I just changed to the flash based ad sidebar. It lets you pick different keywords without reloading the page by clicking on the top tab.
I also continued to focus on Technology Books, picking some specific categories to try and exclude the certification and training books that I find less interesting. I then excluded Microsoft and mcse as keywords, and ended up with Cisco certification so I excluded them as well, and it looks like a more reasonable selection now.
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This blog gets about 50 visitors a day, and most new visitors arrive as the result of a google search for my name, Thumper/ZFS or the SE toolkit. There is a very small number of yahoo and msn searches. The other main source of traffic is the Sun Community blogging site, which links to Sun Alumni's blogs including this one. A few weeks ago I got a lot of traffic from Sun, and I think I traced it back to a blog entry from Jonathan Schwartz, who talked about his General Counsel's blog, and Mike Dillon the GC mentioned the Sun Community blog site. This doubled my traffic for a week or two.
The other recent change is that I stopped showing adverts from ctxbay, which was created by an eBay developer as a side project, won a prize, but never really worked well enough to be useful. I've replaced them with the official eBay in-house AdContext system, which is being beta tested. AdContext looks at your page content, and matches keywords it with popular items from eBay. It can be configured to exclude certain keywords (in my case I exclude "Adrian", which was causing problems for ctxbay), and you can choose certain categories or stores to pick items from. I've picked Technology Books and some Storage hardware categories. I'm going to experiment with different formats and constraints, to see how well it works.
There are three formats, text only, pictures (which I started with) and flash (which scrolls multiple adds into the same amount of screen space). I'll switch it to flash when I get around to it...
technorati tags:sun, thumper, traffic
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