The cost of hosting has finally caught up to me.  The electricity bill has become a bit hard to swallow and I'm looking for every way to decrease consumption or increase revenue.  Most of my environment is already virtual so, short of powering down in the evening (which I don't want to do because I get a lot of traffic from overseas in the off hours), there isn't much else I can do to cut costs.  I think the best alternative is to bring in some advertising revenue to off-set the cost, so I've established my own Google AdSense account.

After submitting my application my site was approved in less than 24 hours and I was ready to create some ads and place them on my site.  I should note Google didn't request any payment information (credit card numbers etc).  The service is free to the host, as it should be.  The only thing they need is a name and address of where to send the checks, very nice :)

I created a few ads of varying shapes and sizes (banners, skyscrapers, etc) and experimented with where to put them.  As you can see in the sidebar to the right, I settled on a 300x250 pixel image only ad to appear at the top of every page on my site.  Creating the ad was the easy part, adding it to this older version of CommunityServer took a little more work.

I added the following code:

<div class="CommonSidebarArea">
<div class="CommonSidebarRoundTop"><div class="r1"></div><div class="r2"></div><div class="r3"></div><div class="r4"></div></div>
<div class="CommonSidebarInnerArea">
<h4 class="CommonSidebarHeader">Sponsored Link</h4>
<center>
     <!-- INSERT ADSENSE CODE HERE -->
</center>
</div>
<div class="CommonSidebarRoundBottom"><div class="r1"></div><div class="r2"></div><div class="r3"></div><div class="r4"></div></div>
</div>

To each of the following pages, immediately after the <div class="CommonSidebar"> code:

• \Themes\Blogs\Default\theme.master
• \Themes\Default\Blogs\blogs.master
• \Themes\Default\Common\home.aspx
• \Themes\Default\Files\files.master
• \Themes\Default\Forums\forums.master
• \Themes\Default\Galleries\galleries.master
• \Themes\Default\Galleries\gallerysidebar.ascx

I then had to specify a fixed width for my theme's sidebar.  My fluid layout was cutting the advertisement off when the browser size was reduced.

Set the theme's sidebar to a fixed width of 320px (account 10px on each side for padding):

• Login as admin, Control Panel -> Administration -> Settings -> Theme Configuration -> Sidebar Tab -> Set Width to 320 px.
   
  

So far so good.  The only thing I noticed was that if you subscribed to me through an RSS/Atom feed, you wouldn't see the ad.  I sure wouldn't want to leave those people out, and wouldn't you know it, Google has just the fix.  My feeds were already set up through FeedBurner so adding AdSense for Feeds was an easy click or two.  I only wish you could choose the ad size and shape.  I'd much prefer a small centered banner over the large left-aligned block.  Oh well.

That's it!  Now sit back and watch the money... roll... stumble... or flat out crawl through the door :)  Not a bad start for day one though, I'll take it.