Journal
In my Adsense tips post the other day I mentioned time based ads, and how I like to display ads based on the age of the article they are on - I should probably point out that I only use this technique on single posts, and not on the site at large.
I really like this idea for a number of reasons:
- It stops regular visitors from being snowed under with ads
- It means I don’t have to see the adverts
- It gives search engine visitors (who will likely end up at older posts) the advertising - and I feel they are more likely to click adverts
So how do I do this? It’s actually incredibly simple indeed (I hope). All I do is use the Wordpress command get_the_time(’U') to get the time the article was made. I then calculate what the time was x amount of days ago and compare that with the …
August 27, 2007 | Links
A colleague at work pointed this out to me the other day. It’s a new image manipulation technique that helps with resizing graphics, without losing detail.
It’s technically phenomenal, and the results are stunning, if not 100% perfect (there are a few places on the beach photos where you can make out joins) however I don’t think I will be using it myself. Watch the video to see what I mean.
The problem I have with it is simply that it distorts the image. Sure it looks good, but if you take a photo of somewhere and then change it using this technique, then anyone comparing your photo to reality will be unable to find it’s equal. There will be similar places, but nowhere identical. I can see uses for it, and it’s ridiculously clever, but I think it’s real world use is limited.
I have spent a long time trying to improve the advertising earnings on my websites and I have managed to go from a couple of dollars a month to 3 figures in a relatively short time, without increasing the amount of visitors to my site.
The tips I am about to tell you are what worked for me, but I encourage you to try different things as each site is unique.
1. Colour and Position
This is probably the optimization which is mentioned most regularly, but it’s for good reason. You really should experiment with different ad positions and different colour combinations. Each time you make a change leave the ads for a week and see how your earnings alter. Make a note of what works and then try something new. I was always sceptical when I read these comments before but since I have started playing with positioning my adsense revenue has …
A Lego machine that makes Lego machines? Genius!
I loves me some Lego, and this production line that creates Lego cars is fabulous. I’m amazed that someone would spend the time creating Lego that builds Lego - and in this scale.
Note the way they chose the colour of the parts at the start of the clip. It’s a little slow so you may want to fast forward occasionally, but I think it’s great. Makes me want to buy the Lego Mindstorms even more now!
August 21, 2007 | General
I decided to go through the competition entries carefully, and read a number of posts from each site before announcing the winners, hence the delay - but finally I have reached a decision.
Finalists
Originally there were to be 3 finalists, but so many good sites were submitted that I’ve picked the ones that interest me most and listed them below. All these sites will be placed in the blog roll on my site when it finally gets completed, and have also added them all to my feed reader.
- Blog-Op - I’ve actually been reading Blog-Op for a while. I won one of Chris’s competitions and decided to add him onto my blog roll anyway. So Chris is through by default
- thepinkc - I really like the design of the pink c (is that meant to be the pc, made girly?), and the content is pretty good too. The most …
Bioshock was released last week, and it’s been getting great reviews. To go with the special edition release of the game they were designing an “art of” book, however the idea was scrapped - so the book has been released for free as an ebook.
But with a game as beautiful as BioShock, that just didn’t sit right with me. Because everyone should be able to experience the beauty of BioShock, see the concept art and visualize the evolution of building such a revolutionary game.
So, with the help of the BioShock team and an amazing art designer, I put together a BioShock artbook for everyone to download. Here it is, in all its glory, in two PDF versions: a smaller, ebook download, and a more hi-resolution version that you can take to your local printshop and bind.
There’s some pretty disgusting stuff in there, although there is no doubt worse in …
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