MadAdsMedia Review: CPM Ads Network

MadAdsMedia is a CPM ads provider for website publishers who wish to monetize their websites. They offer CPM ads only, so no CPC here. I've been personally working with them for more than a year and they are, by far, the best Adsense alternative I could find. Let's see why.

Requirements

Their minimum requirements are reasonable: 10,000 page views per day. They're looking for well designed sites with friendly content. They're a pretty good fit for medium to big sized websites that seek to generate passive revenues.

A New Updated Theme!

For the first time ever, my personal blog has a light style. It feels fresh, actual and very different from what I'm used to. I like it!

I grew tired of darker styles because they rarely age well and have to be replaced over and over. Dark styles, when not done properly, will easily make your website feel like a dark and lonely, obscure corner of Internet. You definitely don't want that.

I also decided to move from Open Sans to Lato for a more formal feel, I think it does the job pretty well!

Reasons Why Your Forum Shouldn't Have a Blog Section

Back in the days when vBulletin was popular, every clever forum admin would buy the vB Blog addon to allow their members to have their own personal blog inside the community.

That was indeed clever in 2008, but what about in 2016? Should you provide your forum members with a place to have their blog, within your community?

I'm not so sure anymore, here's why.

Rubular: A Regular Expression Editor

I didn't have to fiddle with a regular expression in ages, so tonight I had a hard time figuring out how to extract precise parts of a string in Python.

http://rubular.com/

Thanks to this online editor, I was able to work my way through it quite easily.

Which Type of Forum Admin Are You?

Taking care of an online community is no small task, especially on the long run. That's why you gotta be up to the challenge as a forum admin. While some us prefer to lurk in the shadow and let their forum evolve on its own, others are going to be part of the community, just like any other member.

It's pretty easy these days to start a community and make it somewhat active. But are you going to be able to keep up with it and make it happy and active for the years to come? It's likely that after the honeymoon is over, your overall behavior and presence as an admin will change. Perhaps it already has...

Which type of forum admin are you?

50 Vintage Web Ad Banners

Check out the link below to take a look at old banner ads from the late 90s.

VC&G | 50 Vintage Web Ads

Time sure flies! Back then we didn't have fancy ad-blockers or anything. It was quite normal to have such ugly flashing banners all around the pages we were visiting. Good old days!

Dealing With iOS9 Ad Blockers on Your Ad Sponsored Blog

A good article posted on Igor Kromin's blog, a blog I visit from time to time. Thought I'd share it here.

A new release of iOS always brings in new features and its share of troubles and this time it hasn't been any different. Since the iOS 9 release date on the 16th of September, Apple made available its content blocker API to developers. This brought out a deluge of ad blocker apps on the App Store, with some topping the charts within moments of release. This may be a welcome addition to many people, but something that many miss is how this hurts those sites and blogs that rely on advertising revenue to pay for their hosting fees. 

So I got to thinking about how to deal with this. I've seen comments stating that content providers should just suck it up and find alternative ways of generating revenue. I'm sorry, but this is the kind of argument that a zealot preacher would sermonise - all talk about how it should be without solid examples or direction about the 'better ways'. I would argue that for a casual blog, ads are the only real viable source of revenue.

Unfortunately there is no easy way to deal with this situation. The only thing I could come up with was to appeal the the readers' sense of decency by supplying a message when an ad does not load.

Read more:
Dealing with iOS9 ad blockers on your ad sponsored blog

VBScript / VB Syntax Highlighting in Sublime Text

Did you ever feel like programming that quick Excel macro in Sublime Text, but you couldn't because it doesn't recognize VB syntax out of the box? (Not that I like that much to program Excel macros, but you gotta do what you gotta do!) Well, thanks to this plugin, you can now enjoy Sublime Text for any of your VB / VBA / VBScript endeavors.

GitHub | VBScript package for Sublime Text

Download it, extract it inside your Sublime Text plugin directory, remove -master from the extracted folder's name, fire up Sublime Text and you're up and running!

Just when I thought Sublime Text couldn't get any better!

Fix Sublime Text 2 Scroll Lag

Is Sublime Text your favorite text editor yet? Make sure you check it out right away, it's awesome:

Sublime Text: The text editor you'll fall in love with

Depending what OS you're using, your computer's performance and likely a few other factors, you might notice that there's a slight lag when scrolling using the mouse wheel in Sublime Text. Here's what you have to do in order to fix it.

1. Click Preferences, Settings - Default

2. Search for "scroll_speed" and set it to 0. (It's usually set to 1.5 by default. )

3. Save and close the settings file.

By disabling smooth scrolling, we get rid of the slight mouse wheel scrolling lag we experienced until now.

Web Fonts for Your Blog: Open Sans vs Lato

As I was browsing around to find out which web fonts are the most popular and ultimately, which one is currently the best, I came across this blog post. It compares in depth 2 of the most popular free fonts of the moment: Open Sans and Lato. Both are looking great, but which one is the best?

Open Sans vs Lato : A head to head Comparison