About TextAds

February 3, 2002 6:34 PM

I looked on the about page, the front page, and elsewhere, but could not find a single link to the adwords page. Big barrier to entry that.
Also, would it be possible to use the adwords on other sites by including a piece of code, etc?
posted by Neale to MetaFilter-Related at 6:34 PM (8 comments total)

Do you mean a link to this page? There's a link to it right on the front page, right over the textad itself; it reads, "T E X T A D   I N F O R M A T I O N".

As for being able to include them on other sites, that's a great idea.
posted by webmutant at 6:43 PM on February 3, 2002

There's a link to it right on the front page

Weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee! So blindingly obvious to be blinding. Maybe, then, a link to it from the about page?
posted by Neale at 6:47 PM on February 3, 2002

Hmm, might want to update that page with the new price, Matt.
posted by whatnotever at 8:52 PM on February 3, 2002

Yeah, I should add a link on the About page, and no, I don't feel like farming out the ads to any other sites. That's what adfarm.org and textads.biz are for.

Yeah, I should update the prices, thanks for the catch.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 12:06 AM on February 4, 2002

We are just about to start using this. It's open source, and appears to work well. It is presently being used at Rini.org. You can't argue with free.
posted by RobertLoch at 9:23 AM on February 4, 2002

Well free is all well and good, but when it craps out or someone finds a bug, is Bill going to jump up and fix it for you? If someone doesn't understand all the code going into the codebase, I would suggest using some hosted service that you give a kickback to, so you don't have to worry about servers going down or someone exploiting bugs in strange code.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 9:40 AM on February 4, 2002

I take what you are saying mathowie, and agree that it is solid advise. Yeah you can argue very much with free. That was a stupid comment by me.

However if this is something that can be done easily - time will tell - it doesn't seem worthwhile to hand over part of the loot unnecessarily. I don't know how complicated the whole process is - obviously you are in a better position to judge.

Still I also like the fact that he is attempting to open textads up to the masses for - and therefore will give it a try. We'll probably have a trial period where we run cpa text ads rather than paid for ones. He say that he is happy to jump in and fix things and has been testing this for sometime now.



posted by RobertLoch at 10:02 AM on February 4, 2002

mathowie, actually, yes I will jump in and fix it. :-)

I've been running it on my site at Rini.org for several months now (actually using the same CMS as Robert) and they asked if they might use it as well. I've spent several weeks prepping it just so that it won't break. Trying it out on different server configurations and basically beating the hell out of it the best I can. Robert will offer some feedback and yes, I'll be fixing anything that comes up as soon as they tell me about it.

Also it runs on your server, not mine so there is no worry of servers going down . . . unless your server goes down in which case, you're not serving ads anyway :-)

It's opensource so you can hack away at it if you want but anybody who reports a bug will get a pretty quick reply. I really think that the community needs an open source alternative right now. I could have charged money or made it a hosted service or whatever but I've used PostNuke, Slashdot, etc. Hell my servers run Linux, Apache, PHP, Perl and MySQL. I've benefited a great deal from the collective work of many people and if I can offer some small project back so webmasters don't have to fork over 10% - 15% of an already absurd $2.00 CPM, and it keeps some blogger that I enjoy up and running, great.


posted by billman at 10:23 AM on February 4, 2002