by javery on January 12, 2010
Adzerk is a project I have technically been working on for over 2 years. Adzerk is the name of the software that runs The Lounge and Ruby Row advertising networks. Early last year I decided to focus on turning that software into a SAAS solution for other people looking to build advertising networks or sell advertising on their site.
I am excited that later this month my first beta customers will be coming online and I look forward to a more public beta in a couple months (followed by open signup around June).
Some of the features of Adzerk include:
Publisher portal and workflow for signing up
Advertising portal and reporting center
CPM, CPI, Fixed, and RSS advertising
Serve multiple ads with one request
Geo-location and site inclusion/exclusion
Site channels with keyword selection and much more
Publisher payout calculation
I have so much to talk about I don’t even know what to say in this blog post, let’s just say I am very excited to talk about it and will be blogging about some of the interesting features I have built in and some of the open source projects I am going to spin off from it.
If you would like more information when it becomes available please signup for the mailing list.
-James
by javery on January 11, 2010
In June of 2009 I helped to buy DotNetKicks. The site wasn’t really moving forward and I had noticed traffic was dropping mostly due to infrastructure issues so I banded together with two other people to form DotNetKicks LLC and buy DotNetKicks. For the last six months we have been working on a huge update to the site including an all new skin, a karma system, drop kicking and much more. For more information on the update check out this post over on the new DotNetKicks Blog. For why I got into it, keep reading.
Lately I have realized that I rarely read blogs anymore, I get the majority of my news from Twitter or from Hacker News. Hacker News is an incredible community and I wish we had something like that in the .NET community. I think DotNetKicks is the closest thing we have to it, and my goal over the next year or so is to build it into a Hacker News like community. The changes you saw launched today and the changes you will see in the future will all be towards the goal of building a strong community of excellent .NET developers.
In this release we added a karma system because it will help us control the spam problem and it will help to recognize the people who have contributed to building the community.
We added the ability to down-vote because it will let those recognized members of the community help decide what shouldn’t reach the front page, you won’t be able to just get 5 of your friends to kick a post to the front page. The front page should be a reflection of the community and right now it isn’t
We also reduced the page load of the site drastically to make it easier and faster to use the site.
So what else is on the way? My next goal is to increase the amount of comments on the site, so we are going to add threaded comments, allow up and down votes on comments, and make it much easier to leave a comment.
I would love to hear your feedback on the new changes and what you would like to see in the future.
-James
