XServe as an Ad Server!

My day job has me doing all kinds of cool things. Most of which resolve around “search”.

Now, I’m no guru on search algorithms. I know what works well enough to build a business around a vertical search engine for the oil industry. Just like the other search destinations it’s time to monetize the traffic by adding advertising and sponsorship capabilities. The easy answer to all that would have been to simply host static inline graphics or text links and let em fly. There’s something to the idea though of having a more sophisticated invetory management system. Something that handles a variety of customers and a large variety of rotation, weighting, etc…

That, oh by the way, has to run on my Mac servers. No problemo it turns out.

phpAdsNew version 2.x is stellar, stunning, awesome. Maybe even lickably so. (who am I to say?)

But, this deal is exactly what I’m after. I wanted it to do rotational banners for a number of prospective ad buyers, track their performance, etc. And boy does it go WAY beyond that! Text only ads? Sure. Flash ads? Yep. Limited inventory runs? OK. So, in that case if it was to run 1,000 impression or even click throughs… it can do that. Start and stop on certain dates? Yep. If I want to weight some ads more heavily than others it allows for that, too. I can’t see yet how to do context sensitive weighting… It may even do THAT! Just don’t know yet.

I’m only a few days into the setup and config. Let me say this as a warning… if you’re not totally comfortable with the OS X Terminal for the few setup issues you’re likely to encounter… get ready to learn a little UNIX. It’s not much to learn and the lessons will do you some good if for no other reason than to expose you to some interesting new stuff. But, if that’s an impediment to your situation… I hope you’ll find a way to overcome it.

The snippets you’d put in your site are script tags. So, another thing to take note of… If your site doesn’t play nice with script tags (WordPress comes to mind) then this probably won’t work for you. There is a noscript alternative that might work in situations like these… I just haven’t had enough time to tinker yet and wanted to post this while the excitement was high.

There will be more to say about phpAdsNew as the days and weeks roll on. Suffice it to say this is one nice honeymoon.

Explore posts in the same categories: advertising, phpAdsNew, xserve