During the past couple years, people have inquired about buying ad space here at CMSReport.com.  While someone wanting to place a banner on my site could always use Google's Adwords, most of the inquiries seem to want a more direct approach.  I've always been reluctant to host the ad banners on my own server and, until recently, I wasn't impressed with a lot of the banner ad services available for publishers such as me.  Luckily, things change.

I'm happy to announce that I'll be selling 125x125 banner ads through BuySellAds.com.  BuySellAds.com provides a more direct approach for me to manage these ads by allowing sponsors to purchase the ad space at a flat monthly rate.  No longer will I or the sponsors have to worry about cost per click, cost per conversion, cost per lead, etc.

The 125x125 banner ads will initially be offered at $50 per month.  If this offering is as well received as I think it will, the price will likely go up in a few months.  Feel free to contact me if you have interest in sponsoring CMS Report with a banner space of 468x60 or 300x250.  If there is enough interest, I'll provide the ad space.

This Drupal site of mine has taken quite a bit of beating the past couple weeks.  While Mollom has been protecting this site well enough from the comment spammers, it isn't designed to prevent the bots from trying to ping me so much.  It has been an incredible experience to see the bots try to open every possible URL and directory here at CMSReport.com.  But probably the real stress on the site has been my testing of numerous contributed modules that are still under development.  Probably using a production server to test new modules isn't the smartest thing for anyone to do, but it does provide a nice adrenaline rush from time to time.

To make a long story short, I'm testing a number of ways I can use a Web content management system more efficiently to run this site.  I also want to do some restructuring of the site so that I have more flexibility in the look and feel of the site as well as how the content is delivered.  For the most part, I'll be using Pathauto, Views, Panels, and one of the aggregation modules.  I'm currently testing the FeedAPI module for aggregation, but none of the aggregation related modules really do what I want them to do.  I'll put up a site recipe in the next month or two on the modules I finally settle on to support this site.

Now it is time for me to go.  Evidently, one of the modules I've installed is causing some cron issues.  Am I having fun, yet?  Yes, I am.

Baseline: Here are a few key things to think about when it comes to Web site design and management in terms of search results, audience and growth.

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I'm spending time Friday and this weekend upgrading the software I use to run CMSReport.com. You'll have to excuse the mess as I'm working with a lot of themes/modules for Drupal 6 that are still under development. Feel free to report problems below, but note that the WYSIWYG for comments is currently offline. working but considered under "test mode".

Bryan

This has been a very cold week in the Dakotas. Sunday morning the temperature dropped to around -14 degrees Fahrenheit (that's around -26 degrees Celsius). These are real temperatures and not wind chill.

Needless to say, I am not spending a whole lot of time outside this month. However, these cold temperatures are very geek friendly. I am spending my time at the computer and getting some very needed things done.

Some of the items I have been working on that may be of interest to you:

1. I am starting to make some decisions on where I want to take CMS Report from here. I'm considering to go more "professional" with the site. The changes I would like to make may involve some willingness on my part to partner with someone who has similar interests and more experience in these matters.

  New minor versions of Drupal were released this week, Drupal 4.7.11 and Drupal 5.6 (see excerpt below). In case you're wondering, I have already updgraded this site to Drupal 5.6...no problems, no worries.

Drupal 4.7.11 and 5.6 are now available for download. These are maintenance releases that fix problems reported using the bug tracking system, as well as security vulnerabilities.

Upgrading your existing Drupal sites is strongly recommended.

Download

• Download Drupal 5.6.
• Download Drupal 4.7.11.

read more

As a sidebar, Drupal 6 Release Candidate 2 is also out. I promise, we'll be one of the first sites to go Drupal 6 once the software goes "gold". We may break a few things, but well worth the price for some IT glory!