According to my experience programming blogs have very bad potential for adsense earnings. The first blog in my signature gets about 50 to 80 unique visitors per day but a click after lets say 10 days even after testing many ad placements. My another site which have very less 20 to 40 unique visitors gets regular clicks from 1 to 5. So what do you say about earning potential of blogs from adsense and specially the programming blogs?
My suggestions: 1) Replace the leaderboard at the top with a link unit 768x15 with 4 ads (blue background color, white font) 2) remove the small skyscraper on the left 3) Put 2 large rectangles without a border and with text ads only above your first blog post and put a "chapter heading" in the same color and font over the ads that says "Sponsored links by Google Adsense" for blending purposes. 4) But a blended leaderboard below your first blog post
other things kinna make sense, if I put 2 large rectangles above the posts it will just give impression that the emphasis is more on ads other than the actual posts. what you say?
Just try it But if your concern is to high, move the large rectangles below the fold and put them as I told you above below your first entry. Simply experiment and see what works best for you
Programming related websites/blogs will have lousy ctr. I had a programming tutorial website so i know it first hand. To make things worse my CPM was dropping gradually from $3-$4 to under $1. Keep away from programming niche if you want to make real money from adsense
a freind of mine made several hundret dollars a month with an md5 hash db search engine. just do what you like, the money follows