Up till the last couple of weeks search engine generated traffic to the site has been 80 to 90 percent from Google’s search. Over the last month, overall traffic has increased from around 60 visits per day to around 90 per day. Where does it come from? Well, still search engines primarily, and traffic from Google has increased noticeably during this time.

However, to my surprise, Bing is also making a surprisingly strong showing. Click on the chart below to view the details.

(Click on the image to view a larger version.) Chart of traffic sources for rangelistings.com from Oct 1 to Oct 16, 2009. The search engine Bing is suddenly showing at almost 30%.

Hindsight, right? In retrospect, I was just plain ignorant. Had I been using something like Subversion, I can think of a few big issues on past projects that just simply wouldn’t have mattered.

• Before using Subversion: “Argh. I  just royally whacked 189 files in one fell swoop. Curses! When was my last backup?!”
• After using Subversion: “Hrm. I just royally whacked 189 files in one fell swoop. Eh, I’ll just update from the prior revision and try again.”

Source code management irritant

I have a side project, rangelistings.com, built with the Nephtali PHP framework.

Updating the framework source code into my site’s code was trivial, but irritating. With each new release of Nephtali, I would upgrade. I’d do this by doing an export of the Nephtali source from a Google code repository and then copy and paste in the framework files to my working copy.

I couldn’t just drag in a directory because that would drop Subversion’s meta files from that directory and really mess up my working copy. Then I’d spend an extra half hour or so fiddling around to undo my screwed up Subversion copy. Very irritating.

svn:externals to the rescue

I knew about a feature in subversion called “externals,” but had no first-hand experience. I investigated and realized that externals could be the answer to this particular problem.

Here’s how I made use of externals. When upgrading Nephtali, I updated the files in a working copy directory /nephtali/src/NCore/.

1. Since you can’t create an external for a directory that already exists, I removed the NCore directory from my working copy and committed that change.
2. Using Versions, an SVN client for the Mac, added a property to the src directory (NCore http://nephtali.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/src/NCore/).
3. Ran an SVN update on the src directory and, as though by magic, I suddenly had the up-to-date source of Nephtali’s core in my working copy.

On my first attempt, I  followed an example  I had seen online and created a text document that had the svn:externals property in it, and then added the property ‘-F name_of_file.txt’.

That didn’t work so well. It created the folder, but failed to load the files from the remote Nephtali repository.

Once I put the local directory and SVN URL in the property itself, it worked like a charm.

Here are a couple other pages I used while looking into svn:externals.

• The obligatory manual link: Externals Definitions
• Short tutorial on svn propset for svn:externals property (this one includes the separate text file example)

This is the first time I’ve posted advertisements on a site I’ve created, and I’ve run into a compelling question on how to make the ads more effective.

The ads that show up are on-topic, generally. However, an effective ad speaks to the audience, not to a topic, right?

I intend the audience for the rangelistings.com site to be shooters who are looking for places to shoot. Perhaps they, as in my recent case, are moving and want to to find shooting facilities in their new area.

Here is a sampling of the first lines of ads that show up for one of the state pages currently:

• Personal Security Online
• Monitored Security Alarms
• Personal Security Device
• How to Defend Yourself
• Self Defense Pepper Spray

Topically speaking, those are all geared towards self-defense in some fashion. For an audience of shooters, one of them even seems silly (would I rather use pepper spray or a .45 for self-defense?).

So, what ads would be better suited to result in people visiting the site actually clicking on them? Here are a few ideas that I think would work better:

• Ammo: big selection, low price
• Gunsmithing classes
• IPSC videos
• Gun parts and shooting supplies
• 1500+ gun auctions right now

So, ammo, gun parts, and gun auctions have little to do with the actual words listed on the pages of the site, but from the context of the people visiting the site, they actually make sense.

The site just launched, and Google hasn’t even fully indexed it yet, so I’ll not be hasty. However, I’d like to see the ad revenue at least pay for domain registration and hosting fees, and ads that actually appeal to the audience would sure push that goal forward.

The question is, how?

(And I’m not thrilled with the idea of subjugating the content of the website in order to twist the ads that show up. That’s pretty backwards.)

Any good ideas out there?