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A post today on Slash­dot got me think­ing about adver­tis­ing. Specif­i­cally adver­tis­ing on the inter­net, but also adver­tis­ing in general.

The arti­cle linked off the Slash­dot post was writ­ten by a man named Jim Lynch, a long time writer in tech­nol­ogy media both dig­i­tal and print. Mr. Lynch is appar­ently annoyed by a new fea­ture in Apple’s just-released Safari 5 web browser called Reader. Reader is a fea­ture that, when selected by the user, attempts to detect “arti­cle” con­tent on a web page and dis­play it in a sim­ple for­mat which is larger and often eas­ier to read than the nor­mal web site lay­out. It also attempts to detect multi-page arti­cles and auto­mat­i­cally dis­play fur­ther pages as you scroll down, effec­tively cre­at­ing a “print” view for sites which may lack such things.

What both­ers Mr. Lynch basi­cally comes down to adver­tis­ing. When using Reader, if it works prop­erly all ads are stripped out of the con­tent. More impor­tantly for some, the auto­matic load­ing of the next page means cost-per-impression ads get many less views as they would only show on the first page before the user clicked the Reader button.

I under­stand the key point behind his com­plaint, web sites cost money to run and that has to come from some­where. This site costs me about $275 a year between domain reg­is­tra­tion and server space, and it’s fairly low vol­ume (under­state­ment of the cen­tury, I aver­age less than 40 pageviews a day not count­ing spi­ders). I pay this out of pocket, since for my use the domain is for my email and the VPS is just a place for me to exper­i­ment. As far as I’m con­cerned I’d be pay­ing for them both any­ways, so why not put some­thing there? Obvi­ously that rea­son­ing doesn’t tend to apply out­side the range of per­sonal blogs and the costs are much higher when you start talk­ing real traf­fic lev­els requir­ing real servers rather than a vir­tual slice of one.

Unfor­tu­nately, I can’t help but not feel the slight­est bit of sor­row for adver­tis­ers and those run­ning adver­tis­ing when they com­plain about their ads being blocked. They’ve for the most part brought this on them­selves, by design­ing their ads to be as intru­sive and annoy­ing as pos­si­ble. Web pub­lish­ers have been just as badly a part of the prob­lem, inject­ing ads as if they were con­tent, allow­ing nui­sance ads with auto­play audio/video or var­i­ous popup/under/over win­dows, and in some par­tic­u­larly annoy­ing cases using the con­tent as the ad with Intel­liTXT and the like.

We’ve already seen what the abil­ity to skip ads has done to the tele­vi­sion indus­try. For years they thrived on annoy­ingly loud and repet­i­tive ads which seemed to rely on the “any pub­lic­ity is good pub­lic­ity” the­ory. As soon as the DVR became com­mon the ad mar­ket pretty much fell apart on any­thing peo­ple weren’t watch­ing live. Now that exten­sions like Adblock for Fire­fox and Apple’s new Reader are mak­ing it easy for the aver­age user to dodge ads (rather than us geeks who have been doing it for years) the inter­net ad com­mu­nity fears the same thing happening.

All I have to say is that the inter­net ad indus­try needs to learn from the suc­cess­ful tele­vi­sion ad campaigns.

First and fore­most, DO NOT PISS OFF YOUR POTENTIAL CUSTOMER!!!!!!!!!
If an overly loud and annoy­ing ad comes on the radio or TV, I’ll turn the vol­ume down or change the chan­nel if I don’t really care for what’s on while mak­ing a men­tal note to avoid the adver­tiser if pos­si­ble. The same applies to inter­net ads. If your ad stretches over the con­tent I’m try­ing to read, starts play­ing audio out of nowhere, makes half the words on the page pop up prod­uct links, or oth­er­wise inter­feres with my read­ing of the con­tent I will go out of my way to avoid your prod­uct where pos­si­ble. If ad block­ing is avail­able, I’ll turn it on imme­di­ately when any of those hap­pen and may make a note to avoid the site where it was seen as well.

Sec­ond, draw my eye the right way. You do not have to be loud, either lit­er­ally with audio or fig­u­ra­tively with bright/flashing col­ors. Use your space to make me inter­ested in what you have, then if I actively click on it you can load your con­tent of choice. This is more for adver­tiser rather than pub­lish­ers, but due to point one pub­lish­ers would do well to enforce point two.

Third, be rel­e­vant. If I’m read­ing a site about cars, an ad for purse built to carry small dogs is most likely irrel­e­vant. Again this is for both pub­lish­ers and adver­tis­ers. Ad net­works which do not tar­get based on con­tent are out­dated and should be dropped imme­di­ately from both sides.

Fourth, don’t try to shove too many ads in my face. I myself start get­ting annoyed when there’s more than 3 – 5 ads on the screen at one time, depend­ing on the amount of con­tent and such. Sites that split arti­cles in to a huge num­ber of short pages in order to increase impres­sions for ad pur­poses fall in to the same cat­e­gory (and I believe these sites are the great­est rea­son for the Reader fea­ture). Divid­ing arti­cles in to mul­ti­ple pages is fine, but don’t do it unless you have at least as much infor­ma­tion on a page as an aver­age mag­a­zine. Two para­graphs and a few pic­tures are not a page.

The short ver­sion is pro­vide ads that don’t annoy the reader and prefer­ably are some­thing they might actu­ally want and you won’t have as many block­ing them. If the rel­e­vance goes up, more peo­ple will click on them too. As for the rest, those who have already decided to install full ad block­ers, those are gone already. You won’t get them back, it’s just too nice. Down­load Fire­fox, install Adblock Plus, and sub­scribe to one of the pop­u­lar fil­ter lists like Easylist. Now turn it off and browse to a few pop­u­lar news sites. Turn it back on and reload those pages. If you don’t agree that this is a much cleaner and more enjoy­able way to browse the inter­net you’re blind.

If you are see­ing this post, your DNS servers have updated and noticed that my old VPS on JaguarPC is no longer where they should look. My blog and other ran­dom shit has now been moved over to Lin­ode, where they don’t block IRC and other things I run on my box.

This morn­ing I rebooted my test box run­ning VMware ESXi 3.5 to com­plete the upgrade from Update 3 to Update 4. The hyper­vi­sor came back up, but no guests were run­ning and when I popped open the VI Client it indi­cated that there were no data­s­tores con­fig­ured and it could not find any of the vir­tual machines I had in inven­tory. It saw the inter­nal disks and that they were for­mat­ted VMFS, but would not allow me to do any­thing other than for­mat them over again.

Nor­mally this would have sim­ply annoyed me since I would have lost my test VMs, but they don’t take long to build so I’d have just for­mat­ted them and gone on with my day. Unfor­tu­nately within the last week we had tem­porar­ily moved a crit­i­cal application’s VM to this box and we had not prop­erly recon­fig­ured backup. I could restore from the week old backup, but there would be hell to pay.

Since the VMFS par­ti­tions were clearly vis­i­ble I felt I had a chance, but I’m still new to ESX/ESXi so my first step was to flip over to my always run­ning irssi ses­sion (if you use IRC and do not use screened irssi, go Google it now and enjoy) and ask for help in #shsc and #vmware. #shsc always has a few guys who work on large VMware installs idling, and of course #vmware is obvi­ous. While wait­ing for any input from IRC, I went to Google for my next step. I knew ESXi has the capa­bil­ity to be accessed via SSH, but it’s dis­abled by default, so I looked up how to turn it on. A few min­utes later after bring­ing a mon­i­tor over to the machine and reboot­ing it I had SSH access and could go through sys­tem logs from the com­fort of my laptop.

In /var/log/messages I found two entries ref­er­enc­ing my SATA con­troller which looked inter­est­ing:
May 5 14:34:35 vmkernel: 0:00:06:39.406 cpu0:3616)ALERT: LVM: 4482: vmhba000:0:0:3 may be snapshot: disabling access. See resignaturing section in SAN config guide.
May 5 14:34:35 vmkernel: 0:00:06:39.408 cpu0:3616)ALERT: LVM: 4482: vmhba0:0:0:1 may be snapshot: disabling access. See resignaturing section in SAN config guide.

This infor­ma­tion, after a quick trip to Google, led to VMware’s SAN con­fig­u­ra­tion guide which ref­er­ences sim­i­lar issues occur­ring on SANs, so I tried enabling the res­ig­na­tur­ing option and mag­i­cally my data­s­tores reap­peared. After renam­ing them back to their orig­i­nal names and turn­ing the res­ig­na­tur­ing option back off I had all my data and was able to down­load the disk images and VMX files so I was safe in the event of a major problem.

At this point, I could see my VMs but the VI inven­tory was still con­vinced that they were on the “old dri­ves”, so after a bit more time on Google I dis­cov­ered the Import fea­ture within the data­s­tore browser and I was able to bring the VMs back in and get them boot­ing up.

Screen­shot show­ing my data­s­tores and two VMs running

After con­firm­ing that the VMs I really needed were boot­ing and oper­a­tional, I shut every­thing down to move the server back to its spot in my rack. For­tu­nately every­thing came right back up so the pres­sure was now off.

Now my con­cerns shifted. If this hap­pened once, what’s to stop it from hap­pen­ing again? I needed to fig­ure out why it hap­pened. For­tu­nately at nearly the exact moment I started think­ing about this IRC came through for me. “jidar” in #shsc linked to this thread on VMware’s forum with lit­er­ally the exact same symp­toms. A few posts down was a link to this page which again matched my expe­ri­ence exactly and says that U4 updated a num­ber of SATA dri­vers includ­ing the one for the ICH9 con­troller in my Pow­erEdge and changed the way they appear to the hyper­vi­sor, which led to it not rec­og­niz­ing the dri­ves for what they are.

Right now I’m mod­er­ately annoyed at an update that’s not even enough to earn it a minor ver­sion num­ber bump on a piece of soft­ware intended for enter­prise use hav­ing a change with the poten­tial to cause this, but on the other hand I don’t expect any­one who really cares about reli­a­bil­ity to be using SATA local stor­age. Ah well, I learned a bit about nav­i­gat­ing around ESXi’s internals.

Turned off the Twit­ter digests, those were just silly and annoying.

Fixed the pretty URLs and RSS feed (blasted mod_rewrite), added Gra­vatar sup­port, a tag cloud, and a down­load sys­tem that I may or may not ever use.

The Sub­ver­sion install/upgrade method wins again, bump­ing up to 2.7 was a sin­gle com­mand while logged in as www-data on my server and then accesing wp-admin/upgrade.php

In his recent Home Media Server Guide, Brian Won of Ars Tech­nica briefly dis­cusses the heat and space issues involved with pack­ing lots of hard dri­ves in to a per­sonal server. Since these prob­lems are han­dled nicely by cases such as the Cooler Mas­ter “Stacker” line and the Antec Nine Hun­dred, I started think­ing about power consumption.

My ques­tion then became whether it would make sense from a finan­cial per­spec­tive to pay extra for larger hard dri­ves which you could then use less of, thus burn­ing less power.

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