Well, I’ve experimented with placement of adsense on a few of my sites lately.

Specifically on this blog, I placed an adsense block on the right hand side in Advert, a bit out of one reading path, and I got very poor response. Today, I’ve added an adsense banner at the top above the submissions, and will see what the response is going to be.

I believe that Adsense ads must not interrupt your reading of a site, or overwhelm everything like this site. Half the page is just Adsense adverts, thats abit desperate.

Another thing I hate is Adsense ads on blogs that is almost everywhere where you look, eeek hope this blog isn’t getting like one of those.

Another cool tool to analyze how elements are placed on your website is Crazy Egg, which has not launched yet, but they provide some features and screenshots.
This technology can generate heatmaps of your website to see where people have gone with the mouse cursor, also worth a look at.

written by Arné

For the people that do not know, I’m one of the guys developing on IntoShape, a website dedicated for people that would like to live healthier lifestyles.

One thing I can truely say, it is REALLY hard getting an audience to the site. At the moment we are only marketing the website by placing references all over the net like forums and directories. At the moment we average around 80-100 unique users per day, which is way below my expectations. I think also another problem is that this is mainly targeted at only businesses living in South Africa, but we are looking at shifting this vision in the future by getting other domains like .com, .co.uk etc.

My personal expectation for the end of March is to get 500 unique users per day, and would like people to keep on returning to the site.

At the moment there is not very much of updated information on the site itself, but the forum is getting updated at least once in two days with new articles.

We have now started contacting a few people that would like to be interested in advertising and when some of this money start coming in we will start getting paid traffic to our site.

IntoShape Website
IntoShape Forum

written by Arné

Recently I bought myself a new laptop(”notebook”) so I can be more mobile and work wherever I find myself at.
Pre-installed with Windows XP Professional I was now looking for my office tools. Previously I primarily used Microft Outlook and Microsoft Office for my “Office Tools”.

So I decided this time as I do not want to spend money on buying these packages that I will go the Open Source.

So firstly, I searched for an alternative for Outlook and found Thunderbird(check to posts back), which was amazing.
The second thing I installed was OpenOffice 2, which I cannot get enough of. Although not all functionity work the same as in normal Mircrosoft Office, the basics are there, and I get the work done.

At the moment my notebook looks like:

• WindowsXP Pro
• Mozilla Firefox
• Mozilla Thunderbird
• WinSCP(Secure Copy for copying file to Linux machines)
• putty
• Scientilla Text Editor
• Media Monkey (For music)
• VLC Media Player (for the vids)
• Tortoise SVN(for software dev)
• Gimp

written by Arné

BlogMad has launched on the 1st of March, with a small hickup here and there, they now are in full swing BUT unfortunately they are only in Invite-Only Mode, so that means you need to have an invite to join. I can provide anyone with an invite(unlimited stash), so just reply here and I’ll send you an invite.(Just reply with something like “Invite Me!!” and I’ll get your email address from the admin side).

Something quite nice out of a developers point of view is the extensive use of AJAX type of technologies combined with nice clean color schemes and graphics, and of course a nice fast server. But don’t forget the cool games that are available to keep you entertained.

I’ve already browsed over 100 blogs and made myself a few nice credits, although all credits is already gone as more and more people are starting to join. Initially I found doubles here and there as I think we were only 10-20 people, but now the blog count is already standing at a massive 1100 blogs that are registered. WOW !!!

written by Arné

As a Windows user, and now using Linux alot I’ve had little or no experience with Symbolic Links or Hard Links, but for the last couple of months I’ve been using this extensively.

What I’m mainly using symbolic links for at the moment is keeping the source of my programs in one place(program in illustration), and then storing different version of the software package on different directories underneath that. So modules and images are underneath the specific version of the software.

I currently have a few clients using my programs, some of them are on the same version of the software and others are on other versions. By using Simbolic Links you can just create a directory(virtual host-using PHP) for that client, have their config there, and then make a simbolic link to the modules and image folder of the version the client is on.

In the illustration you can see that two customers is using the source of version 1 of the program and at the moment no-one is yet on version 2.

This also has security advantages, so the client can maybe configure his own configurations in his config, but cannot touch the module or image info.

I must say this is much better than copying the source to each customer directory seperately.

One thing that bothers me though is, this method increases access load on the files on the one location, or is it better, as the PHP engine accesses just that one part of the hard drive the whole time

written by Arné