Ads

So I finally caved in and added Google Adsense ads to my website. They’re pretty non-obtrusive, and can be themed to more or less blend in with the rest of my site, so I don’t mind them all that much, especially since I can place them more or less wherever I want.

There’s one annoyance that I want to mention, though. If you’re serving pages as application/xhtml+xml to conformant browsers, Adsense won’t work in the form Google gives it to you, since XHTML-conformant renderers do not allow the Javascript document.write() method to be used on “real” XHTML documents, not to mention that the HTML iframe element used by Adsense doesn’t exist in XHTML. Fortunately, there’s a clever workaround, which is apparently approved by Google (or so I’ve read elsewhere).

Otherwise, the process was pretty painless. I don’t get all that many site visitors (and probably most people who read my blog do so via the RSS feed, which doesn’t get ads), but hopefully this will help in some small way to defray my hosting costs.

I’ll give it a couple months as a trial, and if it doesn’t seem like it’s worth it, I’ll take it down.