I have been working a project lately which required some investigation into online advertising. Let me tell you a little more about my AdSense experiment and how easy it was to set up on this site.

The project I am working on is an online community site, code named Big Trophy Cat. I think it has great potential, but it’s not something I want to fund out of my own pocket (read: my wife won’t let me fund another side venture). A subscription model doesn’t really make sense, I can’t rely solely on donations from users, and since I’m currently employed as an Oracle Analyst I don’t have the time to chase down advertising myself.

One great thing about AdSense is that once you’re approved, you can put AdSense ads on any number of your sites, but all the earnings are combined into your one account. So, while SMJSolutions.com doesn’t generate enough traffic (yet!) to make any significant money, it was a great test case for putting Adsense in with Big Trophy Cat. I can also take time to figure out what ad formats are successful and design the layout of Big Trophy Cat with that end in mind.

Simple Setup

Setting up Adsense was really easy. I applied for an account using SMJSolutions.com as the main site. I was approved within a few hours (it could take up to two days), and could begin picking and designing the ads to go on my site.

Robust Reporting

Adsense does a great job of letting you know how your ads are doing. The reporting system is flexible and easy to use so you can get relevant data about your site. The one thing I haven’t figured out yet how to do is find out which specific ads are being clicked on.

Another great reporting feature is the custom channel. You can define custom channels to track pages, color schemes, ad formats, placement on pages, or any other type of metric you can imagine. Using channels appropriately provides a great tool for analyzing the advertising performance of your site.

Flexible Formats

Adsense offers a wide variety of shapes and sizes of ads that can easily be integrated into your website. You choose the ad format, customize the color scheme of the ads, and Google gives you the code to paste into your website.

However, AdSense isn’t just delivering contextual text ads, it’s a whole suite of advertising tools. There are currently three different types of advertising you can do with your AdSense account: AdSense for Content, AdSense for Search, and Referrals.

AdSense for Content is the bread and butter of the AdSense program. It is the delivery of relevant ads based on the page content.

AdSense for Search puts a Google search box on your site that users can use to search your site or expand it to the whole web. You get credit for the ads that are delivered as a result of the searches.

Referrals are simply ads for Google products or services. You may have noticed the AdSense referral button toward the top of this page. If someone reads this article and decides to sign up for AdSense though clicking the referral button, I can get credited for referring that customer to Google AdSense.

Real Revenues

One of the major reasons I chose AdSense over other online advertising networks is the trust of doing business with an established, public company like Google. Smaller, independent ad networks may pay better per click, but may also not be around for long and may run off with your money. Or worse, it may suddenly decide to run a punch the monkey campaign on your site.

The issue of trust is a major issue for me because online advertising will be the main source of revenues for project Big Trophy Cat.

I read through some of the AdSense success stories and found several examples of non-huge sites that are making real nice revenue numbers through AdSense. It was nice to see some of those bigger numbers especially considering the pennies that SMJSolutions.com has earned from AdSense so far.

Few Flaws

Because Adsense works so well and is so easy, there are a lot of made for Adsense (MFA) sites that exploit the system. As a result, man “junk” ads are in the Adsense system which point to these MFA sites, most of which you don’t want to be associated with your site. Sites like adsblacklist.com identify MFA culprits and show you how to use your competitive ad filter feature in your Adsense menu to block ads from these sites.

Click fraud is a problem that some have predicted will shake up the whole internet and impact the entire economy.

Flaws do exist in the AdSense world. Issues like click fraud and MFA sites are real concerns. But at the end of it all, Adsense provides a great option for webmasters to generate revenue from their websites.

I took a look at the big four search engines, Google, Yahoo, MSN (Live), and Ask to see how they stacked up. I was surprised with what I found.

On my humble site, I get crawled most often by the MSNbot. Perhaps not surprisingly, I also get more referrals from the MSN Live Search than from any other search engine. Also, I have noticed that when I make changes to the site, Live search is the most responsive of the search engines.

One simple example demonstrates how differently these search engines operate. My most popular post to date was Fantasy Football Team Names, announcing the Fantasy Football Team Name Generator I created. If you’re trying to find a good team name for your fantasy team, you would want to see this link in your search results. So, let’s query fantasy football team names into the big search engines and take a look at where the post from smjsolutions.com comes in.

The Google search didn’t list the post in the top 200 results. I noticed a lot of pages that weren’t even close to relevant. Google didn’t perform well here.

The Yahoo! search wasn’t any better. Again the post we were looking for wasn’t in the top 200 results and there were a lot of what looked like garbage links, stuff that wasn’t going to help us with our fantasy football team names at all.

Searching Ask didn’t list the page we were looking for in the top 128 results (it wouldn’t let me keep going), but it did give some other helpful search terms to try. It didn’t seem like it had as many garbage links as Yahoo! and Google did, but it still didn’t find what we were looking for.

The Live search totally bucks the trend. The page we were looking for actually shows up on the first page of results! Not did we find the page we were looking for, but the other links seem relevant and useful.

Why the huge difference? Is the new Live search that much better than Yahoo! and Google? I just don’t know. I’ll leave that for the SEO gurus of the web to figure out. However, because of these results, I’ve started to use Live search more often and it has become the default engine of my Firefox search toolbar.

My biggest hit so far has been the Fantasy Football Team Name Generator, which was ranked highly in MSN searches. The beginning of the fantasy football season brought lots of additional traffic. Other articles I’ve written get an occasional referral from various search engines, but nothing substantial.

So, I made a few changes to be a little more search engine friendly. For those not in the biz, they call it “Search Engine Optimization” or just SEO for short. Here are two simple SEO changes I made to SMJSolutions.com recently:

1. Changed the title structure
If you look at the top of your browser window, you will see that the title of this post reads, “A Little SEO — SMJ Solutions.” It used to read, “SMJ Solutions >> A Little SEO.” Not a huge difference, but the search engine gets the topic first hopefully increasing the magic score that search engines use to place pages. Also it should make it easier for users who may be browsing with multiple tabs (using Firefox).

Since I use WordPress, making this change was really easy, even for a programming newbie like me. I simply added these lines of code in my header template, replacing the old title code:

< ?php wp_title(' ');?>
< ?php if(wp_title(' ', false)) { echo ' —'; }?>
< ?php bloginfo('name');?>

2. Submitted a Google sitemap
I installed the Google Sitemap plugin and ran it. It’s a very simple plugin that can generate a list of links for the Googlebot to pay attention to on your site. As a site owner, it’s nice to be able to tell the bot what is important and what is not. Plus, the Google Sitemap plugin will automatically “ping” Google to let them know that the site has changed every time I post a new article.

So far, I have been impressed with the new plugin. I noticed the Googlebot hit the generated sitemap.xml file the next time it came by SMJSolutions.com.

So, will it work? I don’t know yet. I doubt I will be on the Technorati Top 500 any time soon, but we’ll see if these small changes are noticed by the bots and whether any of my pages get more traffic because of the two simple SEO changes.

I recently ran into a problem which forced me to figure out how to create a scheduled ftp job. I needed to post results from my fantasy football league draft to a website so the slackers who couldn’t be at the live draft could more easily follow along and know who had been drafted so far. The software I use to conduct my draft (FFLM) can automatically generate HTML reports after each pick. I needed to create an FTP job that would take those HTML reports and post them to a website for the remote drafters to see.

I’ve used Linux and cron before, and I was hoping to get something like that in Windows. Although it’s not too difficult in Windows, I needed to do a little research to figure out how to create a scheduled ftp job.

I found an article on the Microsoft Help and Support site that shows how to use an FTP Batch script. If you open up Notepad, you can create a simple file that contains all of the commands you need to type in for your ftp job. Just type in the commands you would use in the ftp command-line utility. For example, my .scr file looks something like this:

open 10.0.0.1
user
password
lcd "C:\Files\ToFTP"
cd website/Fantasy/Football/Directory
put DraftResults.htm
put TeamRosters.htm
bye

The first line connects to the FTP server, the second and third lines are the username and password to connect to the server. The fourth line changes my local dirctory to C:\Files\ToFTP, where my files are located. The fifth line gets to the proper directory in the FTP server, it’s where my files are going to be placed. The sixth and seventh lines transfer the two report files to the server. The eighth line disconnects from the server.

Saving this file as a .scr file means that I now have an FTP script to run. From the command line I can simply type:

ftp -s:Test.scr

The script will run and the two files will be placed on the server.

Now that we have the ftp script, it’s time to automate it. All we need to do is create a very simple batch file. Again, this can be done simply using Notepad. The batch file will basically run the ftp command line script as shown above. Here are the contents of the batch file:

::DraftFTP.bat
::Uploads Draft Files to Website
@ECHO OFF
cd "C:\Files"
ftp -s:Test.scr


The first two lines are comment lines. The third line tells the batch file not to display the command prompt as the commands are executed. The fourth line changes the directory to where the Test.scr file is located. You should recognize what the fifth line does from what we did above.

Now we have a batch file. Double click it and it will run, placing the two files on to the webserver.

So we’re almost there. Now that we have the ftp script and the batch file to run it, all we need to do is create a scheduled job to automatically run the batch file at a given interval.

Open the Scheduled Tasks (Start > Programs > Accessories > System Tools > Scheduled Tasks) and create a new Scheduled Task. Don’t bother going through the wizard, just right-click and select New > Scheduled Task. Give it a name and then open it up. In the Task tab, select the batch file you just created as the program to run. Then simply fill out the Schedule, Setting, and Security options as desired.

Then sit back and enjoy as the Scheduled Task runs your batch file containing your FTP script, automatically putting your files according to the schedule you have defined.create a scheduled ftp job

As mentioned above, there is usually more than one way to accomplish a task. If you know a better way to create a scheduled ftp job please share your tips below, or let me know if this solution worked for you.

I have been a fan of Thunderbird (read my review) for quite some time, and recently came across an extension called Enigmail which promised to give me the PGP security capabilities I was looking for. The Enigmail extension provides the security in a simple and straightforward way and nicely integrates into Thunderbird. The encryption is handled by the GNU Privacy Guard (GnuPG), a free version of PGP.

Here is a simple example of how PGP works. Dave wants to send Jesse an email. Both Dave and Jesse have Thunderbird and Enigmail installed. Both use Enigmail to generate a key pair. Dave gets a private key and a public key, and Jesse also gets his own public and private key. The public keys are public; Dave and Jesse share those with each other. The private keys are private, they should never be shared. The two keys work together to encrypt and decrypt messages. If something was encrypted with the public key, it can only be decrypted by the corresponding private key.

OK, back to Dave and Jesse. When Dave sends Jesse an email, Dave encrypts the message using Jesse’s public key (Dave has access to Jesse’s public key because it is public). When Jesse receives the message, Enigmail will automatically decrypt the message using Jesse’s private key and Jesse will read the message. To anyone else viewing the message it would look something like this:

-----BEGIN PGP MESSAGE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.3rc2 (MingW32)


hQIOA6x3yUQjMAdqEAgAvyC+x6frLRnxE8u67BRQAFb2Jrj
NQdBoN2uFKH6x2DGJeggTSL2aGyABsFSr8eva4j4QWSnVfa
DC5P5EOwEQykSvK65TC9Mi5nX6DpEaClQAz/FDIyM+gr3r0
WYWE560YS4KSKz8CHPkIK3E3MruZVNTSn7CVQjHNbzJmgpJ
fgij2jFt59PgXpUgYxX5idkV0TitdR2O7Uv/VBSbRJCpWlK
hQDcX/k21Gcd89sqES6g6iP/pYXYghCo36pitjIhIwf7Bhk
Tv7rCDjQ8QR4+WFnYk9UVjL9KbWlqbn2awBejVQOqSH2j/f
QV4ry7qPVDODGlY0plIy28nUv7WaNt18E+9mS1e+AcGc/5V
WswmxMwM65qV7/1MiqaJ9fc8NdzUsA3peAfiv56dJuJJQRp
W/PD5WKWf9dDUmwRX6Qql36MMQCguwcBfhZZ1rVFQuZYARh
aiMjOS1+Xhrk8FQZnRYu+rmEpT6sXdkpAdvKelE1y/v5lDs
PdLACAEOW7aQoaxAm03WL4w/jGZAI5FB70VUG9kyEN+Xy2E
fUPF2LBTc/72pjvDrxb6O7lMXtpfgy49Lt+2clg2yqvefBt
jg/GmbdxGZMz1rWXDUuZsd9GdfKwxrmvQN8fSTc7FKcIC7h
1uYv7X8dpubuVdParSQKS4WX7d+7J/CNgUQkWytrMtcdWuH
pRgPtdSlxbIC1GQ7
=OCNT
-----END PGP MESSAGE-----

When Jesse wants to reply to Dave’s initial encrypted email. Jesse encrypts the entire message using Dave’s public key and sends it to Dave. When Dave gets the message, it is decrypted using Dave’s private key. Neither person ever touches the other’s private key — it remains private. Dave and Jesse have now exchanged emails securely using PGP.

PGP is strong stuff. Famous cryptographer Bruce Schneier said PGP is “the closest you’re likely to get to military-grade encryption” (Applied Cryptography, p. 587). The reason it is so strong lies deep in PGPs cryptographic and mathematical roots, which we won’t delve into here. Just know that it’s not going to be cracked. Experts doubt any groups, even large government agencies, are capable of decrypting PGP messages. It’s good encryption.

Another great tool I found for PGP encryption and message signing is WinPT (Windows Privacy Tray). It’s a free, open source program that manages your PGP keyring (your public and private keys) and the public keys of others. One of the cool things about WinPT is that it’s a standalone application that you can use to encrypt or sign messages in a regular text document. So, for example, if you’re at work and don’t have access to your Thunderbird application, but you do have webmail access, you can still send encrypted and signed messages from your webmail client. You can also decrypt messages sent to you. All you need to do is copy and paste the plain text into the WPTray clipboard and select the Encrypt, Decrypt, or Sign options. WPTray will do the dirty work, and you simply copy and paste the results into the message body and send the email.

You can check out my public key page to import my public key into your PGP key manager so you can send me an encrypted email. Please don’t send anything which may compromise national security, but if you want to keep Mom’s famous apple pie recipe safe, PGP is great encryption, and using Thunderbird and Enigmail together make it easy and available to the masses.

• Separation

One scary thing about IE is how tightly integrated it is to the operating system (OS). To find out how tightly IE is woven into Windows, try uninstalling it — good luck! Web-based exploits therefore, can theoretically impact the OS, which is scary stuff. Firefox is totally separated from your OS, and doesn’t have the frightening capability of ruining your whole computer just because you visit a website with malicious intent. Firefox isn’t totally immune to bugs or exploits, but the good new is that any existing exploits aren’t going to mess up the operating system. Firefox is a much safer browser than Internet Explorer.

• Extension

Another great feature of Firefox is the ability to extend it in any way. Extensions are small add-on programs that you can use to customize your browsing experience. If you’re a weatherbug, add ForecastFox extension. If you’re a business traveler with clients in many time zones, try FoxClocks. If you’re a newshound, try Sage — an RSS reader. Flickr and del.icio.us plugins are also available if you use those services. Extensions for word of the day, random sites, and countless other diversions are easily added to your browser.

• Innovation

Tabbed browsing is another reason I love Firefox. This isn’t a totally unique feature, as many other browsers also use tabs — rumors are the next version of IE will have tabs. Tabs are integrated nicely in Firefox and while I thought at first that it wasn’t a newsworthy feature, now I can’t live without my tabs. The 1.5 release of Firefox allows you to reorder those tabs by clicking and dragging to reorder them, which makes for easy grouping of related pages. Tabs are one of those surprisingly simple ideas that will totally change the way you surf.

• Benefaction

The folks at the Mozilla project have been generous enough to give the browser away, no strings attached. Firefox is totally free of charge. It won’t cost you one red cent to switch to Firefox. You really don’t have anything to lose — you can always easily uninstall it (see Separation above).

• Intuition

It’s easy. My grandmother could install Firefox and get it running. As part of the normal install, it will offer to include all of your bookmarks and settings from Internet Explorer. After installation, Firefox is as easy to use and any other browser; in fact, it may be easier to use because the development team has given special attention to the whole user experience and made Firefox as user-friendly as possible.

Get Firefox, use it for a while, add some extensions, and thank me later. You’ll love it.

• Keep it short

Long, rambling emails are rarely read thoroughly; most people skim or totally skip over them. If you want someone to read your email, make it short. If you want someone to read the email and do something, make it even shorter. Proofread your emails and edit liberally; take out any verbose verbiage — emails should be fluff-less.

• Mind your tone

Emails don’t have context. Don’t be sarcastic or try to use any type of tone because it will inevitably be read differently than the way you wrote it.

• Reply with original text

Most email applications automatically do this, but I have received several replies where the sender has not included my original email. This is especially frustrating if I can’t remember what my original request was and the reply is along the lines of, “OK, let’s do it.”

• Use only one space

Spaces are like exclamation points — you only need one to make it work. Using more than one is unnecessary; it simply takes up more space and makes it harder to read.

• Choose descriptive subject

Don’t get too clever with your email subject line. Use a good subject that summarizes the body of the email. Having a well-written subject line is extremely beneficial when digging through old email archives.

• Keep it topical

If your email contains more than one major topic, break it up and send as many emails as there are topics. It doesn’t take much additional effort and makes it much easier keep it short and choose a descriptive subject.

• Respond promptly

This can be taken to an extreme, but just don’t let your emails sit around and get stale. Promptly may mean different things for different emails. Prioritize what you need to reply to and take care of them. Don’t let unread messages accumulate in your inbox.

Learning and practicing these simple principles will make your email life much easier, and your savvy email readers will appreciate it too.

Every email client (local or web-based) I’ve ever used supports the blind carbon copy. It’s just as easy to use as the To and CC (carbon copy) fields; the only real barrier is that most email users don’t know what BCC stands for, let alone what it does or how to use it. That it may be unappreciated, forgotten, and unused no more, I offer a brief description and a few examples.

Suppose you have been tasked with emailing a simple newsletter announcing the next family reunion. The uninformed may choose to put everyone’s address in the To field and send the email. However, a better approach would be to put the addresses in the BCC field. That way, crazy cousin Chris can’t harvest all of the email addresses to use for her annoying “Forward this email to 100 people and you’ll get a million dollars from Bill Gates” emails.

Another worthwhile use of blind carbon copy is to follow up on an unfinished task at work. For example, let’s say a programmer has promised to deliver a custom application, but the deadline passes with no results. You could send a “Where is my application?” email to the programmer and CC the software development manager, but this will make the programmer feel singled out and may weaken your relationship. A better option would be to BCC the software development manager so he can either add additional pressure to the offending programmer or assign additional resources to get the project done. BCC is a great way to keep someone in the loop surreptitiously.

What would I do without the BCC field? I would expose email addresses to people who shouldn’t have them. I would be forced to put everyone on the To or CC lines when some may not need to know who else received the email. I wouldn’t be able to send a copy anonymously to a co-worker when replying to a ridiculous request from my boss. I would reveal email addresses to those who didn’t need to know the other recipients and risk increasing everyone’s spam traffic.

The appropriate use of the BCC field separates the savvy email user from the uninformed. Educate your friends and family about it. Don’t ever send out another mailing list without using the BCC field. Use blind carbon copy appropriately and it will help more efficiently and securely use your email.

RSS is a feed of XML data. This smjsolutions.com site has a feed of the most recent posts. You can click on the RSS link at the bottom right hand side of the page to see the actual feed data (Warning: it’s not pretty in its raw format). Lots of other sites offer RSS feeds (news sites in particular). Most sites will have an orange rectangular RSS button somewhere on the page if it is available.

Probably the best example of a good use of RSS is My Yahoo!. If you have a Yahoo! ID, you’re missing out if this is not your home page. You can subscribe to any RSS feed and have it displayed on your My Yahoo! page. Every time your My Yahoo! page is loaded, it will check the RSS feed for any updates, making sure you have the latest and greatest information that you care about.

Here is a list of some great feeds I subscribe to:

• CraigsList for Sale in SLC – classified ads in my neck of the woods
• New York Times – Technology – latest technology headlines
• smjsolutions.com – latest posts from this site
• BYU NewsNet Sports – Cougar sports news

What are some of your favorite feeds?