Gone Geocaching

It’s been awhile since I first came across the concept of Geocaching and today we are finally geared up to give it a try as a family! For those who are unfamiliar, Geocaching is a sort of community driven scavenger hunt where someone places a hidden container at a set of coordinates and then posts those coordinates at Geocaching.com for others to find. The caches are sometimes just a log book to be signed and sometimes contain small objects to be exchanged.  In order to play you need a GPS unit. Since we have finally gotten ourselves a GPS enabled device we are ready to go out and find us some treasure!.  I will do a more detailed review post about this interesting social phenomenon after I’ve tried it for myself.  In the mean time take a moment to answer this short poll:

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See you on the Geocaching trail!

Some reading on the subject:

Another quick poll: Monetizing a Kid's Blog

I’ve been thinking about whether or not it would be appropriate to put carefully selected advertising and affiliate links on a blog written by and for kids. Please share your opinions on this subject!

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Monetizing for new bloggers

I’ve known for awhile that, if I really want to make a go at blogging, there needs to be some compensation involved. With this in mind I set out to see what could be done, as a new comer with few visitors, to set up some potential revenue streams. Once a blog gains some staying power in terms of both content and traffic it is easier to gain acceptance with some of the advertising networks with more stringent guidelines.

I see monetization on a blog as a multi-front effort that can be broken down into several areas.

  • In Post – Here we have affiliate links to products that are mentioned
  • Around the page – Contextual ads and buttons in the header, footer, sidebar and between posts.
  • Mobile – ads targeted to mobile visitors
  • In the Feed
  • Email Subscription Ads
  • Search Page Ads

I am not suggesting that anyone fill every available space with advertising. As a new publisher several doors were closed to me. I was rejected by both Yahoo Publisher’s Network and text-ads.

For Mobile ads there are two primary options. These are Admob and Adsense for mobile. Since I have a plugin that handles making my site mobile friendly and it has admob already integrated that is what I chose to use for my sites. I would be interested in hearing feedback on these two options.

For advertising in feeds there are also two options. I do not consider Adsense for feeds to be an option since it appears to be in a perpetual closed beta cycle. This leaves Pheedo, which focuses specifically on advertising in RSS feeds, and Bidvertiser, which serves contextual ads as it’s primary platform but is running feed based advertising as an open beta. I ran Pheedo on a blog with 11k subscribers for a few days and have not switched to bidvertiser. The switch to Bidvertiser was mainly due to the fact that they have a WordPress plugin. Pheedo required that I either burn the feed with them, or modify every one of my rss templates. I will see how Bidvertiser performs over the next week or so and then determine where to go from there.

Options that are currently being testing on this site:

I chose to limit this list to category based and contextual advertising networks, with the exception of Amazon.

Plugins:

  • All in One Adsene & YPN
  • Ask Apache Firefox Adsense – This one is kind of cool. Only those that meet the guidelines for payment are actually shown the ad. So windows users in IE get the ad, Firefox users and Non-windows do not.
  • Adsense manager – This does much more than adsense. It’s a good way to keep track of the ads that I’ve set up in adsense and then I can insert them where I choose.
  • Bidvertiser ads for feeds (Download plugin after adding feed to publisher account)
  • WordPress Mobile (Admob ads) This is the most reliable mobile plugin I’ve tried.

I’m still on the hunt for a great plugin for handling Amazon links. There are a few that are promising but I haven’t narrowed it down completely. I’m leaning strongly toward a combination of the following two plugins. AmazonSimpleAdmin and AVH Amazon (Wishlist Widget)

Note about ads in feeds: On initial inspection Pheedo seems better in many ways than Bidvertiser for inserting ads into rss feeds. The ads seem to appear more often and seem to be from higher quality advertisers. This subject will be revisited in more detail at some point in the near future.

Image by Tracy O

Firefox – Loaded

I’ve been using the Firefox web browser almost exclusively for a few years. Initially I found that I needed to have IE ready to launch in order to see the seemingly large number of sites that had created websites that wouldn’t display unless you had one of the browsers for which the site had been optimized. This is not the case today. Most of the websites that I visit have “seen the light.” Ok, so they might not be producing XHTML compliant code or css based design but things are certainly better than they once were.

Firefox has amazing potential to be whatever someone wants it to be through the use of plugins. I am a sucker for extensibility. I love taking a solid core and making it behave just the way that I want. I am still amazed, at times, that so many individuals will not only create applications to do a staggering array of things, but also offer them up to the whole world to use and, in the case of open source, modify.

I recently went on a plugin rampage in Firefox. I figured I’d share some of what I am now using. There are some social networking plugins. I can access most of what I need at any moment with just a few clicks or hot keys. What I can’t get right into Firefox I have found iGoogle widgets to suit my needs. Some of the plugins I’m using at the moment will be removed and others will be added, but here’s my current list of 31 plugins: generated by the Extension List Dumper plugin, actually… [Read more...]