

No related posts.

I went to Amazon tonight to update my wishlist (birthday coming up soon) and was surprised to see a link on the front page to “John’s Plog.” A “recent article”:http://www.cio.com/archive/051504/work.html in CIO Magazine sung the virtues of a corporate “project blog” or plog and for the life of me I couldn’t figure out why Amazon was telling me I now had one. Turns out that in Amazon’s world “plog” stands for “personalized blog.”

From what I was looking at it is nothing more than a couple of normal recommendations with the extended review baked into the main page. I’m luke-warm on the feature for now and in fact the addition of all that text on the main page means there are less visible links to other Amazon products on my main page. I don’t think that is a good thing for Amazon.

Here is the description of what a plog is in their words:

bq(quote). The Plog� Service is a personalized blog. A blog is a straightforward and now widely adopted method of posting a reverse chronological diary on the Internet. Here’s a list of some of the best and most popular blogs:
<LIST SNIPPED>
Your Amazon.com Plog is a diary of events that will enhance your shopping experience, helping you discover products that have just been released, track changes to your orders, and many other things. Just like a blog, your Plog is sorted in reverse chronological order. When we think we have something interesting or important to tell you, we’ll post it to your Plog.

You can see some of the blogs they link to in the image – “Six Apart”:http://www.sixapart.com/ gets a link as well.

Blogs. Can you say mainstream? I knew you could.

No related posts.

Time for me to make the move to Movable Type 3.0 and TypeKey comment authentication, sooner rather than later. Like “many”:http://www.robertkbrown.com/2004/05/29/how_do_these_people_sleep_at_night.html “others”:http://www.gadgetopia.com/2004/05/31/BotSpamming.html I’ve been getting hammered with a new deluge of spammers that are getting around my “MT-Blacklist”:http://www.jayallen.org/projects/mt-blacklist/ spammer protection and I simply don’t have enough time to spend in keeping this place clean. “As I’ve mentioned before”:http://www.johnsjottings.com/archives/2004/03/21/more_on_typekey.html I really don’t like the idea of asking my real commenters, who mostly happen by once or maybe twice and that’s it, to take the time to register but I think that is what it’s going to come to.

The only thing that is holding me back from upgrading is I have not been able to get an answer from Six Apart on whether I need a commercial license because of my AdSense and Amazon ads or if a personal license, for this clearly personal site that happens to generate a little revenue, will suffice.

“This question”:http://www.movabletype.org/frequently_asked_questions.shtml#noncomm from the FAQ comes close to giving me the answer:

bq(quote). Q: I have a wishlist link or tip jar on my site, is that considered a commercial use?
A: A site including links such as Amazon Wishlists, tip jar or donation payments through PayPal or Amazon Honor System links, or merchandise sold through CafePress is not considered a commercial site if such links are not the primary purpose of the site and if the site�s use of Movable Type falls within the limitations described in the Personal Use license. For more information, please review our Personal Use license.

Why not mention AdSense? To me it is clear that if running a webstore with CafePress items is not necessarily commercial then AdSense should fall into the same category. AdSense is so prevalent in the blogging community right now, why not ad this to the FAQ?

Anyway, I’ve asked the question of Six Apart and received a “thank you for your email” response but no answer. I’ll stay patient for now and hope to have an answer soon. In which case the next question will be, “When will I find the time to do the upgrade?”

No related posts.

Six Apart, the makers of TypePad and Movable Type, today released Movable Type 3.0 Developer Edition, the first 3.0 release generally available to the public. Along with this version they introduced the first real pricing scheme they have used to date. Until this release every version of MT was given away for free and donations were accepted. I gave $20 once I knew I would be using it regularly.

The new pricing ranges from $99.95 ($69.95 intro price) to $699.95. According to Mena’s introductory post there will also be a free version but it is definitely losing some valued features that users are accustomed to, such as being on the updated weblog list on movabletype.com. To say the feedback of this new pricing scheme has been negative would be an understatement.

As for myself, I still plan to buy the personal edition at the discounted price of $69.95. I’ve already donated $20 which allows me to discount it down to $49.95 and as I’m currently generating about $1.75 a day in secondary revenue on this very modestly visited site I’ll have my fee paid for in a little less than a month. I’d wager that many of the people who run commercial sites who are bitching about the $699.95 fee could easily generate enough revenue in a month to pay for this license. If the software helps you get there simply then why not pay for it?

I saw somewhere, I can’t find it now, where someone said that they predicted that within a year WordPress would have more users than Movable Type. Non-paying users, of course. I’m sure Six Apart won’t be losing any sleep over that what with a robust TypePad meeting most normal users needs and MT 3.0 paying for itself for most anyone else.

No related posts.

“Inspired”:http://www.johnsjottings.com/archives/2004/03/22/play_zork_over_aim.html by Andy’s “Zork-playing AIM bot”:http://www.waxy.org/archive/2004/03/21/infocomb.shtml#002715 I’ve thrown together a quick little bot that allows you to check out recent comments and entries on my weblog. Give it a try by AIMing johnsmtbot. Should be self explanatory from there. AIM me if you are having problems.

I used “Wired Bots”:http://www.wiredbots.com/tutorial.html for the bot framework and then regular DBI calls to the MT database to pull the data.

I can see some really interesting uses here.

No related posts.