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!

Whoah, it’s been a while since the last post!  My apologies.

We’ve got a few new features up: new interactive charts and chart types, as well as an upgrade to our ad code.

The charts you’ve probably noticed: they’re what’s shown when you’re examining the performance of an ad box (or a bid, or an ad, or a campaign!).  They used to be static images - and still are, if you don’t have Flash installed - but if you do, they’ve been replaced with more interactive charts that let you get exact values for every data point.  Neat!

We’ve also added comparative charts, which let you plot the performance of, say, three bids on the same charts, so you can see at a glance how they’re performaning against each other. We’ve set up a page here, which walks you through how these new charts work. Enjoy!

The second new feature is a revamped version of our copy-and-paste code. This new code is simpler to install, but otherwise has all the same features. You can get it by going to “My ad boxes” and clicking on “Get code”. You don’t have to upgrade if you don’t want to, of course!

Why did we change our code? There’s a few reasons. The main one was that some platforms (Blogger and Wordpress, specifically) would try to get too helpful and would accidentally modify our code so that it wouldn’t work. This was not so good! Our new code is more compact and simpler, which means that it takes up less space on your website, and there’s less places where it can be modified. It’s also prettier to look at.

The new code also gives you the option of whether or not you want your ads to display to people who have disabled JavaScript: having it on means more people seeing your ad, but also larger code on your page. Most other networks don’t offer non-JavaScript ad displays, but we recommend it!

So that’s what’s new! Expect to see more frequent posts here in the future, and thanks for being a member of Project Wonderful.

We’ll be rolling out a new update on Wednesday with two major changes. First off, after you log in the welcome page will display stats about your ad boxes and bids. Secondly, we’ll be limiting you to a maximum to 20 tags for describing your site’s contents.

The welcome page change is part of the usability enhancement program that we’re developing to improve our member’s experience and make frequently used features more accessible. When you log in to your account, if you have active bids or active ad boxes, then the welcome page will change from the default “how to use the service” message to a display that gives you up to date information on performance and other stats.

Give it a try and let us know how you like it.

On the tags side of thing, we noticed that while the vast majority of our members had less than 20 tags describing their sites, there was a small minority of ad boxes that had hundreds of tags! While we get wanting to ensure maximum exposure for your site, having hundreds of tags to describe the content is functionally equivalent to having no tags at all. If you have 500 tags, then the fact that one of them says “recipes” doesn’t really give me any information about the content of your site. The consequence is a race to the bottom where advertisers end up losing trust in the tagging system and going back to checking site content by hand, which is bad for everyone.

Starting Wednesday, we will limit sites to 20 tags. If you are currently over the limit, we’ve automatically selected 20 from the list you had, though we recommend checking with our choices and readjusting them to better reflect the content of your site. We hope that this move will help clean up the tag namespace and ensure better accuracy in searches as well as encouraging our publishers to be more focused on their core topics.

-Tim

We’ve added a new feature for our advanced members who want to use the same ad on multiple pages with different colour schemes. If you log in to your account and take a look at your ad box code, you’ll notice a few new lines of code and many lines of comments explaining how to use them.

Look for the lines: foregroundColor=''; and backgroundColor='';

If you edit these with the hexadecimal that you want for your foreground and background colours (i.e. backgroundColor='ff0000'; for a bright red), they will override the settings that you set in the ad box properties on our site.

If you have no idea what I’m talking about don’t worry! Cutting and pasting in the code that we generate will still work just fine.

-Tim

This is the official Project Wonderful blog.

We’ll be using it to announce features, discuss tips and tricks for using the service and generally try to keep on top of all things Wonderful.

I’d like to start with the new features that we rolled out on the 12th.

First off are the new 300×250 rectangular ads. Quite a few publishers requested this size and we’re happy to oblige! They look like this:

With the new rectangles, we’re now offering 7 different formats for your ads and ad boxes (you can see them all here).

The other thing we’ve added is the ability to suspend your ad boxes. Say you want to take your site offline for some maintenance, you can deactivate your ad box, which will suspend all bids on it. When you reactivate the box, any bids that haven’t expired will reappear. These options are available under “My ad boxes” -> “Edit ad box”. This allows you to signal to us that your site will be down for a while. We won’t send our robot back until you’ve reactivated your ad box!

Our robot will still be diligently checking on all publisher sites to make sure that the ads are displaying properly. If a site goes down unexpectedly, or a publisher forgets to suspend the box, then the robot will suspend bidding as normal.

Email us at service@projectwonderful.com if you have any questions!

–Tim