jotsheet

iTunes is a piece of shit. I hate it. It’s slow, it’s a RAM hog, and its constant self-updating is both annoying and destructive (as noted by Dennis Kennedy). Of course, this is to say nothing of my disdain for the iPod.

But I do own an iPod, and I did use iTunes to rip my CD collection, so I’d been using iTunes to play the AAC and M4P files–until now.

My favorite little Winamp replacement, Quintessential Player, has a plugin for playing AAC/M4P files. Get it from RareWares. Then you needn’t use Microsoft’s abominable resource hog (Windows Media Player) or Apple’s abominable resource hog (iTunes). You get to use a fast, skinnable little player, and you feel extra special nerdy cool while you do it.

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1. Go to Jewel, preferably during a busy time. Saturday afternoon works well.
2. Walk to the liquor section. Select your favorite variety of beer, wine, or spirits.
3. Go to the self checkout line.
4. Wait for the Jewel employee in charge of the self checkout area to become distracted. This happens regularly.
5. Scan the alcohol. The system will say that approval is needed.
6. Approval is not needed. Swipe your credit card.
7. The system will exit out of the “needs approval” screen and into the “choose your payment type” screen.
8. Finish paying.
9. Walk out.

I’m 90% certain the system works this way. I’ll try it again next time I’m at the grocery store. Have fun, teenagers.

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I picked up a useful bit of information this morning. Did you know that you don’t have to burn an ISO image to CD/DVD to access its files? Instead, you can mount the image as a local drive. This is handy because (a) you don’t have to wait to burn the image, (b) you don’t have to waste a DVD/CD, and (c) it’s faster because the files are accessed off the hard drive, not the CD/DVD drive.

Since more and more apps are downloadable as ISOs, I think this will be useful.

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A couple of weeks ago, the irrepressible and overrated Seth Godin wrote 56 ways to get more traffic to your blog. Many were boring and unoriginal and many were contradictory. Seth’s legion of marketing fanboys went gah-gah over it, as he allowed comments on the post (oh joy!).

Well, I can do better. Here are 60 Ways to Get More Traffic to Your Blog. I don’t do all of these, and I don’t even advocate all of them. Some overlap with Seth’s list. Well, if the guy’s gonna post 57 ways, he’s bound to get something right. Some of these may bleed into how to have an interesting blog rather than a highly trafficked blog. Nothing wrong with that.

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Over the last few weeks, my AdSense revenue dropped significantly. I was curious and a little annoyed but didn’t investigate much. When I did take action, I realized quickly what I’d done.

I have a Large Rectangle unit on my pages, which is the prime moneymaker. But I also have (and might eliminate in the future) a Link Unit. Link Units are nice for the per-pixel ROI, but they don’t make a ton of money. A few weeks ago, I moved my Link Unit to a higher position on the page, trying to boost revenue.

It worked. I earned a higher CTR for the Link Unit and made a little more money. But in doing so, I crippled my Large Rectangle. It was actually a terrible move.

I found all of this out by using channels effectively. (If you’re not using a per-ad unit channel, you’re really missing out. Make sure to communicate information such as particular unit, color, and position on the page. When you change it, change the channel so you can do an A/B comparison.) I looked back in the AdSense stats to find the first day of stats for my newly prominent Link Unit. I then compared overall revenue and revenue per-unit for my pages before that change and after.

The difference was clear. It caused a direct decrease in my revenue for the Large Rectangle that clearly outstripped the increased revenue for the Link Unit.

So here’s a question: why was I getting so much less money for the Large Rectangle. My CTR wasn’t too much different. Does AdSense feed the best performing individual ads to the first link units placed on the page (in the top-to-bottom order of the HTML)? Was I robbed my Large Rectangle of high-paying ads?

If you know the answer, speak up. Maybe I can find it for myself, too.

Update!

I did find the answer! (Shouldn’t have been so lazy…) From the mouth of Google…

Tip for maximizing multiple ad units: make sure that the ad unit with the best placement on the page is the ad unit that appears first in your HTML code. This will help ensure that your prime ad real estate is occupied by the ads that place highest in the auction and will generate the most revenue for you. Find out how to define the first ad unit.

And here’s a bit more detail from Google about what the “first ad” actually means.

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I recently moved a friend’s medium-size blog from Blogger to hosted WordPress (on DreamHost, not WordPress.com), and I thought I’d share a few tips for making the transition smooth.

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Sound strange? It’s not. Here’s why.
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