Preamble:
Google AdSense Referrals are pretty cool in a way as they contribute well in topping up on your daily AdSense earnings. Moreover, they’re quite unobtrusive and can be placed anywhere on the page without interfering with the content much. According to me they’re best placed in the side-bar and since I’m using a widget enabled theme I got down to searching for a widget plug-in that would let me to do just that.
If you don’t know how a AdSense Referral looks like, here’s a snapshot…
Anyway, I found plenty of AdSense widget plug-ins that allow you to display the text-ads anywhere on the side-bars. None of the plug-ins I found were cut-out for Referral Ads only, but with some minor modifications one could use the available ones to show referrals too.
Google provides you with 4 different kinds of referrals at the moment and my idea was to keep rotating between all of them randomly, thus presenting your visitors with a wider range of choice to pick from. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find a single one in this category and hence with whatever limited knowledge of WordPress I have, I got down to writing one of my own. The idea was to use the mt_rand function of PHP which …
“uses a random number generator with known characteristics using the Mersenne Twister, which will produce random numbers four times faster than what the average libc rand().” provides.
… and generate a number between 1 & 4 and use that number as a key to an array holding the google_cpa_choice code for the four different referrals. Pretty easy, eh ? Every time a visitor loads the page containing this widget in the sidebar, a new random number is generated, thus showing a different referral (most of the time). I say most of the time here, since occasionally the generated random numbers might overlap showing the same referral consecutively for a couple of times.
When it came to the implementing the idea part, I was at a total loss as I’d no clue about writing sidebar widgets. However, I’m extremely adept at making meaning out of existing code and modifying it to suit my purposes. I acquired half my PHP knowledge that way. So even here, I picked a AdSense widget plug-in that seemed the easiest to decipher and recode. The plug-in I chose was Google AdSense Widget written by Mike Smullin. It took me about half-an-hour to read through the code and another one hour to get it to do what I wanted. The result was GARR or Google AdSense Referral Rotator, which I’m sharing with you here.
Current Version
- 0.1
Requirements
- Wordpress Sidebar Widgets Plugin in case you’re using WordPress 2.1.x or below.
- None, if you’ve WordPress 2.2.x installed.
Download Google AdSense Referral Rotator Widget v0.1 (downloaded 803 times)
