Editing a blog has many interesting aspects, not the least of which is wrestling with the technology we are using to bring you nice and interesting stuff. If a picture is sometimes temporarily misaligned or the text wraps in a funny way, well, it is not us trying to innovate… It is the undocumented features in our tools that crop up here and there.
But context sensitive advertisements are the most fun by far!
Our regular readers will perhaps remember the big skyscraper ad on the right hand side of the main page that showed attractive ladies in various degrees of undress, alternatively proposing to find your new Ukrainian date or to conquer the world by playing on-line games… We do try to make ads as unobtrusive as possible while also ensuring that they are relevant and useful to our readers. Believe it or not, those ladies were generated by a piece of code supposed to react to the content of the blog and show ads that matched the content.
We could never figure out which air traffic management related text, abbreviation or whatever made the code think we needed a new partner in
life or wanted to practice conquering the world but it did make one wonder about the hidden depths and meaning of ATM apparently visible only to computers.
Anyway, those ads were considered inappropriate and we plucked out the corresponding code.
A little later we tried something else and this works fine. You will see two text based ads at the end of each article and they now line up pretty well with our aviation theme in general.
Of course no system is perfect… I have noticed that after the article “Whatever happened to (the benefits of) Mode S Enhanced Surveillance” one of the advertisements is for Elementary and Enhanced Surveillance Aircraft modifications by STC. The article by our contributor cleo is rather critical of Mode S Enhanced Surveillance but this left the advertising module cold. You may not like it but you still have to do it. Now that is what I call context sensitivity…
P.S. If you see an ad after this article that seems out of context… well, this is what happens if you as much as mention ladies in your text.