Place Ads Precisely with OpenAds

OpenAds, formerly known as PhpAds, is an ad management server that many people are using to display and control ad blocks on their web sites. My site Ask Leo! used OpenAds to serve up ads, including both Google's Adsense as well as direct purchase advertising.

The "problem" is that OpenAds doesn't natively support the level of ad placement that I'm looking for. However things like that don't always stop me. This article describes the approach I've taken using OpenAds to place ads in my MovableType generated pages:

in specific articles
on specific pre-defined positions on a page
any combination of those two
in any specific category
site wide

All while maintaining most of OpenAds other features including weighted distribution of ad content.

Now, I do have to throw out a few caveats:

As I write this I'm running OpenAds 2.0.11. Naturally later versions might add features and functionality that make my efforts redundant.
I'm going to assume you have at least a basic understanding of OpenAds. It's non trivial, and documenting it is well beyond the scope of this site, and for that matter, my abilities.
My approach might be stupid. Someone more familiar with OpenAds might well say "you should do it this way" and define something much more elegant. Fair enough. My approach works, though.

With all that butt-covering out of the way, let's dive in.

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Tolerate Broken URLs

If you use meaningful page names on your site, you'll often end up with URLs that are quite long. For example out on Ask Leo! you'll find an article entitled What's the difference between Windows Live Messenger, Windows Messenger, MSN Messenger and Windows Messenger Service?. If you look at the resulting URL, it's very long. So long, in fact, that I need to chop it down to show it to you here:

http://ask-leo.com/whats_the_difference_between_windows ... vice.html

More commonly you'll recognize this situation in email programs when you try to email someone a long link:

http://ask-leo.com/whats_the_difference_between_windows_live_messenger_
windows_messenger_msn_messenger_and_windows_messenger_service.html

As you see above, email programs see the "http://" on the first line and automatically treat the rest of it as a link. But since the line is too long to fit on the screen, they break it into two, and then don't include the second half in that link. If you click on the highlighted link you get an error from the destination site, since you didn't provide the full page URL.

And yet, if you click on that partial link above for Ask Leo!, you'll get to the intended page anyway.

Ask Leo! tolerates broken URLs. Here's how I do it.

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Leaving Breadcrumbs in Movable Type

Breadcrumbs are staple (pardon the pun) of many web sites. You've seen them, they're the line typically near the top of an article page that shows you where in the tree of semi-organized information that article resides. Something like:

News Home : World : National : Local : Seattle : Space Needle on Fire

Each of those encompasses everything to its right, and each would be a link to a summary page for that level of topic. The last might be the actual page you're on.

If you've used Movable Type for any length of time, you might be thinking something about categories, sub categories and the like.

As was I, when a friend prodded me with "If you come up with an MT hack for that, please post it."

I hate a challenge that I can't resist if I'm already overbooked - particularly for something I want myself. :-)

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Changing Page Names Mid-Stream

Ask Leo! was originally set up to name files using MovableType 2.x's default structure. Individual articles were archived with old style names of the form: http://ask-leo.com/archives/000001.html

That works, but current thinking is that search engines "like" seeing keywords in URLs. Since I wanted to do all I could to improve my search engine rankings, I decided to change my page names from being numbered and in a subdirectory to being the article title and in the root of the site.

Changing names midstream becomes a bit of a challenge. With several hundred articles on the site already, I wanted to switch to the new naming scheme while still allowing the old-style URLs, that people had perhaps bookmarked, to work.

I'm presenting these steps in the order that you need to do them to a live, running site. Review the entire set of steps before proceeding. If you follow these steps in this order, your site should never appear "down" and links will not be broken as you make this conversion.

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