Blog update

A quick post about the blog… As you can see, the blog has undergone an update, and there are two major changes.

The most obvious change is the move from a centralised view, to placing all the post of the text on the left. The reason for this move is so that advertisements can be placed on the right (the blog is now carrying advertisements in an attempt to off-set development costs and bandwidth use).

The second change, which is less obvious at first glance, is the addition of ‘tags’ to the blog posts.

Tags: These are good news for the reader as they link the blog posts by keywords. If you click on a keyword listed in the Site Search Tags: at the end of the post you will be taken to a list of articles that are also tagged with that word. Basically it is another way to find material in the blog.

Another ‘positive’ of the tagging is these keywords can be used to ‘target’ the eBay ads, provided by AuctionAds, that are now on the right hand side of the screen.

Also, one thing that you won’t notice, unless you view the blog from different countries, is that the ads displayed are ‘geo-senstitive’ (‘geo-targeted’). No information is collected (or stored) by thesnowsite.com, but when a page is requested a script grabs the IP address and then does a ‘reverse-lookup’, using a database, to find the country of origin for the address. At present ads are only targeted for the UK and US, with plans to add other countries at a later date (if you are reading this in a country that is not the UK or US then the ads default to the US).

For more information on how these changes were brought about, and how the tagging is done/run have a look at the post over at the MMISoftware Blog.