As I mentioned in a previous entry I’m sick of AdSense so had started to look around for a replacement. After making a few enquiries I came up with AdBrite

Their ads work a little different to Google’s they are not content specific, instead advertisers bid to have their ads included on your page. They also have a funky feature called ‘in-line’ ads, what happens is that you insert a little javascript into your page body and then certain words get a double underline. When you hover over these words little pop up ads appear, quite cool.

You can also run them alongside AdSense as they are not contextual, so I will leave both on the page and compare performance.

We have visitors staying with us and they make a lot of noise in the bathroom. They also jump around a lot at night and knock things over in the kitchen. This evening they wouldn’t let Nuth go to the toilet without watching her and once or twice they got a bit too close and she screamed. They also like climbing everywhere, hanging from the ceiling and jumping over your head when you least expect it.

They are tree frogs you see, incredible things, you would not believe a frog could climb like a monkey until you see it. They get everywhere, we seem to have a whole family of them from very small ones to big fat ones.

I’ll try and get some pictures tomorrow if one of them sits still long enough.

A few years ago I was looking around for a CMS to build a site for a gaming clan. After taking a look at all the major contenders I found a PHP-Nuke fork named Dragonfly. It looked good, it had phpBB integrated as the forum solution which was a big bonus. So I installed it and gave it a chance. What followed was a lot of pain, what looked good on the outside was basically a bunch of code hacks, the theme integration was laughable with 3 separate templates needed, one for the main site, one for the forum and one for the gallery. Of course, there was no global CSS, each template used it’s own and there were HTML tags hard coded all over the place.

I stuck with it and got a nice site up and running, the main problem is this site can never be upgraded to the current stable release of Dragonfly due to the amount of code fixes I had to make.

Earlier this year I was opening another site, again Dragonfly fit the bill nicely, I figured it must have matured enough to be usable. Again on the surface it all looked good but it wasn’t long before I was running into all the same old problems again, matured? It’s hardly changed in the last couple of years.

I stuck with it, making good use of the support forums although the developers and moderators are a bunch of tossers who would rather post cryptic replies to questions than real answers, I think this is to cover up for the fact that they don’t even know how the thing works. Eventually after a couple of weeks hard work I had the CMS and the new site knocked into shape.

During these two weeks something that really pissed me off happened. I went to the Dragonfly website to search the forums for a solution to one problem or another and I landed at an almost blank page. The only text on the page said the developer of the CMS was fed up and was shutting the whole project down. So there I am, along with thousands of other people with a website running a CMS that will no long be supported and no bug fixes released (like they were anyway).

A few days later the site re-opened, it seemed the guy had gotten over his tantrum and changed his mind. But to me the damage has been done, I will never touch Dragonfly again. I have removed all code credits from my site, the developers don’t deserve to be acknowledged due to their childish behaviour and disregard for their user base.

So now I’m on the hunt for the ultimate CMS again, pickings look slim.

6 clickthroughs today in the first hour, they earned me $0.28 in total, what use is that? Google have come out with the new ’smart pricing’ algorithm which put simply means the more clicks you get the less you get paid!?! What the hell?

I think I’m going to start looking around for a new provider, I really cannot make a living at $0.05 a click. I took a look at Yahoo! Search Marketing but they want at least 20 million (yep you read that right) page views a month minimum before they will accept you.

I think I’ll go take a look at the forums over at www.talkgold.com and see if somebody can recommend something as an AdSense replacement.