I know you”ve seen the text boxes on numerous websites — you know, the ones that say “Ads by Google” (or “Ads by Goooooogle”). These text ads are a neat, effective way for advertisers to match their advertising money to their target audience.

Google”s Adsense and Adwords programs are a contextual advertising system — Google varies the advertising based on the text content of a particular web page. When a web “publisher” puts up a new page with Google Adsense code, Google”s advertising engine determines in real-time which ads to present on the page.

Usually this initial determination is based on the domain and the web page”s file name. For example, a hypothetical web page www.terryshometheater.com/dvd-players.php would have its initial Adsense ads based on the words: home, theater, dvd and player. Google”s advertising engine is smart enough to parse the domain name and file name, although you can help it with dashes and underscores, if you wish.

Original article posted to blog.TerrysComputerTips.com

Continue reading “Google Adsense Advertising”

I”ve just published this week”s issue of my free, weekly Terry”s Computer Tips newsletter.

Everyone can see the online newsletter version, even without subscribing.

Email subscribers get an extra benefit – they get notices of the newsletters, see the table of contents, and get a special Just for Subscribers article each issue.

Check out my current and archived newsletters, and the rest of the site, at www.TerrysComputerTips.com.

Post-Gazette.com had an interesting article on October 30th, which they still have available on-line.

As described in their article, “How to Survive a Robot Uprising: Tips on Defending Yourself Against the Coming Rebellion” is a humorous book by Daniel H. Wilson. Mr. Wilson is a graduate of Carnegie Mellon University”s Robotics Institute.

Check out the article for an interesting take on the coming of robots.
Buy the book here!

Creating a web site is fun.  Learning that others visit your web site is even better.  But, the web sites you can host for free at your Internet Service Provider are sorely lacking in space and in functionality. When you are ready for the next step, you need a web host that gives you plenty of space and plenty of throughput and no surprise overage charges.  I use Powweb for all my web hosting.

Powweb offers an extremely affordable web hosting package.    Powweb”s standard price a great deal at only $93.24 per year (average $7.77 / month).  The price even includes a free domain name for the 1 or 2 year hosting period that you purchase.

Powweb”s October Special — buy 2 years and get 2 years free — continues until the end of October!  That is such a good deal that I bought a second package with this deal — it is an average cost of $3.89/month.

As an extra bonus, how about a discount coupon code for October?  For use only with the “buy 2 get 2 free” special — You can get $5 off with the code “oct05″ (without the quotes). Buy Your Package Now!

Have you noticed the neat, interactive advertising on my sites (www.TheNextWindow.com, www.TerrysComputerTips.com, www.TerrysHomeTheater.com and www.TerryStockdale.com)?

The above ad is a good example of the interactive Chitika eMiniMall ads. Notice the tabbed interface — and that it changes tabs when you move the mouse cursor over a different tab.

Chitika eMiniMalls are a good alternative to Google”s Adsense in the PPC (pay per click) advertising market. Even better, by setting one of the options, you can use it in addition to Adsense on your web site!

Continue reading “Chitika eMiniMall ads”

OpenOffice.org, the free software suite from the organization the same name, is now available for download as version 2.0 — not just a beta version, not a “pre-release” version — but the real thing!

OpenOffice.org includes a word processor (Writer), spreadsheet (Calc), presentations (Impress), graphics editing (Draw), formula writing (Math), and a database (Base). New to OpenOffice.org v2.0 is the ability to import WordPerfect files.

The database is a new component in OpenOffice.org, while the other functions have been included since earlier days. The file formats, through, have changed from its own specialized formats to OpenDocument XML.

Price, of course, is one of the driving forces in the market place. With a price of FREE and a quality product, OpenOffice.org is poised to grab market share from Microsoft”s lucrative product line “Microsoft Office.”

Read more about OpenOffice.org