This is the blog of Adam Kalsey. Unusual depth and complexity. Rich, full body with a hint of nutty earthiness.
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11 Mar 2002
There’s a new version of the code behind the TextAd Exchange. In addition to some small bugfixes, there are two new major features.
Ad Language. You can set the primary language of your site and then only ads in that language will appear on your site. Since most of the sites that belong to the network are in Spanish or English, those are the first two languages that I’m supporting. Sites in other languages are still allowed. Just use the "Other" category.
Multiple ads per site. Each site an have three ads. Each ad can have a different title, ad body, and link. The traffic reports show the traffic for each individual ad and the cummulative traffic for the site.
If you alread have a Textad account, take a look and set up your new ads. If you don’t have an account already, why not join today?
Good questions. I should have made this more clear. You choose your language when you sign up. For sites that were already part of the ad network, I set the language for each already, so there's nothing for you to do here. Each of the ads you create are in rotation at the same time. So if you have three ads, any of the three may be displayed at any given time. As the features become more complex, I should probably write some documentation to clear these sorts of things up.
I noticed TextAd sets a cookie on the users machine, what's the cookie for?
I've removed it. It was the default per-session cookie that IIS sends by default. The cookies were not saved to your hard disk and the only information the cookie had was an session ID. Since I don't use ASP sessions, there was nothing else stored. As soon as you closed your browser, the cookie was gone.
No big deal. I was just curious if you were doing some type of doubleclick type tracking. :)
How does one set up three ads to go at a time, do we just call the script multiple times, or is there an option to have it generate three unique ads?
Also could we see how many ads we have served and how many clickthroughs we have for our website?
To show three different ads on your site at the same time, just call the script three times. There's no guarantee that all three ads will be different, though. I'm not tracking how many times your site has shown an ad or how many times someone has clicked from your site. I'll consider that for the next upgrade to the ad server.
I really dont get it - I'm running movable type and when ever I paste the ad code into the template for the Main index, the page break and nothing of my text is shown below the ads? I'm not so familar with style sheets so this could what are causing the problem. I have left a page showing the problem at http://www.mejlgaard.dk/blog/problem.html if any body should feel like taking a look
I don't see anything wrong with that page. You have the ad being called twice, ad it is appearing each time.
It would be nice if there was a parameter to the script that would allow me to specify the target of the link. That way when a user clicks on an ad displayed on my site, I could open it in another browser, and chose whether I always send it to _blank or to _parent or to a specific windowname.
I use php to convert the target to a _blank parameter
Great to see that you implemented the language thing, Adam! I guess I'll have to do that in Blogsnob too ;)
This discussion has been closed.
David McDonald
March 12, 2002 2:41 AM
Your Textads are fantastic, and have definately helped traffic towards my site. However, I have a few questions regarding the new features. I can't see where to select the language for my textad? Am I missing something? Also, if I have more than one ad, do they automatically go on rotation? If not, how do I select which ad to use?