About 3 month ago a lot of TLA (Text Link Ads) publishers got an invitation to join the new publisher service AuctionAds. This program is smart way to show ads eBay auctions without to be an eBay affiliate. After using these ads for more than a month it’s time for short review.

First of all the account functions are very easy to use, showing reports and generating new ad code is done within no-time. There are reports for campaigns and for different time periods about impressions clicks and earnings.
I like the ad code generation tool at most, you can choose from the most common standard banner sizes to get an ad for every place on your website, blog or forum. Choose what the color scheme you need and most important you can choose the keywords for the auctions you want to publish. There are also advanced keyword and price options like: Read the rest of this entry »

XS4ALL is one of the biggest ISP’s in the Netherlands and is a specialist in ADSL and hosting products and services for home and business customers. I know XS4ALL as a real service provider, every time I called the help desk they were able to analyze and solve my problem in a short time.

Okay, enough about the company, for some time now they are looking for experienced PHP programmers, check their Job offer if you’re located in the neighborhood of Amsterdam (or if you have your own helicopter ;)) and send in your resume to become a member of their great team of employees.

These days Google announced that the product Referrals 2.0 will become available to the most of their publishers. Yesterday I got the chance to have a first look on this new product. The first thing I noticed is that its very easy to use, just like the other Adsense products.

The old Referral product screen is extended with a number of categories where the publisher can choose multiple categories for his ad publishing campaign. From every category it’s possible to preview the advertisers. At this point there was the first “scary” thing! SPAM!

I checked the telecommunication category and found several advertisers for diet pills! I checked some other popular categories and got the same result.
Nice is the feature to select ads for specific countries and languages, but also in other countries and languages the same situation: non related advertisers in multiple categories. Read the rest of this entry »

Finally after waiting a few years, the PHP conference 2007, held in Amsterdam, is on a date (16th June 2007) where it’s possible to me to join this important PHP event without to cancel my vacation.
The Conference this year is first time organized by the Dutch Zend partner “Ibuildings.nl” and has a very “heavy” agenda:

• Trends (Object orientation, mash-ups…)
• Frameworks (Zend framework, Symfony, ATK)
• Databases (Oracle, stored procedures in MySQL 5)
• Enterprise Solutions (diff. show cases)

OK, you can’t follow all this stuff in several hours. Thats why you have to choose from three presentations from every block. I hoped to meet some of the founders of PHP or Zend, but this year I have to listen to speakers like Cal Evens, Derick Rethans and some others…