My latest “spare-time” project has been creating an Adsense Click Pepper for Shaun Inman’s excellent Mint web stats package. A pepper is a plugin that can be used to extend the features of the base Mint project.

The pepper I have created will track hits on your Google Adsense ads from Internet Explorer and Firefox. The pepper will track the page that the click occured on, the ad unit number (if you have more than one ad unit on the page) and the size of the ad unit.

Download Adsense Click Pepper now!

Notes:

The clicks should be very accurate on IE as IE supports tracking of the focus event on iframe elements. Firefox is a different story as for Cross Site Scripting security reasons, FF does not allow events to be attached to iframes that have an off-domain source. For that reason, I am tracking clicks on the Adsense iframe by determining if the cursor location is over the iframe just before the page unloads. It seems to work pretty well, but misses every now and again.

I look forward to feedback and making some adjustments!

The Pragmatic Programmers are offering a new concept in book publishing called Fridays. A Friday is a short, highly focussed book, typically addressing a specific technical topic. It’s written to the same high-quality as all their other books but are only available in PDF format for a charge of between $7.50 to $10.00.

ROLLYO is kind of like your having your own search engine. It lets you specify exactly what sites to search, then aggregates the results for your search term against those sites.

In celebration of their 8th birthday, I recieved this nice note from the people at my webhost, Dreamhost:

Hey Just-Became-Happier DreamHost Customers! In honor of our 8th birthday, as of right now, all our shared hosting
plans have been upgraded to include unlimited fully-hosted domains and sub-domains, forever!

It seems that every month, their packages get better and better, and they pass on those improvements to all existing customers.

So, if you’re looking for a new host, check Dreamhost out. If you sign up now, and use dmm as your promo code, you’ll recieve $60 off your first years hosting fee. That makes your first year cost only $59.00 for unlimited domains, a huge 4.8GB of storage, and a whopping 120GB of bandwidth per month!

I’ve been working on this one for almost two days now, and can’t seem to find a solution!

Using Javascript, I need to attach either an onfocus or onclick event to an iFrame in Firefox. I have this working IE but Firefox is simply not cooperating.

Has anybody run into this problem and possibly have a suggested solution? Any help would be great!

MySQL has just announced the availability of MySQL 5.0 Release Candidate. This version includes many new features including:

• Views (both read-only and updatable views)
• Stored Procedures and Stored Functions, using the SQL:2003 syntax, which is also used by IBM’s DB2
• Triggers (row-level)
• Server-side cursors (read-only, non-scrolling)

To provide a little extra motivation to testers, they will be giving away Apple iPod nanos, and full conference passes to the 2006 MySQL Users Conference, to those who deliver the most valuable feedback.

The New York Times reports that Microsoft Plans to Sell Search Ads of Its Own, joining both Google and Yahoo in the competition for Web search business.

Google is now offering it’s Personalized Search Beta). Personalized search saves your search history and allows you to visit recent searches and uses those results to provide more relevant searches in the future.

Personalized Search is an improvement to Google search that orders your search results based on what’s most relevant to you. The Search History feature of Personalized Search lets you view and manage your history of searches and search results you’ve clicked on; this information then personalizes your future search results by bringing results closer to the top when it’s clear they’re most relevant to you. Early on, you may not notice a huge impact on your search results, but as you build up your search history, your personalized search results will continue to improve.

MonoRail is an attempt to provide a port of the Ruby on Rails Action Pack class. The open-source project is currently in Beta 4, can run on IIS or Apache, and has a great resource/tutorial/documentation site. If you’re stuck in a “Microsoft house”, you might want to check this one out.

Howard Chui has had a chance to review the Nokia 770 Internet Tablet. The tablet uses Bluetooth or wifi to connect you to the Internet and surf the web. The 770 can also playback music and video, read RSS feeds, check email, view pictures and read PDF’s. And its tightly bundled into a 3” by 7” form factor.