The Boston Diaries

The ongoing saga of a programmer who doesn't live in Boston, nor does he even like Boston, but yet named his weblog/journal “The Boston Diaries.”

Go figure.

Wednesday, March 23, 2005

Forget disturbing search requests, how about “Disturbing Ad Requests?”

Third day, and already I'm leary about Google's AdSense.

Earlier today it wasn't serving up ads. At first, I thought they took exception to my critical stance towards them, or of the disclaimer I have just below their ads and dropped me. But no, I was still signed up. It's just that for a period of time, Google just … couldn't serve up ads.

How odd.

Then, when it was working again, what do I see? An add for “Diary Of An Anorexic Girl” followed by an ad for “Fleming's Steakhouse” (at least the steakhouse is in Florida and not Massachusetts).

What is it with Google?

I've set up my site so that Google will index each individual entry, and yes, the Googlebot is pulling up individual entries, so why can't Google match the advertising better? I thought the whole point of AdSense was targetted text based ads.

Genres of advertising

From: “Ken Maier” <XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX>
To: “Sean ‘Captain Napalm’ Conner” <sean@conman.org>
Subject: Google advertiser exclusion
Date: Wed, 23 Mar 2005 21:22:17 -0500

Not sure if you know, but you can go into your AdSense account and enter exclusions for the advertisers you don't want to see on your site.

—ken

I know you can excluse particular advertisers through AdSense, but not genres of advertising. So, while I could exclude ads from Weight-Watchers, that still means I get ads for FatBurners-‘Backwards-R’-Us. And if I go down the path of nuking individual advertisers, then I run into the set limit of 200 excluded advertisers. It was more of a way to exclude competitors.

Obligatory Picture

[The future's so bright, I gotta wear shades]

Obligatory Contact Info

Obligatory Feeds

Obligatory Links

Obligatory Miscellaneous

You have my permission to link freely to any entry here. Go ahead, I won't bite. I promise.

The dates are the permanent links to that day's entries (or entry, if there is only one entry). The titles are the permanent links to that entry only. The format for the links are simple: Start with the base link for this site: https://boston.conman.org/, then add the date you are interested in, say 2000/08/01, so that would make the final URL:

https://boston.conman.org/2000/08/01

You can also specify the entire month by leaving off the day portion. You can even select an arbitrary portion of time.

You may also note subtle shading of the links and that's intentional: the “closer” the link is (relative to the page) the “brighter” it appears. It's an experiment in using color shading to denote the distance a link is from here. If you don't notice it, don't worry; it's not all that important.

It is assumed that every brand name, slogan, corporate name, symbol, design element, et cetera mentioned in these pages is a protected and/or trademarked entity, the sole property of its owner(s), and acknowledgement of this status is implied.

Copyright © 1999-2024 by Sean Conner. All Rights Reserved.