Blogging Techstacks

Another Microsoft Store Sale

If anyone is looking to buy a new PC, the Microsoft Store is having another sale on select desktops, notebooks, and netbooks while supplies last.  Here are the details.

On Advertisements

You may have noticed that I've been making some changes to the site over the past few days.  My blog was starting to look more like a park page then an actual blog!  I don't think I'm completely finished yet but thought that a post documenting the changes would help explain what I'm doing and why I'm doing it.

A couple days ago, there was a survey on AdSense that I participated in and whenever I participate in one of these "blog monetization" surveys, a period of introspection and re-prioritization ultimately follows.  I began selling ad space via AdSense for the same reason everyone else does—we all think we're going to get rich from Internet ad revenue. The reality is far from the fantasy however.

This site has been live for about 2.25 years now and I've been 'selling' adsense ads pretty much since day one.  I've yet to reach $50 from these ads.  If there are 2 clicks on an Adsense ad in a month, it's been an unusually good month. I've been an Amazon Affiliate partner now for about the same amount of time and although I get many more clicks for these types of advertisements, I only had 1 sale in 2008 and 1 sale in 2009.  I've experimented with other types of affiliate networks as well and although there are a lot of clicks, no one really buys.  So, the results of my advertising experiment so far boils down to this:

1. AdSense ads have a relatively high pay-per-click but the number of clicks on a technology blog that deals with Open Source web and application servers is extremely low.  The number of Firefox users visiting this site is much higher than the industry norm and I'm assuming Adblock Plus has a part to play in this as well, or, the Adsense ads just aren't that good.  I don't really know.
2. Affiliate ads (offers for product and services from sources like Amazon, Symantec, GoDaddy, etc) are very high in relation to the number of Adsense ads clicked.  However, no one is buying.  A friend of mine says that when he sees an advertisement from Amazon, for example, that he thinks is useful, instead of clicking the ad, he'll open a new tab his browser and go to Amazon directly so this type of ad on my blog essentially becomes a free advertisement for Amazon.

I'm not ready to completely pack it in yet but I think that these experiments have prevented this blog from attaining a higher reach.  Here is a summary of the changes I have implemented to this site:

1. I cleaned up the Navigation Bar.  There are now only links to the home pages for the different sites I'm running under the techstacks.com umbrella.  I used to also include links to popular categories on this blog, but, to be honest, I don't think they were used that often.  I also moved the nav bar back underneath the main site banner.  
2. I started a new blog this weekend called Techstacks Promos.  It's the Promotions and Events link in the navigation bar above.  There were several reasons for setting up a separate site:
   • As I already mentioned, there were way too many image-based ads on this blog.  The site was starting to look gaudy. 
   • I didn't want people to think that this site was a content warehouse, designed to attract search engine traffic for ad referrals.  This blog was meant to be (and still remains) a place to go to find information to help people get out of a bind.
   • Although the products or services I link to I think other might find useful, posting them to the main blog was a mistake.  Many of these items are useful but they certainly don't warrant being the featured article on a tech blog and since I post to this blog fairly regularly, a post regarding a sale on the Microsoft Store could fall onto "Page 2" fairly quickly.
3. I removed most of the ad banners and buttons on this site.  I think the AdSense ad on the right is fairly small and unobtrusive but the AdSense banner at the top of the blog was removed as well as the other banners and buttons.
4. I re-worked the "Subscribe" section of the site.  I got rid of all the individual buttons to subscribe in popular feed readers and feed aggregators, replacing it with a simple link at the top to Subscribe to the Feed, Follow on Twitter, or Follow in TypePad.  If you click the Subscribe to Feed link above, your computer's default settings for news feeds should kick in and load the reader or browser-based feed aggregator that you prefer.  Because the buttons looked pretty much the same as the ad buttons, I suspect no one even looked at them.   The subscribe to section is now at the top "above the fold" and, therefore, easier to find.
5. In the near future, I will probably add a button for the Techstacks Promos sites on the sidebar or a Recent Posts section.  This is because I do think that people might find these offers useful but I do not anticipate adding any new posts or product links in the future to this blog.

Let me know what you think.  Is this better?  Not far enough?  Does any one have any thoughts on what I should be doing (or what I should stop doing)?

Book Review: Apache Roller 4.0 Beginner's Guide

As I pointed out in my last post regarding Roller, when I first started blogging almost 3 years ago, I was looking at Roller as my blog engine of choice but the learning curve on the product seemed a bit steep for someone with no experience in this medium. I actually did give Roller a spin for a brief period of time but then became frustrated with the lack of well-written documentation and felt that I wouldn't get off and running easily if I needed to worry not only about the content itself but also managing Roller's internals as well. Too bad for me that this book came out three years later because the Apache Roller 4.0 Beginner's Guide by Alfonso Romero is a near-perfect introduction to blogging and blogging with Apache Roller.

The book's first three chapters cover blogging in general, how to use Roller as your blog engine, and how to get up and running using on Windows or Linux platforms. Detailed instructions are provided for integrating with the techstack that many of us web and middleware administrators are already familiar with: linux, apache, mysql, and tomcat.

Later chapters cover almost everything one would need to know in order to use Roller for creating content, working with images or video, and how to customize styles and templates to get the look you want. I liked how Mr. Romero also included information on dealing with some of the 'gotchas' that one were to come across during normal Roller use. One example is dealing with file upload sizes larger than 1MB and easy-to-follow steps for solving that issue.

Some of the other things that I liked that were included in this guide are tips for blog promotion on various social networking sites (including my villain, Technoroti) but one item missing that I thought might be useful for beginning bloggers as well as bloggers new to Roller was information on search engine optimization. For a blogger like myself who gets 85% of his site's traffic from search engines, I would love to know how to customize individual posts or templates for search engine optimization. Maybe that will be covered in the Intermediate User's Guide (hint, hint!).

To close, the Apache Roller 4.0 Beginner's Guide is a well-written and well-edited book if you want to get up-close and personal with Apache Roller.  For bloggers looking to use Roller as their personal or business weblog engine, this book provides pretty much everything one needs to know to get started and I highly recommend getting this book.  

Buy the Apache Roller 4.0 Beginner's Guide direct from the Publisher or get the Apache Roller 4.0 Beginner's Guide book from Amazon.

---

Disclaimer:  I am not being paid by the author, the publisher, or any other entity to provide a review on this book.  I was asked by the publisher to do a review of this book and the publisher provided me with a free reviewer's copy.  Some of the links in this review are affiliate links and I could get paid a referral fee in the event someone were to buy a copy of this book after clicking on one of these links.