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.
Keep your WP updated or you’ll get mounds of spam, and worse, security exploits galore. WP is the ’90s sendmail of the ’10s.
You better put some captchaing in here too, tho my wayward never-posted-to-blog has spam farms posting with real humans to it, still have to delete posts manually, if I cared to.
Well… right now, you didn’t even get posted until I ‘approved’ you. There’s oodles of plugins and options, but it’s cool that this worked.
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