For a long time I’ve considered putting ads on this blog. Not because I think I’ll make any significant amount of money. The traffic that goes through here is frankly quite pitiful. Maximum number of hits I’ve ever received in a day? 353. I had to write about a college student pissing in bottles to get that. I wanted to install ads to learn how they work.

So I signed up for Google Adsense. Can someone please read their terms and conditions and translate it for me?

Adsense’s service seems neat and intuitive to me. It has an ad generating wizard that walks novices like me through the process allowing customization options such as colors, text, size, and font and outputs a piece of Javascript that you simply stick into the webpage. And can someone explain how such a short script like this works?

<script type="text/javascript"><!–
  google_ad_client = "pub-3629350823494672";
  /* 300×250, created 6/30/10 */
  google_ad_slot = "8814665115";
  google_ad_width = 300;
  google_ad_height = 250;
  //–>
</script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js">
</script>

Is “google_ad_client” in the 2nd line a variable? Visiting “http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js” shows a heap of Javascript that makes my head hurt. How does this witchcraft work? Maybe I’ll figure it out someday.

Adsense is easy to use. It’s user-friendly, even for someone like me. My only complaint is that Google thought everyone was using a WYSIWYG web editor or was creating each HTML page separately. Come on now. We’re not in the dark ages of the Internet here. What serious Internet publisher still writes each page separately? Most, like WordPress, are probably using PHP to create dynamic pages from mySQL or other databases. Google probably thinks that people who are this far along don’t need help implementing Adsense scripts.

Luckily, I found a nice WordPress ad management plugin. Also pretty intuitive and easy-to-use. The ads are on the right sidebar at the bottom. If you’re reading this, I would say please click on an ad. Hell, maybe even buy something. I could make some money here. But, alas, Google police would come arrest me. So click away if you want. But, for the record, you’re doing it on your own volition.