John Bintz announced today that the latest version of Plugin Wonderful is out. You can download it here!
Plugin Wonderful is a fantastic way to add Project Wonderful to your WordPress themes. Thanks John!
When you’re doing web design, it’s always tempting to design for the most up-to-date browsers, but you have to remember that not everybody runs them. You can’t leave those folks behind. On the flip side, however, some folks are running browsers that are so out-of-date that to support them fully would mean crippling your website and leaving out a lot of modern functionality. So, there’s always a tradeoff!
We always try to make things as inclusive as possible. For example, our ad code is one of the few in the world that can gracefully degrade and display ads even to people who have JavaScript turned off. Recently, we added Ajax functionality to our bidding pages, which allows you to bid up and down in real time. Of course, if you’re not running JavaScript, these won’t work, but they fail gracefully: they direct you to a page explaining what JavaScript is and how to turn it on. And, as before, you can always use the simple “edit bid” page.
For something more modern like Ajax, you’ve pretty much always got to ensure that there’s a non-Ajax way of doing things. In other words, shiny new interface elements for those who can handle them, while everyone has the option of staying with the tried and true.
We also updated our bid status icons. Older versions of Internet Explorer had long-standing bugs in which alpha blending (the transparent parts of images!) would not be rendered properly: instead of “seeing through” the image, you’d see an ugly shade of gray. It wasn’t very pretty. As such, our status icons were in GIF format, which rendered properly everywhere but which were limited to 256 colours. With IE support of PNG images now working properly for a while, we’ve upgraded our images to PNG format, and tidied them up a bit while we’re at it.
After (PNG format):
You’ll notice the new images have a much smoother border, with none of the “jaggies” associated with the GIF format. This is an example of the trade-offs mentioned earlier: members using old versions of Internet Explorer will still see grey backgrounds on these images, but these members are in a much smaller minority now, and the majority of members can now enjoy a prettier Project Wonderful.
(Any resemblance between the old “NSF” image on the right and Pickle Inspector from the critically-acclaimed comic MS Paint Adventures are entirely coincidental.)
Many of our publishers use WordPress as their content management system: it’s a convenient way to publish online. Adding our ad code to WordPress is generally pretty simple: just copy the code from our site and add it to your site’s appropriate theme files, and you’re good to go! The downside of this, of course, is that you have to be comfortable editing the source code of your WordPress themes, and not everyone is.
John Bintz to the rescue! John, who ALSO does the all-ages adventure comic A Moment of Clarity, wrote a WordPress plugin just for Project Wonderful: Plugin Wonderful. Just install this plugin and you can drop Project Wonderful ads onto your site with ease. SWEET.
You can download the plugin here!
John’s other development work includes ComicPress Manager, the much-praised administration plugin for the ComicPress suite of WordPress themes. So what we’re saying here is that his work has an established track record for quality. Thanks John!
One of the major changes we’ve made to the bidding page (although it appears relatively minor on the page itself) is how bids end. Before when choosing an expiry date for your bid, you’d just click on the appropriate link, and a calendar showing the current month would pop up. You’d flip through to the month you wanted (assuming, of course, if you want the bid to expire on a day in the current month), choose a date and time, and you’d be good to go. It looked like this:
and when you’d click on that yellow “ending” text, you’d get something link this:
Pretty simple, right? We thought so too, until we discovered this one interface element caused a small market drop 12 times a year.
The issue is that most bidders don’t really care when their bid ends. Some do, of course (which is why it’s great to have this feature), but we discovered that when most bidders would choose an expiry date, they’d use approximates, saying things like “I want this bid to last about 2 weeks” and select a date appropriately. So far so good. But rather than always choosing a day about 14 days away, the date bidders would choose was being influenced by the interface.
Let’s say it’s the 15th of March. Our bidder, wanting his or her bid to last about two weeks, would most likely click on the last day of the month, the 31st, since that’s pretty close to his or her goal of two weeks. One thing they wouldn’t do was click on the calendar once to move it ahead to April, and click again to select April 1st. Selecting March 31st instead of April 1st saves our bidder two clicks, and the two dates are both close enough to being two weeks away from the 15th that it’s not really worth the hassle.
You may see where we’re going with this!
Now let’s say it’s the 16th of the month, and we’re in the same scenario. Our bidder is again most likely to select March 31st, since it saves time and clicks, and while it’s not as close to two weeks away as it was on the 15th, it’s still a pretty good fit. And as days go by, this bidder keeps selecting the 31st of March as their “two weeks away” point until we’re so close to it that it’s not a reasonable approximation of “two weeks away” anymore. At this point the bidder either thinks “Ah well, one week is enough” and again selects March 31st, or they bite the bullet and click twice more to select a later date in April.
The result of this was that we would see a spike in expiring bids at the end of every month. This was less than ideal for publishers, because at the end of every month all these bids would disappear en masse, and bid prices would drop across the board. Of course, that meant prices were cheaper for advertisers, but as we’ve seen recently in the world economy, a stable market is often preferable to one with drastic changes in it, even if this volatility is somewhat predictable. It would usually take a day or two to push prices up to where they’d been before the month ended.
Our new interface is similar, with an important difference: if you want to enter in an expiry date (and you don’t have to), you now have two ways of expressing this. The first (and default) way is to select the number of days (or weeks, or months, or years) that you want your bid to last. The second option is the one we discussed, with the pop-up calendar that allows you to choose a particular day. It looks like this:
What this new interface does that the old one didn’t is make the desire for efficiency we all share (some might call this “laziness”, but I disagree!) into a positive thing. If you’re there thinking, “I want this bid to last two weeks, and I don’t particularly feel like looking at a calendar to figure out what day that actually is”, this allows you to enter in the most important information (the length of your bid) without having to transform it to a date. The result is that bid expiries are no longer clumped around the end of the month, but happen throughout it instead. This means is a more stable and consistant market, which is good for everyone!
It goes to show you the importance of interfaces: even small things like this can have larger effects on the system as a whole. Normally improvements to our pages like this one are made without this sort of post to go with it, but it was really interesting for us to discover what was going on, why, and to redesign (and test, and redesign, and test, and redesign) the page appropriately. I hope you found it as interesting as we did!
We’ve just rolled out a ton of new features to make Project Wonderful easier and more useful for you, our beloved members! Here’s a short list of the highlights:
There are various other interface improvements made throughout the site, including the pages used to modify your ad boxes and campaigns, which have been simplified and clarified. We’ve got other improvements planned throughout the year. It should be a good one!
Thanks for being Project Wonderful members.
It’s Christmas Eve, everyone! That is exciting. I wanted to wish you happy holidays and a most excellent new year - I hope the it brings you nothing but happy surprises and good times!
Our offices are shut down for the holidays but will be open again on January 2nd. If you’ve applied to become a publisher, the turnaround time on approval may be a bit longer than normal. And support may be a bit slower during this period, but you’ll still get a response to your email!
All the best.
Today, if you’re in a part of the world that observes it, is when Daylight Savings Time ends, and your clocks fall back by an hour. It’s a free hour of the day! Depending on how you look at it!
One question we’ve never gotten - which has always been kind of surprising - is how DST affects Project Wonderful: we charge in terms of time, so aren’t people getting a free hour of advertising when we fall back, and isn’t an hour of advertising disappearing when we spring forward?
The answer is of course no: all temporaral calculations on Project Wonderful are done in terms of “Unix time“, which is the number of seconds elapsed since January 1st, 1970. This may sound weird, but it makes a lot of things in computer science easy, including DST. Since Unix time measures the number of real seconds since this date, it’s not affected by changes to the clock: when we leap forward, we aren’t gaining an hour in any real sense. The second after the leap forward we’re still only one more second away from January 1st, 1970, and that’s what Unix time records.
I recommend checking out the linked articles on Daylight Savings Time and Unix time! They’re both really interesting, and there’s so much history and controversy and trivia behind DST that you might not expect.
Autosurfing sites are sites that will simulate traffic on your site, usually through an exchange: something like “for every 30 seconds you view one of the sites our members have submitted, another one of our members will view your site”.
The end result that autosurfs advertise is that your site gets Real Traffic FastTM, while the end result in reality is that your site gets a bunch of low-quality traffic from disinterested readers who are just running out the clock so that someone else will do them the same favour. They don’t work, but have an appeal to someone who wants to see their hits go up, no matter how it happens.
Wikipedia has a great article about them, with a few main takeaways:
So generally, they’re something you want to avoid. If you’re a Project Wonderful publisher they’re definitely something you want to avoid, as using autosurfs to inflate the page views of your site goes against our Terms Of Service, and will result in your ad boxes being deleted and your account being shut down. So just in case you’re tempted by the promise of “REAL TRAFFIC NOW” — we’d advise you to look twice, and do the research.
We’ve updated our help pages recently: gone is the open-source phpMyFAQ and replacing it is some homegrown software more suited to our needs. Nothing against phpMyFAQ, as it is a solid piece of software, but it was never a perfect fit: our new software is perfectly integrated with the rest of our site and set up more like a book you can browse, with some wiki-like features added in.
Questions are organized into categories, which are themselves organized, so you can see the context of each article you’re reading, and also see related articles on the same theme. Of course you can search for articles as well, but this new help system should make finding the information you want easier, while also making the system less daunting to new members!
Behind the scenes, there’s some exciting management features, like recording the most common search terms people use that don’t result in an exact match: this way we can see what we’re missing that people want, and add it into the database!
You can check out the new help system here. We’re adding new articles to it all the time, and one of the most popular new articles is the one titled Which sites can I put Project Wonderful ads on?, which explains our publisher standards in some detail. If you’re thinking of applying to become a Project Wonderful publisher, it’s worth checking out!
One of the most common questions we get at our customer service address goes something like this:
“Hi! I like your service, but I’ve noticed that many bidders cancel bids before they expire. Does that mean they’re ripping me off, because they don’t have to pay when they cancel a bid?”
The short answer is “No, as a publisher you earn money every second a bid is displayed on your site“. And as an advertiser, you’re charged every second your bid is the high bidder. These charges happen every few seconds and are credited (or charged) to your account automatically.
The longer answer is that, although we discuss advertising in terms of cost per day (ie: how much it costs to have your ad on a site for an entire day), bids don’t have to last a full day. We actually charge bidders every few seconds to the nearest 1/100th of a second, so there’s no way anyone can gain anything by cancelling a bid: it just prevents future charges.
For example, if someone bids your ad box up to $24 a day and sits there for an hour before cancelling, then we will charge them $1.00. On our site, the values we show are rounded to the nearest cent, but if you hold your mouse over the “current profits” number (if you’re a publisher) or the “current expense” number (if you’re an advertiser), you’ll see the a less-rounded version.
As most of you know, we do allow bidders (and publishers) to cancel any bid at any time. Often bidders will try out a site for a bit to see the performance. When a bid is cancelled, there’s no way anyone is gaming the system or not paying anything - they still have to pay for the time they were up. In addition, our campaign system will sometimes cancel bids as it manages the campaign: that’s probably where most of these cancelled bids are coming from!
But I’m not just posting this to clear this issue up. Over the past few weeks, we’ve made changes to the site to try to make this more clear to our members, but nevertheless, this question still arrives in our in box once in a while. Much less frequently, granted, but still enough for it to be noticable! I think it’s time to admit that maybe the word “cancelled” wasn’t the right choice: it has connotations of “undo” to it, a sense of “oh, wait, wait, I take this back”.
We’re considering renaming the “cancelled” status to something a bit more clear: “Expired early” is our current favourite, but we’re open to alternatives! If you have any suggestions, feel free to post them in the comments, with our thanks. And you can expect to see the current naming of the “cancelled” status to be “expired early” in the near future.