Category Archives: Commercial

Commercial, politics

Cook/TCP speaking event.

177 Comments

Those interested in the TCP project will likely want to reserve tickets to attend John Cook’s presentation of the results from the 97% project. This event is sponsored by the “Cabot Institute” and is associated with Bristol University. One suspects Lewandowsky will be nearby. Perhaps there will be an opportunity to chat with both Cook and Lewandowsky.

The event takes place on Friday 19 September 2014, 6 pm at Victoria Rooms, Queens Road, Bristol, BS8 1SA. Tickets are free and available by clicking the orange “Register on Eventbrite” icon. In anticipation of tickets going quickly, I’ve made my reservations. I’m going to see if some generous souls (Koch brothers?) will fly me to England and fund a nice hotel room so I can attend the event live. Failing that, I’ll be contacting some of Dad’s cousins who live in England and offer them the tickets. Failing that, I’ll release my tickets at a later date.

I encourage anyone who thinks they might be interested in tickets to reserve their seats before they run out. At the time of writing there seem to be 567 tickets available. Cook is an internet celebrity. These could go fast.

Commercial

Testing Ad Plugin

10 Comments

I’m testing an ad plugin. I don’t want ads to be too obnoxious, but I want to run some. (For example, reading Keith Kloor post linking to instructions on finding a green hottie has motivated me to think about whether homebrew is “green”.

If I’m going to discuss homebrew, I might as will link to ads showing you the homebrew kit my brothers in law got and those of you who are thinking of going “green” by making your own beer can order kits resulting in a humongonomous influx of affiliate earnings to me. But… to do that… I need to inject ridiculously high paying ads into appropriate blog post.

Of course, if I’m going to do that, I want to be able to easily change the ad later when a company stops selling a particular beer making kit. And of course, on some future day, I’ll want to run ads for something like a coffee grinder. To do that conveniently without injecting ads into all the non-beer making posts written by me, Zeke, and any and all future authors requires using a flexible plugin. I think I may have found one, but meanwhile, I need a test post with tags and category properties that let me limit display.

This is the post. It is tagged “beer”, and placed in the category “Commercial”.. Right now, it has no ads, but if the plugin I’ve found works as advertised, some will appear. With luck, none will appear in the other posts. (If any of you happen to have tips for the perfect plugin, pipe up!)

[sam id=1 codes=’false’]I’m currently testing out simple ads manager, which is new, seems to have useful features and links to blog posts that appear to explain how it is used. If this is a bust, I’ll update and report what other plugins I’m trying.

Update: This plugin works, and has features useful to real bloggers. (That is, bloggers who mostly provide content but would like to insert occasional ads, but which they anticipate wanting to update. In contrast there are blogs set up mostly to advertise stuff. They have different needs.)

Commercial

Blog Sponsorships Poll

12 Comments

In my quest to make sure the blog covers the $14/month or so cost for hosting, I looked around for Sponsorships. I thought I’d found something, which I will describe. The visitors can tell me what they think, in comments and by poll.

Sponsorship

Social Spark (SS) lets bloggers find temporary sponsors for their blogs. The sponsors pay a daily fee; the blogger in turn runs an form of… yes…. pop up ad.

It goes without saying that pop-ups are , shall we say “In your face”? (By the way, evidently, this type of popup is called a “Blog Welcome”.)

Normally, I’d immediately just say no to pop-ups. But this is one of those slightly less obnoxious kind of popups. The less obnoxious feature is that it’s designed to recognize visitors and only display once to any individual visitor. The visitor hits the go-away box, and, supposedly, never has to experience that particular pop again. (Of course, if the blogger gets a second sponsorship… well… )

The Poll

Poll Ended. Click to view results.


You may vote for up to two choices.

Comments

It’s always impossible to craft just the right questions in a blog poll. What I really want is feedback. (FWIW, I have not accepted the offer to run any sponsorships yet. I wanted to explain them to my readers first.)

Info about polls at WordPress blogs

I always like to give information when I add a new blog features. This polls was created using Lester Chan’s WP-Polls plugin. I couldn’t get the “Poll” button in the “Write Post” button to display, so I also installed Exec-PHP plugin for WordPress. This let me insert the PHP Lester discussed in the “usage” section of his plugin description page. I inserted the PHP for the poll in the post, and the poll displayed.

Evidently, the poll will automatically show results when the poll closes. This is the first time I’m using it, so we’ll see.