Tech Tips

So far it seems that BlogRush is pretty much useless. I can't see how it has added any traffic to any of my sites - actually, it's more likely to take away traffic since it's another exit point.

At this point, I'm not even sure I understand why I should be using it - since it has generated little or no traffic to any of my sites, and the benefit of accumulating the BlogRush credits is unclear to me at this time, I see no point in devoting any of my sites' real estate to the latest widget. I suppose that one must promote BlogRush in order to truly benefit, and if that's the case, then it speaks volumes about the program.

So... I'm removing it from all my sites for now. I'll check it out later and see if it's worth using.

It appears that the ad blocking wars are heating up.

There are massive fortunes at stake, and you are fooling yourself if you think that advertisers and ad network owners will just sit back and let it happen without making any effort to defend their markets and income.

I had the 'honor' of rescuing yet another victim of a pre-installed software nightmare. A new co-worker was working with his notebook (a Hewlett-Packard, recent vintage, less than a year old with Vista Home Basic installed).

The complaint? Minimum five (yes, FIVE) minute boot time from power-on to desktop interaction.

After a cursory examination, I found that it wasn't a hardware problem, nor was it due to memory limitations: the system had 512MB RAM, Vista was using just over 300MB with no other applications running (yes, that's a lot, but this is Vista, after all).

Blocking Firefox is a Bad Idea

A friend of mine forwarded me a link to WhyFireFoxIsBlocked.com (no, I won't link to them, because I won't feed this particular bit of link bait.) He asked: what are these people smoking?

My initial response probably makes him wonder what I've been smoking!

AdBlock Plus Is Not The Problem

In a nutshell, at least one webmaster has (and perhaps others have) decided to try to block site visitors who are using Firefox, because of the existence of a popular extension called AdBlock Plus, which has the ability to allow one to visit web sites and never see any ads.

I've been reading up on the issue, and it seems that Firefox-blocking webmasters' position is may be summarized as:

• Firefox users with AdBlock installed are engaging in "theft" (their words, not mine) because they are visiting sites that depend on commercial advertising revenues to support the site, and
• AdBlock developers have taken steps to circumvent webmaster attempts to detect and defeat AdBlock use by site visitors.

(There are other, non-essential and even more inflammatory arguments made about some Firefox users and promoters, but I won't bother with them here because they have nothing to do with the matter at hand.)

I see frequent posts on webmasterworld.com: 'My AdSense revenue/EPC/eCPM is/are down, what's going on?' - the conversation often degrades into a slam session asserting that it's all a conspiracy or the phases of the moon may be factor - so, I've been thinking of some of the things that a webmaster can control, and those that can't be controlled.

Here are things I have discovered over the years: It is important to focus on the things that you can control, and not worry too much about the things you can't control directly. I find it more productive to focus on the things that I can change, rather than dwell on something totally out of my reach, such as Google's motives or need to increase this quarter's profits.

A strange thought just popped into my head: What if Google's content network pricing algorithms (smart pricing, etc.) are at least partially driven by the need to ensure adequate inventory ('supply') of ads to run on publisher sites on any given day?

In other words, in order to prevent showing blank ads or PSAs on lots of sites, they need to drop the actual per-click payout rates across the network in order to ensure that advertiser daily budgets are not exceeded too quickly... in order to have the ads shown across the network throughout the day.