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Installing PHP 5 and Apache 2.2 on Vista June 25, 2008

Posted by Bryan in : Coding, How-to, Microsoft, QuickTips , 1 comment so far

Sometimes you want to get things done right and sometimes you just want to get them done. When your installing a PHP 5 and Apache 2.2 development setup on Windows Vista using the automatic installers, it may seem like neither one of these is an option. This quick tip is going to save you a lot of time and trouble.
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A review of the ShoppingAds and AuctionAds services December 28, 2007

Posted by Bryan in : Coding, New Products, Reviews , 1 comment so far

I’ve been testing the AuctionAds and ShoppingAds services for several months now. Despite some promising results early on (as mentioned in this post), I am very disappointed with the overall results. Over the past six months, I tested a variety of AuctionAds and ShoppingAds ad blocks from in numerous positions on various sites. As a result of real world obligations I haven’t devoted much time to site development lately and the ad blocks remained in place longer than their performance warranted. Bad for my bank account, but good for testing purposes. The final result? In over six months of testing I made less from these services’ combined totals than I typically make from AdSense in one day.

Both AuctionAds and ShoppingAds allow for product images in their ads and this is one of the reasons I expected them to be successful. However, Google’s targeted ads clearly outperform AuctionAds’ and ShoppingAds’ keyword based ads despite AdSense’s lack of product images.

Unfortunately, I can’t rule out issues with the AA/SA backend as the cause for the low earnings. For example, I received several clicks on the referral based service (AuctionAds) but none on the CPC service (ShoppingAds), a fact that is inconsistent with all other ad blocks during the same period and suggests a problem with unrecorded clicks. Additionally, earnings appeared and disappeared rather frequently on reports from both systems. Bugs are to be expected in new products, but frankly, if I have to devote a significant amount of time to double checking earnings reports, it’s just not worth it for me.

My current recommendation regarding these services is to fight the urge to be an early adopter. Wait until these services become more mainstream and work out the bugs. Currently they require more effort than they are worth given the viability of other alternatives.

Dissecting your site’s Google PageRank April 28, 2007

Posted by Bryan in : Coding , 2 comments

It appears that the Google PageRank update (or ‘export’ to be more exact) that has started and stopped a couple of times over the past weeks is picking up momentum again. We are now showing different page ranks for all of our sites across the various datacenters. This article will provide you with some tools to help you dissect what your site’s current page rank is, why it is there, and where it’s going.

A website’s page rank helps determine a site’s position in Google’s search results for any given search term. Page rank is continually updated internally, but this information is only publicly updated every quarter or so. Because high page ranks can mean big advertising business for websites, the public rollouts are highly anticipated, and many tools have been developed to help predict future page rank scores and to recognize updates as soon as they begin.

The following is a list of some sites that let you check your current page rank across various datacenters: (more…)

Addressing common installation problems with RMagick - CORE_RL_magick.dll & RMagick.so February 26, 2007

Posted by Bryan in : Coding , 5 comments

It seems that two potential areas for problems when installing RMagick are the CORE_RL_magick.dll (or other .dll) “not found” error and errors mentioning RMagick.so.

Having encountered the “CORE_DL_magick.dll not found” error while working on Datechest.com I know that there’s not a lot of information out there about how to fix it. A question on the RMagick rubyforge forums regarding it didn’t even result in an answer. However, the solution is simple and obvious (not to say that it didn’t take me about an hour to realize). Just reboot your development machine. That worked for me and I’ll bet it will work for you.

Apparently, according to this thread, that can work for errors with RMagick.so as well. I’d imagine if you’re installing RMagick on a Windows development machine rebooting after installing would solve or prevent a lot of problems.