The Blog of Xangis

Today was pretty random. I worked a little on everything.

I spent a good chunk of the morning researching on the Digitalpoint forums and discovered a little about how Google Adwords works. Apparently it was silly of me to create just one ad to show for a campaign - the general idea is that you’re supposed to create a handful, maybe half a dozen, and as the campaign runs you should drop the bad ones and replace them with variants of the good ones. My abysmal click through rate is what deactivated my ads and though I’ve modified it and created a new batch they haven’t started up yet. I may have to remove the whole campaign and start over. We’ll see whether it picks back up overnight.

I installed and figured out how to use the PHPLinkDirectory software, meant for creating DMOZ-style directories. I have a niche directory I’m working on, thanks to brilliant inspiration from Suzanne, and I’m sure I’ll mention it in a few days when it’s not completely empty. Even better, since it was her idea, she knows what links to fill it with better than I do.

I added “Brave New World” to fictionclassics.com and a few manuals to soundprogramming.net. I also did some work on my upcoming domains. The neatest thing I figured out was including a Google AdSense search bar in SoundProgramming.Net. There wasn’t a search bar module for Drupal, so I figured out how to create my own content block, dropped in the code, and made a change to fix the incompatibility. Drupal uses “q=” in its URLs and so does Drupal, but apparently the parameter in a Google URL can be changed to “as_q=” and it still works.

I also signed up for seomeeting.com forums because it was an Adsense revenue sharing forum. It turns out that the post activity there is pretty abysmal, so I don’t expect anything to come of it.