Was thinking about the approaching yearly site hosting bill and how it’s gonna get paid … thoughts turned to advertising on my site. This is something I really didn’t want to do, but when needs must …

Two main options I’d looked at before were Google and Amazon ads. Google ads I’d had on a site before for 15 months. The site had had 12000 page views in this time, and the returns – a measly £7. Which of course I hadn’t been paid, because it didn’t reach the Google threshhold. So in the end I’d taken the ads off.

Still £7 was better than no pound? or was it? Did it compensate sufficiently for having ads for American insurance companies plastered all over the site?

I thought Google might have improved things by now so I’d have another go with the Adsense contextual ads. Installed them on an old version of my site for IE only, and while some of the ads were reasonably targetted, there were still a lot of quite inappropriate ads being served to a level that I found offensive.

Also to reach ~£200 yearly hosting bill I would need approximately 350,000 page views in the year – a fair target.

So, to Amazon Associates. I’d signed up to this before but never got as far as putting any ads on a site. I thought what I could do was serve the Amazon ads 50% of the time, and Google the other 50%, then I could compare returns over a period of time.

I wanted to do this using front end code rather than backend as my site for historical reasons is composed of a number of different systems. I didn’t want to go through and modify the different backends. By changing the front end code, it could be done in the common stylesheet and javascript.

This meant having the Amazon and Google javascript in the page at the same time, turning off one or other as appropriate with css. Would that work? No. The pages loaded so slowly that I wasn’t going to get any visitors let alone ad referrals.

So it was a straight choice. Google or Amazon? I played around with Amazon’s widgets then started looking at their aStore feature. First I tried building a list of items by inputting their ISBNs. This was very cumbersome and time consuming, and fairly soon I realised a lot of the books that I’d enjoyed were out of print.

For a second trial I tried using a widget tied to Amazon listmania. Again very cumbersome to setup and now limited to 25 items. Also once I’d got it setup, I found that a number of these books weren’t directly available, so setting up an aStore using this list meant that the viewer had to go through to the Amazon store rather than staying on my site as they weren’t in the main catalogue. And when I deleted these out of print items this broke the aStore – when you first went into it it showed the correct ones then clicking through the pages, it started showing ones that had been deleted. Buggy code.

So while I liked the widgets and I liked the way I could tie them to the aStore, I was having difficulties with the selection of products and the bugs. I decided that I just wasn’t buying enough recent books to be able to recommend a reasonable choice to the viewer.

The final options I decided on – were to set the aStore up to be focussed specifically on the photographers category. Most of the returns seemed ok though I didn’t know all these photographers. A fairly narrow subject selection – but this suited my site which is mostly about photography.

Then I used two widgets – a banner for the old part of the site which is now more of a personal site. A small widget on the more portfolio-ish front part of the site. Both widgets are served to IE only, so if you are reading this you know how to view the site without them until I change things again.

On the front of the main site I included a menu link ‘Recommended’. This links to the aStore site within an iframe. Colours are matched to the existing site. Due to page width I didn’t use any of the aStore widgets on this page, so the end result is quite simple and hopefully effective.

So now wait and see if Amazon performs any better than Google did…

Monitored by SiteUptime

Had another go with jquery. Last time I had tried to use the xml functions for ajax. It worked, kind of, but kept clearing my cookies resulting in needing a nasty workaround to restore them.

This time I was going for something less ambitious – my homepage has a text area that changes depending on which of four graphics your cursor is over. I wanted the text area to slide up, down, in or out or some similar ‘cool’ effect, instead of just switching over.

Got the jquery installed and figured out the jquery code to do this … nice and straightforward – 20 mins. But then trying to get it to work smoothly and in a neat manner … no! The text would slide in and out, but it just wouldn’t work cleanly. After 1 1/2 hours faffing I’d had enough. Looked through the demoes for doing this kind of thing – they were all a bit jerky and just not good enough.

So once again – I like the idea of jquery – but it doesn’t quite work … then there’s the problem if there’s anything wrong with the jquery code – you need to be a javascript master to touch it …

The reworking of the site continues … a new layout largely driven by increasing screen sizes and the requirement for sites to resize to work on many resolutions. Most of the photography on the site – over 1000 images was scanned at 300px high, and isn’t going to get rescanned in a hurry – the new design needs to take into account the fixed fairly small images but increasing screen space that site pages need to take up.

So after less than a year I find myself redesigning the photography part of the site, the design which I still quite like, though I’ve spent too much time working on it and am a bit fed up of the black and gray.

The rest of the site is done to the new layout – no loss on the design for that part of the site; the content has been culled, restructured and reprioritised – now the parts of the site that are going to get new content are more readily available. The whole site has one design, off one style sheet, with one master template; and while I’m not so happy with the new design it will be possible to modify the whole sites look easily and regularly as I get tired of it and feel it needs a refresh.

Still a couple of weeks before everythings done … but things are moving along nicely.

A last look at the old design before it disappears:

here is the preview video for the Fungaloids game. Programmed originally by Michael Orwin, this is the remake for PC submitted to the Retro Remakes 2003 competition

Download Fungaloids here

Here’s the preview video from the ZX81 Caverns game:

Download Caverns here

Got through the majority of Professional Search Engine Optimization with ASP.net, though it did have some snippets that were interesting, couldn’t help but feel a lot of this has already been widely covered. Some of the chapters were very brief – black hat SEO in 30 pages? and some seemed very light on useful information. Still as a round up it wasn’t too bad, and got through it in a morning … I do wonder how much more I should really have read that is not covered in the book though. The technical areas that were the most interesting, it introduced but tend to say the detail was beyond the scope of the book.

Areas that may have been overlooked by developers were outlined in the chapters on duplicate content through multiple urls referencing the same material through parameters/canonicalization, and presenting HTTP status codes correctly to SE.

Content relocation is an area of difficulty where 301 redirects are not available to the developer/SEO person. URL rewriting has probably been discussed/implemented by many developers these days.

A couple of chapters while interesting didn’t seem like core issues or have been covered widely before: link bait, sitemaps and cloaking … the chapter on building an ecommerce site was poor.

Added new photographs from the Bradford Carnival or “Lord Mayor’s Parade” in July 2009. Once again this was brilliant with some fantastic costumes and street dancing …

Also added a page to show some the web design/development I’ve done over the past few years. Hopefully will keep this up to date.

Rates:
c# : http://www.itjobswatch.co.uk/jobs/uk/csharp.do

css : http://www.itjobswatch.co.uk/contracts/uk/css.do

graphic design : http://www.itjobswatch.co.uk/contracts/uk/graphic%20design.do

The North quarter of Manchester … another part of Manchester totally changed since my last wander round – probably not that long ago. Quite funkyfied – once only worth going there for Afflecks Palace – now lots of places to check out, including some good record shops.

Urbis had an exhibition of video games which I had to have a look at … 3 pounds in, that would have paid for 30 games of space invaders in myyyy day! But also apart from a fleeting mention of the ZX81 and BBc Micro, the video games were somewhat after my time. I was struck my how small the keyboard for the ZX Spectrum appeared, but then our hands may have been smaller in those days. Not sure what the need to have playable setups of the latest consoles was – wouldn’t it have been better to have games that you can’t see normally? Still I suppose everyone has there own nostalgia region for the machines they owned or played – maybe next time they should fill the whole of Urbis…

On the 2nd floor was an exhibition of modern art largely from New York, but I was more taken with the photography exhibition on the third floor, constructed images of Manchester the lightbox images were especially beautiful. Andrew Paul Brooks constructed the images digitally to make part real and part fictional visions of Manchester locations.

Manchester Art Gallery was sadly between exhibitions, and not a lot going on in there I hadn’t seen – there was a Peter Fraser photograph which reminded me of one of my tutors telling me I must get to see one of his books, but this was now rare, and I never saw. The image didn’t seem like it would be one of his best, still a nice reminder. Also Cornerhouse was between exhibitions – I left quickly in case I started buying lots of expensive magazines from the shop.