A couple weeks ago, I noticed that this site and Life of Brian were serving up nothing but Big Brother and Big Sister ads. This happened more or less at the same time that I experimented with putting some Adfly links around the site.

It turns out the problem wasn’t some kind of AdSense / AdFly rivalry at all. It was me, making a few changes to other advertising. I had been using ContextWeb (previously AdsDaq) to serve up some ads on these two websites.

The way the service worked, you got paid per impression. You set a PPM price (a bid, basically), and if there was an advertiser willing to pay it then the AdsDaq / ContextWeb ad showed. Otherwise, it defaulted to a “backup ad” – in this case, AdSense.

Well, these weren’t performing very well, so I turned them off. Apparently, when I paused the ads in the ContextWeb dashboard, that killed the script altogether. Instead of defaulting to the backup ads (AdSense), it just showed those public service ads. Doh…

I went back and put the AdSense ad scripts into the theme directly, and regular AdSense ads starting showing up again. It’s nice to know there’s no problem; it’s a bit annoying that it took me two weeks to figure out I was the problem.

Well, there’s another company on the scene – Bigger Bidder – with a similar business model. Bigger Bidder hosts penny auctions, just like QuiBid. People “bid” on stuff, just like they would on eBay, and each bid increases the price one penny. At the end, you pay for the final bid, you pay for the shipping, and you get the item.

So… How Does That Work?

Here’s how it works.

Bids are not free. Each bid costs you $0.68. When you place a bid, you use a bid… in other words, you just spent $0.68.

So let’s take an example (and yes, this is a real example from the website). On September 23, an auction ended for an Apple iPad 2. The final price was $15.09. Shipping was an additional $20.00.

The final bidder paid $35.09 out of pocket for a brand new iPad 2. Awesome! Right? Maybe.

Let’s say the winner placed one final bid and happened to win. That would be an awesome deal. But, if the price increased to $15.09, there were 1,509 bids placed. Let’s say the winner was bidding heavily for the last couple hours, and placed 100 bids. Well, then he spent $68 in bids alone. Still a good deal; around $100 with the final price and shipping.

How does Bigger Bidder make money? All the other bids. In this case, 1,509 bids x $0.68/bid = $1,026. That’s double the retail price of the item, so assuming they got some kind of wholesale price they made a nice profit on this. The trick (or luck) of it is to get in at the end of an auction. If you bid too early, you either invest a lot of money (and don’t save anything) or just end up giving up and wasting all your money.

Are There Deals to Be Had?

Most definitely. Somebody won an Apple TV for $0.02 + $15 shipping. Less than $20, for an item that costs $100 on Amazon? A Dell Inspiron laptop (retail $900) also went for $0.02.

I don’t quite understand the rhyme or reason behind these auctions ending so low. I guess it’s just plain dumb luck… but if you can get lucky, you can definitely get a good deal. It may also be that the user base is still relatively small, so there are auctions ending at weird times of the day where you won’t have competition. A larger site, like QuiBids, will have a more steady buying audience and thus more stable end prices.

The Best Part?

You can get free bids. Sign Up through this link and you can get 150 free bids.

You might not win anything… but at least you can try the site out without wasting your own money. Just think, that’s about $100 worth of bids. Isn’t it worth trying to snag some nice piece of electronics at a discount price? And if you lose, just keep on moving!

Seemed simple enough. Shorten a URL, send people to it, make some cash on impressions.

This site and my other old blog both have a little bit of residual traffic that comes to them, despite the fact that I don’t really update them in any meaningful way. I figured if I added a few links to the end of each post (think related posts, with adfly links going to outside sources), I might be able to make a few bucks off those readers.

So I wrote up a short script, inserted it into both themes, and forgot about it for a few days. Today, I came back to look at something on the site and I noticed that all of my Adsense ads had changed to public service announcements (Big Brothers and Big Sisters, to be exact). The same thing had happened on both this domain and life-of-brian.com.

My other blog, the one that I still update and hadn’t put any Adfly links on, was still serving up regular Adsense ads. They’re all on the same Adsense account, too.

My guess, then, is that the crawler noticed the Adfly links and that flagged something in the system. Maybe there’s something in the Adsense ToS that I should have read before I tried this, oops. But keep in mind that if you try posting Adfly links on your legitimate Google AdSense website, you may jeopardize AdSense as a source of revenue. So you’d better make more money from those Adfly links than from the AdSense…

I like writing tutorials/educational stuff (which is the way this site began), and this falls into that niche. Photography is an increasingly important hobby of mine, and this new site will give me a chance to organize my thoughts about photography and also help out others.

As an exercise for myself, I’m also maintaining a Picture of the Day section of the site. The goal is to look through Flickr for one nifty photo each day, post it on the site, and then explain what I do/don’t like about it. You get better by looking at the work of others…

Another ulterior motive is that I want to help promote my other project: Olinda Gibbons Photography. Ideally, Digital Photography How To can be used to generate some ad revenue, but I’d be happy if I can also use it to channel some link juice and traffic back to that site. Ultimately, the photography itself will be much more lucrative for Olinda and me than the writing about it…

Although it’s kind of a work in progress, it’s up, live, and fully functional. I wrote a little bit about how I designed the site elsewhere, and I plan on writing up some more information in the future. That info will likely appear in a new blog portion of olinda-gibbons.com.

In the meantime, one highlight to check out is the portraits portfolio page. It was made possible by a combination of the galleria jquery plugin and the NextGen gallery plugin for WordPress.

I wrote up a series of short articles on Associated Content explaining the basics of exposure. If you’re starting out with photography and feel that you’re ready to break out of the “auto” mode on your camera, they’re a good read. The more you read about photography and how everything works together to create an image, the better you’ll be.

What Does the Aperture Setting of a Camera Do? The aperture is the size of the hole that lets light into your camera. Bigger hole = more light, smaller hole = less light. But, this also affects the depth of field – how much of an image will be in focus. Read the article for more details.

What Does the Shutter Speed Setting of Your Camera Do? The shutter speed is how long light is allowed to shine on your cameras image sensor (or film, if you’ve got a film camera). Keeping the shutter open longer allows in more light, and keep it open for a shorter period of time allows in less light. But… this also affects whether your picture will be blurry or not. Read the article for more details.

What Does the ISO Setting On Your Digital Camera Do? The ISO rating determines how sensitive your camera’s image sensor is to the light coming in. Turn the rating up, and your sensor will be more sensitive and create a brighter image. But, this also creates more “noise” – little pixelly speckles that can ruin your photo. Read the article for more details.

The Dell Inspiron 2600, on the other hand, was troublesome. I finally have it working now, and I’ve written a couple articles on my other blog about the process. These aren’t in depth tutorials, but they’re meant to help point people in the right direction if they have similar problems.

Installing Ubuntu on a Dell Inspiron 2600. This seemingly simple task was complicated by the fact that the integrated graphics card doesn’t seem to work with most Ubuntu installations. I found some suggestions that Ubuntu 8.04 worked, and eventually it did after I modified the settings and specified the correct graphics driver. Read more about this in the full article.

Adding RAM to a Dell Inspiron 2600. This should have been simple, but it wasn’t. The machine reported 320mb of installed RAM, but I could only find one memory module – a 256mb memory module located underneath the mother board. After skimming through the documentation a couple times, I found that there was a second location to install a memory module located on the other side of the motherboard (underneath the keyboard). I followed the Dell documentation to disassemble the laptop and install another 256mb chip (which replaced the presumably original 64mb RAM chip).

I have been updating my other blog a bit, but its mostly inconsequential posts about my training as a runner.

I have, however, been doing some writing for Associated Content. I’ve amassed a decent amount of pageviews there (170k), and I’m close to hitting the second highest ranking on the site – Clout 9. If I keep writing articles, I’ll hit that benchmark in a month or two. The next goal would be to hit Clout 10, which would require 3-400k pageviews. These are fun goals, but they also bring with them higher pay-outs per pageview… so there’s a point.

Anyhow, here’s a quick rundown of some of the articles I’ve written recently.

Where Can I Find a Replacement Lens Cap for My Nikon Coolpix P80? I lost the lens cap for my P80, and I had a hell of a time finding a replacement. Nikon doesn’t seem to manufacture the part anymore, but I found a third party vendor on Ebay. Very useful article, if you happen to have the same model camera.

What is the Derivative of a Function? I’ve been working with some kids at school on Calculus, so I thought it would be interesting to try my hand at explaining math concepts online. I might expand this work into a larger site in the future, but for now I want to get some thoughts on paper, as it were.

How to Remove an Autorun Virus from Your Flash Drive. We had a nasty infection on our school network recently, and I spent a lot of time cleaning autorun viruses off my flash drive. I found a quicker way to handle it, through a basic DOS batch script, explained in the article.

In the late Spring, I got burnt out and kind of lost momentum to continue posting things. Ironically, the site was increasing in traffic and readership. Doh.

I was otherwise occupied throughout the summer (Damn you, WoW!). When the school year swung around, and I officially quit WoW, I decided it was time to revive my old web development/publishing pursuits.

However, for a variety of reasons, I chose not to just pick up with this site and continue. For one thing, I wanted to combine a handful of projects into one, manageable project. One reason I stopped posting here was to work on a blog about World of Warcraft. My new project – This Life of Brian – incorporates a couple of different topics/websites under one umbrella. It makes it a lot easier to keep things up to date.

Also, I grew tired of this domain name. It sounded catchy at first, but now I think it’s a bit spammy. I had a couple articles do well on Digg, and some commenters pointed out the domain name. Doh.

I’m now in the process of slowly migrating the archives of this site to my new project. They’ll all be contained in the web development and publishing section of the site – Nerds at Work. It’s pretty well segregated from the other topics (online gaming, education, and random blogging pursuits). It’s got its own theme and its own RSS feed.

I’m also hosting all of my new content at that site, and this site will no longer be updated. I just renewed the domain for another year, so this site will be here until next December. However, don’t expect anything new here… and hopefully all of the old articles will be at Nerds at Work by the spring time.

So what are you waiting for? Head on over and check out my latest work.

Google Reader provides you with a nifty tool to help you do this. With the “Share” feature of Google Reader, you can easily syndicate a list of articles that you recently read and found interesting.

Get a Google Account: Start Reading

If you don’t use Google Reader – or another feed reader – start using one. Until you use RSS feeds on a daily basis, you’ll never know how wonderful they are, and you’ll never know how much your readers may come to rely on them.

Once I decide I like a site, I generally read it through Google Reader. If an article is interesting, I’ll click through to the site and comment on it. Other than that, I rarely go back to the site. Without the RSS reader, I’d probably never return to the site at all.

An RSS reader is a great way to collect relevant readings into one location – so you can sit there with your cup of coffee and read all of the new stuff out in the blogosphere. You can then decide what is important enough to comment on (on someone else’s blog) or respond to (on your own blog).

Share Items – Creating Your Own Feed

With Google Reader, there is a cool “Share” feature. At the bottom of the article you are reading, there’s a list of options – “Add Star,” “Share,” “E-mail,” and “Mark as Read.”

By choosing the “Share” option you are adding that article to a publicly viewable list. That list also generates its own RSS feed – which makes it easy for you to syndicate the feed on your own site. By doing so, you provide your readers with a list of articles that you recently read and found interesting.

It’s a more targeted and stable than a standard RSS feed that just shows every headline from a given website – which will hopefully make it more useful for your readers.

Grab the Widget, Style Yourself

This feed is available in a standard rss xml file. You could use SimpleXML to parse the feed and display the information yourself. Or, you could use the ready-made widget that Google provides.

The Google widget uses Javascript to access the information while your page is loading. This potentially stops your page from hanging if the Google server is not responding – the rest of the page can load while the RSS feed is updated. You can find this widget by clicking on the “Your shared items” link in Google Reader and clicking on the “put a clip of your shared items” link.

The only problem is that the pre-designed styles don’t offer you a lot of options for making the list blend in with your site’s theme. My suggestion would be to select “None,” for the color scheme. You may also want to leave the title blank, and add your own title to the feed.

If you do this, the feed will be generated with the following HTML. Note: This example uses the “Show item sources” option.

<div id="readerpublishermodule0" class="reader-publisher-module">
  <ul>
    <li>
      <a class="i" title="Good for Hunters, Bad for Druids" href="http://4thehorde.wordpress.com/2008/04/25/good-for-hunters-bad-for-druids/">Good for Hunters, Bad for Druids</a>
      <div class="s">from <a href="http://4thehorde.wordpress.com">For the Horde</a></div>
    </li>
    <li>
      <a class="i" title="Bornakk: Druids Not to be &quot;Big Green Blobs&quot;" href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/%7Er/Resto4Life/%7E3/279629927/">Bornakk: Druids Not to be "Big Green Blobs"</a>
      <div class="s">from <a href="http://www.resto4life.com">Resto4Life</a></div>
    </li>
  </ul>
  <div class="f"><a href="http://www.google.com/reader/shared/user/18391951200330501918/state/com.google/broadcast">Read more...</a></div>
</div>

By taking a look at this example HTML, you can easily style the widget yourself.

The entire thing is contained in a div with class “reader-publisher-module.” Each headline is contained within its own “li.” If you use the option to display the source of the article, it’s in a div with class “s” inside the list item.

My one gripe with Google Reader is I can’t create multiple shared lists. For example, I’ve divided blogs I read into ones related to web development and ones related to World of Warcraft. I’d love to be able to create a shared article list for each topic, so that I can syndicate each one on a different website.

If you want to see this in action, check out my World of Warcraft blog, Rolling Horde. It’s on the right hand side, in the middle column, underneath the recent articles.