Tuesday, January 25, 2011

PHP Programming and Google Adsense

I haven’t posted much here on DarkMercury lately (Happy New Year btw) because I’ve been pretty busy with a new website I’ve written for work.  It’s a PHP script that loads schedules and sorts them depending on different criteria you input into it.  Each month every pilot and flight attendant in the company looks through these lines to figure out which is the best for them and lists them in the order they want.  The people who have been there the longest get the first pick, and so on down the line.  On the ATR, I’ve only had about 35 lines to look through so it wasn’t much of a big deal to do it by hand.  As I make the change to the Embraer jet, now I’d have to look through ~280 lines.  I looked into other commercial bidding software and decided it wasn’t worth the cost.  It’d be easier to just write my own.  So for the last 2 months I’ve been working on a pretty powerful and unique bid software that I finally announced on company forums last night.  So far, it’s gotten very good reviews, and because I can capture a little niche market here, I enrolled in the Google Adsense Program.  Google displays relevant ads on the bidding website, and when someone clicks on them, the advertisers pay google and google lets some of that trickle down to me.  It’s not a bad program and I’ve been watching it throughout the day as people learn about the site.  Hopefully the system can kind of sustain itself and bring in some pocket money each month during bid time.

I rarely get much actual traffic on my DarkMercury website, and the traffic I do get is usually on my AppleTV and Freenas posts, so I’m running a little test to see if google ads work well with my site.  I have one strip along the right menu bar, and individual blog entries that I choose can display an ad header.  I pretty much set these only to pages linked from google for the visitors.  I know most of my friends simply use the RSS and nothing will change for them.  So far, the adsense program is looking good and I hope to open up another website with the same model in the next few months.  Until that one is ready, you can check out the bid program, written from scratch at [link removed]:

[Edit 05/02/11: I removed the actual name of my work website due to Google showing my personal blog in its search results for the bidding program.  While I realize that anything posted online should be expected to be read by anyone, I’d rather disassociate the two to the best of my ability.]