Recently in AdSense Category

 Google has started to migrate AdSense users to Google Accounts and it broke my little  AdSense Watch Toolbar - it couldn't login into account. For the first time and only because I haven't coded login procedure flexible enough. The change was oneliner - just different URL.

Anyway, I uploaded AdSense Watch Toolbar v1.0.1, which supports both old AdSense and new Google Accounts. If you migrated to Google Accounts, please update.

If you were using my little AdSense Watch Toolbar 1.0b version and it expired, I'm sorry about that, go and download new version 1.0, which has no time limitation.

After 6 months in beta I can say AdSense Watch proved to be pretty stable, which is kinda unusual for screenscraping applications. Google used to change AdSense site once in a months or two, breaking various AdSense tools, but this toolbar kept working just fine. I never had to fix it because of Google site changes. That's because AdSense Watch is only using screenscraping technique for logging in, the AdSense data itself is fetched as CSV in English, which happens to be stable enough.

So if you are AdSense addict, that's for you. And it's free. Feature requests are welcome.

First hundred users of the AdSense Watch Toolbar and first nasty bug - when language other than English is set up for an AdSense account at Google the CSV report cannot be parsed. Apparently googlers generate CSV report in a localized form - headers are translated and numbers are in a locale-specific format. Weird. What about separation data and presentation, huh? Why on earth CSV report needs to be localized? It must be pure data in an easy to process form. Google doesn't think so.

Ok, I figured out that if I add "&hl=en" to the end of CSV report request I get CSV file in English no matter what language AdSense account works with. Good enough.

I updated AdSense Watch Toolbar installation to fix this issue. If anybody got "Cannot parse AdSense data" error, download new version please.

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 AdSense Watch Toolbar.

AdSense Watch is a Windows Explorer toolbar (a desk band technically speaking), usually docked to the Windows taskbar. AdSense Watch displays your current "Google AdSense for content" report - Page impressions, Clicks, Page CTR, Page eCPM and Earnings. The data is updated automatically or on demand. More info on AdSense Watch Toolbar usage can be found at the XML Lab site.