I’ve been experimenting with the new Adsense Video Units on a couple of my other blogs: Buenos Aires, City of Faded Elegance and El Sur: Travel Guide to South America.

The Adsense video units are very easy to setup:

1. Login to your adsense account
2. From the setup panel of your adsense account, authorize your YouTube account to be accessed by adsense. (You’ll need a YouTube account to place Adsense video units on your site. If you don’t have one, then you can sign up from within adsense).
3. Wait a while for adsense to authorize your account for video units.
4. Then it’s time to create the player. As with normal adsense units you can create several types of channels or, in this case, players.
5. Select the type of video content you want.
6. Then embed the code in your site.

Three sizes of video players are offered: 400 x 415, 500 x 515, 780 x 560

A particular challenge to bloggers and other web sites initially will be on deciding the best placement of the Adsense video player on the Web page. Even the smallest Adsense video unit player takes up a large chunk of real estate.

Bloggers solely interested in monetizing their sites likely will slap the adsense video unit player smack up at the top. But it seems like that approach might almost obliterate all the other content on the page.

For my sites I chose to place the smallest version of the player at the bottom of single post pages. You can see examples at 30 Things to do in Buenos Aires and Bus companies in Argentina.

You should be careful in placing the video player in the right file of your blog’s setup. In WordPress that will depend upon the structure of your theme. I placed my video link in the WordPress file single.php. Be careful that you don’t place the video player in the php file that will cause the player to be displayed below every post on your index page. I don’t think anyone wants to see 5 or so video players embedded in one page!

Another question is whether people even want to see a video player embedded on every page. It may depend upon how well YouTube/Google is able to target the content to your site. I’m going to have another posting on that topic. I will have to say that from my early viewing of the adsense video player that I am not pleased with the video content that is being targeted for my sties. It’s totally irrelevant even though I selected categories and keywords in the adsense player setup that should direct content to my sites’s topics. And there is a lot of content in YouTube on Buenos Aires, Argentina, South America travel, etc. But, I’m going to give it time. It also took the traditional Adsense ad units a while to start displaying relevant contextual ads. So, I assume the same is true with the video.

Update: After more than 24-hours, still no change of video content in the Adsense video unit. Still the same video, totally irrelevant to the category I chose. I’ve removed the Adsense video unit from my Buenos Aires blog. I’m keeping it on the El Sur blog, which has a different traffic pattern, for a few days to see if it changes.

When programming and developing for the Web I’ve always preferred a Linux box or, in the past few years, Mac OS X. Lately I’m finding myself on a Windows machine and before I go about installing Linux, I wanted to revisit the difficulty of setting up a development environment in Windows (mysql, php, apache). With XAMPP the whole process is remarkably easy.

XAMPP is also available for Linux and versions are in development for Mac OS X and even Solaris. As the documentation strongly states, XAMPP isn’t secure enough for a production environment and is only intended for development purposes. How long does it take to install on Windows? Let’s see…

With the installer version XAMPP is a 33 MB download, so that gives you time to read the documentation. On my connection the download took 3 minutes but there’s really not a lot to read.

The actual install was under 2 minutes. …. since I’m on a Spanish language version of Windows the installed location is C:\Archivos de programa\xampp … I guess that is “c:\Program Files\xampp” for most of you, rigth? I forget.

After installation the XAMPP Control pops up. At this point you need to be sure to have read the part about security. After configuring a couple of passwords you’re then ready to go.

So, just 15 minutes after beginning the download I now have mysql, php, phpmyadmin, apache, and a few other things all working fine on my Windows machine. Simple, I like that.

XAMPP also includes a little batch file that you can use to switch between PHP 5 and PHP 4. You have to stop the apache service first before running the batch file but the XAMPP control panel makes that easy.

Maybe it’s not all that difficult to install all these things individually anymore on Windows. It has been a while since I did that. But with XAMPP I don’t really see why anyone should bother if you just want a development machine. Unless, that is, you’re needing to work with a specific version of MySQL. The version supplied with XAMPP is 5.0.24a.

Of course, I always think that the best development environment is a developmental server that is similar to your production server (same OS, same configuration). But that’s not always a possibility.

Working with technology can be fun when you’re presented with a challenge and need to find a solution. One of my latest tasks is to figure out how to manage more than 100 Web sites, each with its own domain (not subdomain or subdirectory), in the most effective way possible. Some sites will be blogs, others will be more traditional Web site.

I’m very fond of WordPress and my initial thinking was to figure out how to make it work for my needs. I particularly like the way that themes work in WordPress and the ease of designing, customizing the interface will be a factor in implementing all these sites.

And though I do have a dedicated server for all these sites I don’t want to have a hundred instances of WordPress. I would like to have one application installed that can manage sites over multiple domains.

Keeping WordPress in mind I looked at WordPress MU and Lyceum, which are both forks of WordPress designed for multiple users. There are some interesting aspects to those projects that require further examination.

I’ve also collected a number of URLs on this topic, particularly relating to the use of WordPress that I may later add to this post.

For my needs it would be even better to be able to manage these sites all from one admin interface since these will be sites all maintained by one company rather than a lot of different users unaffiliated with each other. So, this makes things a little more complicated.

Also, multilingual capabilities will be nice since some of these sites will be in English and Spanish while some also will be in French.

I started to broaden my search to other content management systems. Drupal immediately came to mind since it’s an impressive project. I thought about Joomla! but it doesn’t seem to support multiple sites from one installation. Seems like Drupal offers a good option for many of the tasks that I need. Will definitely be examining it closer.

But I also decided to think about other CMS options and headed over to the CMS matrix, which lists hundreds of content management systems. I didn’t know that there were so many…not sure why the world needs so many, particularly the ones that costs > $75,000 but, hey, whatever …

A tool that seems very attractive to me is Typo3, particularly for its multi-lingual support and a number of other options. Since I’m less familiar with Typo3 I’m going to be spending some time exploring it. The drawbacks that I gather so far is that it has a high learning curve (no big worry to me) and it is very resource intensive (again, no worry here since I have a dedicated server for this project). Coming next, more info about Typo3….