Google Tools

I've been reading about Google's Adsense and wanting to give it a try in the hopes of making some money off of this blog. I applied for it the other night and the application went through. I think pretty much any site will get accepted unless there are a bunch broken links or the site content is pretty foul. There's a ton of fine print to go through. I skimmed through it and basically I'm not allowed to click on the ads on my page and I'm not allowed to direct page viewers to the ads visually (through fancy flashing arrows and the like), verbally (asking people to click on them), or through the code (forcing viewers to click on something before viewing content).

I'm not sure exactly how Google picks out the ads to display. I tried looking for a setting where it would only display ads for canadian outfits, but couldn't figure it out. I'll have to do a little more research some other time.

I'm looking forward to seeing how it all works. Who knows ? Hopefully I'll make some pocket money for a coule pints here or there...

Another neat little Google tool is Google Analytics. I recently signed on the other night and am starting to see the results roll in. It's pretty amazing. All you really do is insert some javascript code in you blog template and Google uses it to track interaction with your page. Again, I'm not sure how it all works, but the numbers it collects are neat. Here's a sample of my dashboard:



There's a lot of data in the underlying layers and it's presented in a neat fashion. It could be pretty useful for some web designers, but I have it mainly because I'm interested in how my blog is being viewed. Again, who knows where this will end up, but it's a neat piece of technology.