Recently I had a project where I was aked to add visual styls to Openads in an effort to create text that were similar in style to Google’s Adsense ads. Openads is an ads server or an extended banner rotator which allows for stats and all kinds of other features. I won’t get into it, if you need an adserver or want to know more, visit the Openads site directly.

Setting up the text ad is fairly simple. Click on Inventory, Advertisers, Choose the advertiser, Choose or Create a new campaign and then click on add a new banner. I’m hoping you know how to get to that point, otherwise give me a shout and I’ll be happy walk you through it.

Choose “Text Ad” from the dropdown box and you the page will look something like this:

Ok, so now in the big trextarea, lets insert the following:

<font color="blue"><strong>How To Kill Bed Bugs</strong></font>
Kill Bed Bugs with Strei-Fab Spray Buy Now from Nixalite.com
<font color="green">www.nixalite.com/bedbugs.asp</font>


This should end up looking like this when all is said and done:
How To Kill Bed Bugs
Kill Bed Bugs with Strei-Fab Spray Buy Now from Nixalite.com
www.nixalite.com/bedbugs.asp

Now when we publish the text link, just place it in 200px div and voila, you have a sudo adsense text advertisement.

First off, I’d like to wish a happy new year to all of you. I hope that this year is even better than last, and I must admit that last was very good for me!

Alrighty, so one of my clients took my advice and asked me to implement the new ga.js tracking cookie on his site. I didn’t pay much attention to what had changed, and just uploaded the new code without thinking about it. Google offers upgrade, they must insure backwards compatibility right?!?! Naw, that would be way too simple, instead they decide to take Microsoft’s lead and nerf backwards compatibility.

Ok, great, it doesn’t work so how do we fix it? Well, in this case, my client re-directs links to other sites. These redirects are driven via database driven backend and tend to change often enough that they shouldn’t be (and aren’t) hardcoded. To capture these clicks in analytics (which we compare to our own tracking system and notice a less than 5% difference) we used the following in our links:

onClick="javascript:urchinTracker('/outgoing/uniqueID_or_Title');"

and then changed it to

onClick="javascript:pageTracker._trackPageview('/outgoing/uniqueID_or_Title');"


So how will it work out? Hopefully all will be fine and our data will once again be tracked by analytics… if not I’ll let you guys know. BTW: You can find the information on google here: (for both versions of the tracking code)

GA Tracker (new)

Urchin Tracker (old)

Charles