I get a ton of daily traffic from search engines; It’s actually a bulk of my traffic on this site. I wanted to take advantage of this traffic, but didn’t want to muck up my site with ads. I wanted a way to display ads for people who visit my site from search engines, but no one else.

To do this, I modified a script that searches posts on my site for terms that Google referrers are searching for, to include a Google AdSense Ad. Now, the only way people see ads on my site are if they come directly from Google, which is great because it’s likely they werent looking for a weblog anyway.

This is further enhanced because I use Google’s AdSense service, so the ads on my page are based Google results, in effect creating perfect marketing – the ads Google shows on the result are the same ads Google would have put on their own site for the search terms that led the person here.

This little trick was put in place my click through percentage went up 600%.

One project that I’m least proud of, though it’s received the most recognition, is The Caption Machine. It’s basically a community site where I choose a photo from the thousands that have been uploaded. Then I allow the site patrons to add captions to it. It was one of the first on the web to be simply powered by a blogging content management system. Originally it was listed on Blogger.com as a weblog of note. Then it spent a couple days on the front page of “My Yahoo” as a featured site which brings new meaning to being “slash dotted” let me tell you. It was also part of a “cool sites” feature on Tech TV’s, The Screen Savers, and I was interviewed by the New York Times (it actually made it to print – my mom ordered a copy and framed it — that’s what mom’s do).

My other site is my shareware, freeware, and free AppleScript site called Objective Labs. (Originally called Web Entoruage, but Microsoft Layers “asked” me to change the name) The flagship product was BlogApp and was featured in MacWorld magazine. It’s since been overpowered by competition and a serious lack of updates. I have a few other jems on there including a Mail Merge program that uses the built in Address Book of Mac OS X and your email program of choice. It’s aptly titled MailMergeApp.

The Tech of Salted Wound.
The main or weblog portion of Salted Wound is powered by Movable Type version 2.63. Over the years it’s been also powerd by Blogger, Blosxom, the defunct B2 which is now called Word Press and is being developed by a new team.

The Photo Gallery on this site is powerd by PhotoStack. It’s a PHP based photo gallery maker that is simple and clean.

The referrer log is powered by Refer. It uses mysql and is full of referral spam and is now all but useless.

Comment spam blocking is thwarted by the always evolving Blacklist-MT. I’ve also got a cron task running daily to update my blacklist with the new additions at the blacklist clearing house.

The five recent photos you see at the top of the main page are placed there via Flickr. Currently in beta but soon to be released community photo site that allows me to snap pictures on my SonyEricsson T-610 camera phone and send them either to flickr, or to flickr and my weblog. I can also upload photos via email, or through a desktop client application. It’s quite nice, and you don’t need a weblog for it to be useful.

The “Listening To” section is now being generated by a desktop app and site combo called Audio Scrobbler. The list on the page is generated using a php based rss reader called MagpieRss