Day: September 1, 2008

Ozh’s Who Sees Ads Plugin for WordPress

WordPressOnce upon a time, back in the heady days before the collapse of the Internet bubble, I was making close to $1,000 from ads on various websites/blogs I was running.  Not bad considering it was (and still is) just a hobby. Today most months I make enough money to pay the dedicated server costs, so basically the blogs subsidize some of the other things I do with the web server.

Anyway, like everyone else I’m not a big fan of seeing ads everywhere on websites I visit and I try to limit how intrusive ads are on this and other sites I run. One way I’ve done that is with the Ozh Who Sees Ads plugin for WordPress.

As the name suggests, the plugin gives you a lot of control on which visitors to a WordPress site see ads. I’ve got it set up so both visitors who are logged in and visitors who are regular readers (2 visits in the last 10 days) should never see ads (and really, you should be using Firefox with AdBlock Plus anyway, but that’s a different rant).

The plugin has a lot of flexibility, so you not only could I not show ads to logged-in and regular visitors, but I could show additional ads to folks who don’t meet those criteria, etc.

Gemni Division Silliness

WonderlandBlog.Com has a pithy analysis of the silly restrictions on viewing Gemini Division online.

Gemini Division is a web-based science ficition serial starring Rosario Dawson and picked up by NBC as its first web-only original series. But as Wonderland points out, NBC doesn’t quite seem to understand the web,

Sounds like you won’t be able to miss it even if you wanted to – unless, of course, you’re not in the US. They didn’t mean “for the web”, they meant “for the bits of the web that are geographically located in the US“.

Notavailable

It’s such a shame that networks and broadcasters still attempt to cling on to territories on the internet. There are no territories on the internet. And they wonder why torrenting is so popular.

. . .

Seems wraparound ads on the site and a truckload of product placement still can’t warrant a global launch. Pity, because it’s really not difficult to google gemini division torrent, at which point they lose the counted eyeballs altogether.

The author of the Wonderland blog lives in the UK, so she’s one of those stuck out of watching unless she turns to a torrent or other site. What a stupid strategy — when are content companies going to learn that they simply can’t get away with this sort of attempt at regionalization, especially for a web-based series.

Marvel RipRollerz

Sometimes I come across Marvel or DC branded toys and have to wonder just how the marketing pitch from the manufacturer to the publishing company went. Take, for example, the Marvel-branded RipRollerz.

As you can see below, this is essentially a ball with a cord you insert into the middle of it and then give a swift hard pull. The ball then goes skittering across the floor.

Except with the Marvel RipRollerz, the ball is simply the face of your favorite Marvel super-hero. Which is weird because who wants to see a decapitated Spidey head zooming across the floor?

Anyway, I picked up most of the run of these at the local Walgreens where they were clearanced at 49 cents each.

More Than You Ever Wanted to Know about Green Lantern-related Merchandise

The Green Lantern Corps fan website has a page devote to an extensive history of Green Lantern-related merchandise, including numerous iterations of the power ring.

And yet, for all of that, I still haven’t been able to locate an adult-sized Green Lantern costume for Halloween. Looks like I’m going to be stuck going as the Flash (just need to decide if that’s Barry Allen or Wally West).