McNicholl Holdings

I have just finished reading Why AdSense Might NOT be Best for Your Blog on Darren Rowse’s Problogger Blog.

Everything that Darren has said is correct - its some of the comments that I find odd. The post itself revolves around 7 reasons that Google’s Adsense program may not be the best money making program for your blog - finished of with the customary “what do you think?” question to his readers.

A few of the commentators feel that Adsense on a company’s blog is a bad idea. I think they have missed the point entirely. For a start - there are many different types of companies. Most firms sell a product or service and this generates revenue - Revenue that they can utilise for their future endeavours. Other companies provide a service for free and require other revenue streams to survive.

Digg, Reddit, YouTube and their ilk had venture capital funding and their business model (in the early days) was ‘maximum exposure’ and ‘maximum userbase’ with a view to being bought over by a larger firm.

No Funding

Firms that do not get or do not want to get venture funding have to grease the coffers with something. Most advertising programmes will not entertain your website/blog with their ads until you have a certain amount of eyes glazing over your pages - so in the beginning (i.e Zero Pagerank, Zero visitors and Zero Income) some would say it’s best to have something coming in than nothing at all. This is where Adsense steps up.

Darren Rowse started with Adsense, as to did all the other bloggers that are popular today. This is now their business. Darren has now stated that on problogger.net - he has outgrown Adsense. If he can optimise the space on his blog and capitalise on its popularity then obviously private advertising will return higher than adsense - so the change is simple business logic. This takes time though, private advertisers don’t come running to your door just because you have a website.

So - back to point - Adsense is the best place to start generating income for any fledgling company/self-employed/part-time blogger simply because it brings in money until the higher return avenues open up.

p.s. Even established companies find Adsense to be a valuable avenue of income - e.g www.translink.co.uk - This is Northern Irelands main train company with gross income of close to £1million per day. They still use Adsense on their website.

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With only 2 weeks to go I have just realised that I haven’t bought any presents nor had any ‘christmasy’ inclinations. What made me realise? I hear you ask….. Well - every christmas the free TV channels start playing high budget films. Roll in ‘Oceans Twelve’.

Since I work a full time job alongside setting up a business of my own its been :

while (!(hasMentalBreakdown())) {
work();
home();
work();
sleep();
}


So here starts the countdown until Christmas! Do you have all your presents bought?

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The application that I am programming at the moment dictates that an object can have many participants. For improved usability the owner of the object needs to be able to add and remove participants en massé.

Creating this functionality is simple but ensuring that it is done efficiently requires some further thought.

A = List of Users who currently have access to the object

B = List of Users that should have access to the object after updating

B can contain none, some or all of A.

Method 1

The easiest thing to do when updating the list of participants is to delete all current participants (A) and grant access to all new participants (B). In doing this we would be executing two, possibly bulky, of an RDBMS’s most time intensive SQL statements :

1. DELETE FROM X WHERE Y in (A,B,C) and D=E
2. INSERT INTO X VALUES (A, B, C)

Method 2
Another method of setting the new participants would be to only update what has changed in the list. Doing this incurs an additional SELECT statement in order to determine what needs to be added and removed :

1. SELECT * FROM X WHERE Y=Z
2. DELETE FROM X WHERE Y in (A,B,C)
3. INSERT INTO X VALUES (A, B, C)

The question now is :

Which method is the most database efficient?

Method 1 gets the job done in two SQL statements but method 2 can possibly reduce the number of inserts and deletes necessary while at the same time adding an additional SELECT statement.

To emphasize this issue further - consider the following :

In my application an object (A) can contain child-objects (B). Each child-object can have an individual list of participants - this list is a subset of those participants in the parent object.

If a user is removed from the participant list of the parent - he/she should no longer be a participant in any of its child objects - and hence should be removed.

In doing this the same situation arises above :

Is it best to do a blanket DELETE statement across the participants table for the parent object and each of its child objects for the user ID?

OR

Execute a SELECT statement to find the list of objects and child objects that the user has access to and then DELETE as necessary?

Which method in these scenarios is the most efficient?

Any thoughts?

Answers on a postcard….

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