Announcing Adzerk

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

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The new dotnetkicks.com

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

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Year in Review (2009)

January 7, 2010

It was a very very interesting year. In January my long-term contract ended and I have managed to avoid taking another long-term contract. I did take 3 small contracts throughout the year, two around working with Azure and one in Rails. I hope to take even less work this year (although I might be doing [...]

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TekPub: A belated announcement

November 6, 2009

I have reached a new low in neglecting this blog, I launched an entirely new venture and didn’t even get around to blogging it here. As you have probably already heard if you follow Rob’s blog or follow me on Twitter, Rob and I have launched a new service called TekPub. The purpose of TekPub [...]

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Heading to San Francisco

October 15, 2009

No, I’m not moving there permanently (I love living in Raleigh).
Earlier this year I realized that two conferences I wanted to go to were going to be in San Francisco this year. The Business of Software conference is running from the 9th-11th of November and RubyConf is running from the 19th-21st. So I had the [...]

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Simple .NET Developer Survey

September 18, 2009

If you would like a chance to win one of five $100 vouchers to spend at Amazon then take this short (< 10 minutes) survey about .NET tools: http://www.questionpro.com/akira/TakeSurvey?id=1325041
It’s not me doing the survey this time, although I do still have some results to post from the last survey.
-James

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Raleigh Code Camp this Saturday

September 18, 2009

It’s that time of year again and Trinug is putting on the annual Raleigh Code Camp. I swore I wouldn’t do a presentation this year but I got talked into it at the last minute. I am going to be doing a tools talk about analyzing the performance of ASP.NET web applications:
Measuring and improving the [...]

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True RSS Feed Bankrupcy

September 18, 2009

People like to refer to the act of marking all of their feeds as read as declaring RSS bankruptcy. They get to clear out all the items and start fresh. I realized recently that I needed to declare a true RSS feed bankruptcy and delete all of the RSS subscriptions I had collected over time. [...]

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Your idea will probably change

September 10, 2009

When I took over The Lounge back in December of 2007 I looked at it as a great way to make a little extra money each month, but not a ton more than that. As it grew, and after I launched Ruby Row, I started to see that advertising networks could be a good little [...]

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Contact

July 2, 2009

Feel free to contact me if you have any questions, opportunities, or would just like to chat.
Name: James Avery
Email: javery@infozerk.com
Phone: (919) 600-0742
Fax: (888) 353-6720

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