Free Coop Advertising Network

[digitalpoint]

Okay, another freebie... This is actually is a network of site owners with content sites. If you offer ad space to the ad network, and the ads you define are spread throughout the network.

Why does this have value? Because it's easy to put 100,000 of your own ads on your own site, but imagine if you could instantly spread your ads to hundreds or thousands of sites.

Ads can be graphic banners, text based banners, or even raw text link ads (which you can format to work into your site's content then).

There is a weighting system built-in, so the larger sites with more valuable ad real estate get their ads displayed more across the network. That way it's fair for sites large and small.

Currently it's setup for vBulletin 3.x site owners, Movable Type blog owners and Blogger blog owners. Although there are some cases where other sites will be allowed into the ad network.

Anyway, you can find it at http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/ad-network/

and there is a FAQ available at: http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/ad-network/faq.html

[schlottke]

Good to see it finally going live - how many sites are currently doing this anyway?

[digitalpoint]

There ended up being 14 at the end of the testing phase...

[awall19]

Do you think search engines will ever be able to penalize such a network if it grows to a large size?

Initially I signed up, but I am super conservative when it comes to things that may eventually garner some sort of penalty.

I guess my question is "Is this idea truely scalable?" and "What other features do you intend to ad to improve relevancy when the network grows?"

[nates]

How do I edit the desc. paragraph?

I need to shorten the paragraph but only had options for enable or delete.

Thanks

[digitalpoint]

Originally Posted by awall19

Do you think search engines will ever be able to penalize such a network if it grows to a large size?

Initially I signed up, but I am super conservative when it comes to things that may eventually garner some sort of penalty.

I don't see why it would warrant a penalty to be honest, unless the search engines are going to penalize sites for advertising. {shrug}

But either way, I would say it would be impossible to detect since it's not done with JavaScript, IFRAME or anything else. If you look at the source, the ad is embedded within the HTML source.

I actually had a problem being able to automatically validate that the ads were in place, because *I* couldn't even detect it. I did figure out a way to do it by having the system insert a unique/random HTML comment tag while the validation happens. But the tag is always different, and only turned on for the split second the validation routines happen. It's also a good way to make sure people aren't spoofing the ads to make it look like they are serving them without actually doing it.

Originally Posted by awall19

I guess my question is "Is this idea truely scalable?" and "What other features do you intend to ad to improve relevancy when the network grows?"

I think it should be scalable, I mean I don't see why it wouldn't be.

Once the network grows will probably add things like the ability for site owners to classify the type of ads they have, then allow other users to optionally set their ads to only show certain types of ads.

[digitalpoint]

Originally Posted by nates

How do I edit the desc. paragraph?

I need to shorten the paragraph but only had options for enable or delete.

Thanks

Easiest is just delete and re-add.

The reason there is not an edit option is because ads are all reviewed before they are approved, so being able to edit existing ads would defeat the purpose.

[GuyFromChicago]

Originally Posted by awall19

Do you think search engines will ever be able to penalize such a network if it grows to a large size?

Initially I signed up, but I am super conservative when it comes to things that may eventually garner some sort of penalty.

I guess my question is "Is this idea truely scalable?" and "What other features do you intend to ad to improve relevancy when the network grows?"

Even if the SE's did penalize this (which I highly doubt they will) just yank the couple lines of code out of your forum and you're in the clear.

It's an awesome program - I'm happy to participate.

[awall19]

I gotta fix my template on my site as it is still the ugly default MT one. after I fix that and figure out where to add stuff I think it would probably be a good call. I added the stuff in and got it to work, but currently my individual post templates look a little caca and need some fixin

cool program though.

[flawebworks]

====
On occasion we will manually review/allow other sites into the ad network that are deemed worthy
.======

I don't have a blog as yet on my site - if I put one on it will be wordpress. I would love to participate, however. Would you consider my normal site?

Site is in my sig.

[digitalpoint]

Sure, if you can get them working on your site... What type of web server are you running?

The primary reason it's not freely open to everyone is everyone has different types of sites, and it's hard to try and support the "how-to get it to work with your site" questions.

[GuyFromChicago]

Originally Posted by digitalpoint

Sure, if you can get them working on your site... What type of web server are you running?

Looks like he did, I went to his site and they are at the bottom of the page.

BTW, I'm now obsessed with ANWR (ad network weight rank). PR is in my past

[GuyFromChicago]

Hey, I had someone sign up and they sent me the following:

"I signed up and got the code, but I am getting Access Forbidden from that .htaccess file. Do you know what may cause that?"

Any ideas?

[digitalpoint]

I updated the code to add an additional RewriteCond line (that checks to see if the file on the server actually exists). This fixes a problem where if a URL was http://www.domain.com/ but they don't enter the trailing slash.

Do they get the error if they use the trailing slash (the proper URL), and if it works like that, have them grab the updated .htaccess code.

[flawebworks]

=======
Sure, if you can get them working on your site... What type of web server are you running?

The primary reason it's not freely open to everyone is everyone has different types of sites, and it's hard to try and support the "how-to get it to work with your site" questions
=======

It's an apache server version 1.3.31, running php 4.3.3. Linux.

I've almost got it working. I *can* get it to work; but the passthru.php trashes my css, and the other php includes I'm using for rss and the footer, and the site looks like ..... Or; it will double everything on the page.

I changed the 'index.html' to index.php in the passthru.php file; that's when everything doubled - but your banners did work. Then I tried changing the index.php to /; with an include on the page: the page came up correctly, but your banners didn't, and didn't work at all if I removed the include and went with the .htaccess calling the passthru.php.

What I'm wondering is if I add all of the phpincludes into the passthru file; if that will work, and load it correctly.

THis page works somewhat:

http://flawebworks.com/adtest.php

But; the rss feeds don't work, nor does the footer. I'm calling the passthru.php with a php require_once, and index.php in the passthru file.

I'm sure I can get it to work. It may take beating my head against the wall for a coupla days but I'll be able to do it.

I think....

<edit> Haven't tried it on a normal html file yet.

[Dodger]

Hi Shawn,

It was I that is having problems.

Yes, I did put in the trailing slash in the submittal form. I have it set for http://www.webstractions.com/news/

But I think the problem is in the .htaccess file.

I have the latest .htaccess I guess. It it the one in his setup. If that is the latest.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /news/
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}	-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !passthru.php
RewriteRule ^(.*)       passthru.php?file=$1

I have that in my /news/ directory along with the passthru.php (the blog directory per instructions).

It is a Blogger Blog. I updated my template ... you can see the comment in the pages now.

Blog is at http://www.webstractions.com/news/ (filename is index.html)

I can access the root of the domain (obviously), but not the news directory or any subdirectories of the news directory (forbidden).

I have removed the .htaccess code in order to regain access.

Any thoughts, as to what may be wrong?

Also, If I get this working .... can it be used on the Archive files too? Those are in a sub-directory to the /news/ directory. This is where the ads will be getting the majority of impressions due to the subscriptions I have on the feeds ... they will click directly through to those pages.

Thanks in advance.

[digitalpoint]

Originally Posted by flawebworks

=======
Sure, if you can get them working on your site... What type of web server are you running?

The primary reason it's not freely open to everyone is everyone has different types of sites, and it's hard to try and support the "how-to get it to work with your site" questions
=======

It's an apache server version 1.3.31, running php 4.3.3. Linux.

I've almost got it working. I *can* get it to work; but the passthru.php trashes my css, and the other php includes I'm using for rss and the footer, and the site looks like ..... Or; it will double everything on the page.

I changed the 'index.html' to index.php in the passthru.php file; that's when everything doubled - but your banners did work. Then I tried changing the index.php to /; with an include on the page: the page came up correctly, but your banners didn't, and didn't work at all if I removed the include and went with the .htaccess calling the passthru.php.

What I'm wondering is if I add all of the phpincludes into the passthru file; if that will work, and load it correctly.

THis page works somewhat:

http://flawebworks.com/adtest.php

But; the rss feeds don't work, nor does the footer. I'm calling the passthru.php with a php require_once, and index.php in the passthru file.

I'm sure I can get it to work. It may take beating my head against the wall for a coupla days but I'll be able to do it.

I think....

<edit> Haven't tried it on a normal html file yet.

Are you files PHP based? If you are already using a footer file, you could probably just add it to that since the other files (I'm assuming) already read it. Could be done with SSI or PHP (if the footer was already a PHP file).

[digitalpoint]

Originally Posted by Dodger

Hi Shawn,

It was I that is having problems.

Yes, I did put in the trailing slash in the submittal form. I have it set for http://www.webstractions.com/news/

But I think the problem is in the .htaccess file.

I have the latest .htaccess I guess. It it the one in his setup. If that is the latest.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /news/
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}	-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !passthru.php
RewriteRule ^(.*)       passthru.php?file=$1

I have that in my /news/ directory along with the passthru.php (the blog directory per instructions).

It is a Blogger Blog. I updated my template ... you can see the comment in the pages now.

Blog is at http://www.webstractions.com/news/ (filename is index.html)

I can access the root of the domain (obviously), but not the news directory or any subdirectories of the news directory (forbidden).

I have removed the .htaccess code in order to regain access.

Any thoughts, as to what may be wrong?

Also, If I get this working .... can it be used on the Archive files too? Those are in a sub-directory to the /news/ directory. This is where the ads will be getting the majority of impressions due to the subscriptions I have on the feeds ... they will click directly through to those pages.

Thanks in advance.

It should work for that folder and all sub-folders (archives for example) when you put the .htaccess and passthru.php in the root of the blog (the news folder?) I tested with a test blog that was also in a sub-folder and it seems to work fine (including archive folders).

But obviously something isn't right on your setup for some reason.

Are you able to access your http error logs to see if it says anything about the 403 errors?

[flawebworks]

Originally Posted by digitalpoint

Are you files PHP based? If you are already using a footer file, you could probably just add it to that since the other files (I'm assuming) already read it. Could be done with SSI or PHP (if the footer was already a PHP file).

Only a few files are php based; because of the rss feeds. The footer is a .shtml file, I did add the code to that. I haven't tried renaming it to footer.php. I'll try that next.

[Dodger]

Originally Posted by digitalpoint

But obviously something isn't right on your setup for some reason.

Are you able to access your http error logs to see if it says anything about the 403 errors?

I am checking the error logs now. I am also emailing the Host on this too, his first thought was folder permissions. Mine are set to 777. Would that matter?

I will get back to you on the server errors.