Blogger :
Oleg Tkachenko
All posts :
All posts by Oleg Tkachenko
Category :
XML
Blogged date : 2006 Aug 13
This Lebanon war had a terrible impact on my personal productivity. Too much TV, too much internet, too much pain, too little work. Hope it ends soon. Anyway I decided I need some short victorious war, oops I mean small interesting project to get me back on track. I've seen AdSense Notifier plugin for Firefox another day and I thought - cool, but I don't run Firefox 100% time, I want it on Windows taskbar, not a browser statusbar. So I had a spike project and got it working in just one night. Then I spent another two weeks polishing it. Ahhhhh, a joy of good old pure win32, MFC-free, just Windows and you and nothing in between. Unmanaged C++, LPTSTR, HWND, messages, win32 multithreading - sweet, I'm in The Old New Thing world again. The result is AdSenseWatch Desk Band.
AdSenseWatch is a Windows Explorer toolbar (a desk band technically speaking), usually docked to the Windows taskbar. AdSenseWatch displays "Google AdSense for content" todays report - Page impressions, Clicks, Page CTR, Page eCPM and Earnings. The data is updated automatically or on demand. More info on AdSenseWatch usage can be found at the XML Lab site.
Latest AdSense Watch installation is available at the XML Lab Downloads page. Latest AdSenseWatch version is currently 1.0b and as any other beta software is free (but not open-source). AdSense Watch was tested on Windows 2000, Windows XP Pro and Windows Server 2003.
Any suggestions, bug reports and comments are welcome at the AdSenseWatch forum.
Sorry in advance to Allen G Holman that AdSenseWatch looks similar to his great AdSense Notifier. Basic things usually similar in any environment...
I wasn't aware of Google AdSense API (and I'm still unaware of what it provides) and so implemented AdSense login basically using screenscraping technique. I tried to make login code as robust as possible and I think I succeeded in that, at least AdSenseWatch survived latest changes in Google AdSense login procedure AdSense Notifier stumbled upon. As for report data - AdSenseWatch is using CSV data for reliability.
Btw, AdSenseWatch is Windows Explorer Desk Band, but from implementation perspective it's not much different from Internet Explorer toolbar, so with minimal changes (mostly wrt registering) I actually can make AdSenseWatch IE toolbar version.
I want to investigate Google AdSense API possibilities and add more features in the next version if there will be any interest in this tool.
Anyway, enjoy.
Contents
ReBlogger Contents
Email TopXML