WordPress: easy, Ad plugin: not so easy…

You did­n’t expect abject altru­ism, did you?  Are you sur­prised that one of the first things I’d be fig­ur­ing out is how to put ads on my blog?

I’ve been using Google AdWords late­ly.  They seem to be giv­ing away $100 accounts to every­one and their dog — so I final­ly start­ed using one that I set up awhile ago.  How’s that work­ing for me?  Prob­a­bly worth a whole post, but the short answer is we might have got­ten one request for info for fail­safe out of many thou­sands of impres­sions and a few dozen click­throughs and most of the $100 spent.  Since I’m loathe to actu­al­ly spend mon­ey on adver­tis­ing (I know I should, but I find the deci­sion hard nonethe­less), I decid­ed to start a blog on the vain thought that enough peo­ple might read my ram­blings to put some funds into my adwords account.  Fat chance, but hey.  Any­ways, push that on the stack for anoth­er day.  I need sleep soon.

The serv­er I’ve had for­ev­er was still run­ning php4.  That appears to be enough for Word­Press, but not enough for the ad plu­g­in.  These things nev­er give errors that make any sense, but some googling of the error text led me to believe that php4 was the prob­lem.  Of course, upgrad­ing is fraught with risk.  I haven’t heard of any­thing bork­ing on the upgrade from php4 to php5, but change is risk.  Luck­i­ly, there arn’t too many cus­tomers on the machine any­more, so the upgrade is a bit less of a risk.  most of the prob­lems, I can test myself.

The upgrade php4 to ph5 went well, but the FreeB­SD port php5-exten­sions offered a large num­ber of things in it’s con­fig — many of which I select­ed.  This led to a web serv­er not even start­ing.  I reversed all that (hint: remov­ing /var/db/ports/<port name>/options will let the con­fig re-default for you).  After rede­fault­ing and only choos­ing things I absolute­ly need­ed (I’ve left out about 20 diag­nos­tic steps here — sigh… need bed), the web serv­er runs… and the ad injec­tion plu­g­in no longer crashes.

But you won’t see ads yet.  I only just signed up.  Says that it takes a few days.  Maybe there’ll be some more posts on here before they check back.  Maybe not.  This is an exper­i­ment after all.

Next I need to wrap my mind around some high­ly tech­ni­cal arti­cles that peo­ple will actu­al­ly read  with some regularity.