This update improves compatibility with geo services. Several dashboard tweaks are included and the plugin is tested to work on WordPress 5.6. Also stats work a little different now.
It’s easy, lazy and super convenient to join an advertising network such as Google AdSense or Media.net or something similar. You can create an account in minutes, get ads immediately and see earnings within a week or so. It’s boring and anyone can do it. But if your site is big enough from the get-go it may be easy money and work fine for your purposes.
The real fun starts when you sell your own ad spaces. That leaves you in control and with AdRotate and AdRotate Pro you can easily manage which advert goes where and for how long. You make the rules and, within reason, you decide what happens. And that’s not a bad thing at all.
In February of this year I wrote a blog post about the sad state the Update and AdRotate Geo API were in, causing problems for many AdRotate users. Have things improved since then?
TLDR; Yes!
Over the last few months updating AdRotate Professional has not been as easy as it should be.
A ton of things have been going wrong with the update routine for many users. While for others it worked without a hitch. I’m one of those people where it usually works. So it’s a bit hard to find the problem. But here goes.
I took some more drastic measures to actually improve things and not just patch stuff up.
3 Major issues have come to light and have been fixed or will be fixed over the next few weeks.
For years I have wondered why the world so blindly got hooked up with Google services and why almost nobody seems to question if that’s a good thing. Nobody I know has any doubts. Reviews everywhere on the internet tell people Google is the best, or at least it’s very good. And if you search for “best way to sync your android phone” or “alternative for iCloud calendars” or something similar, everyone seems to blindly recommend the Google sync stuff – Which also quietly has you use their services afterwards.
Why? It makes no sense… Oh wait, it does. The Google services as a whole work quite well and they work on pretty much every platform and system. Sure, but so do many others. So why choose, and trust, Google?
Like so many others, I recently started to resent companies like Google and Facebook who seemingly just do whatever they want. Dancing around laws and regulations like they don’t exist or matter and the endless lying to their users. I wrote a bit about that in a previous blog post.
This update again focuses on streamlining the AdRotate Professional experience and improves a number of things in the dashboard. But more importantly it fixes the date pickers end dates and localization. We’re reversing to the old system that uses dd-mm-yyyy instead of named months. Another important change is the update routine going forward. More below.
Over the years I’ve been using all kinds of online services without thinking too much about it. I’ve been all over social media, forums, online stores. Opening accounts left and right. And for what… For a long time I enjoyed the internet, to be included. Only to get entangled in this magical thing called the internet. It all comes at the low cost of my privacy, only to realize how invasive and unnecessary most of it is.
Many people around me don’t seem to mind at all, and for a while I pondered if I wasn’t making it all up in my head. But if you look closer and understand the tech behind it a little you come to realise what an absurd internet we’ve created over the last 18 years.
This update focuses on streamlining the license and geo targeting experience and includes a number of bugfixes and tweaks related to those 2 functions. License notifications should now work more clear and reliable.
Geo Targeting has recently moved from using Cookies to Sessions. A number of fixes makes that more reliable and robust.
Recently Paypal once again announced they will raise transaction fees. They also changed their Terms of Service in a way that you as a merchant are more liable for your customers antics, making it easier for them to charge you when trouble arrises (which should occur rarely, if ever. But still, not cool!).
By my calculations many transactions will end up costing almost double compared to earlier this year.
If you use WordPress with WooCommerce as your sales platform not all is lost though. You can easily lessen this costly burden and keep your business afloat more easy. With a simple plugin I’ve created. Read on for more information!
This started as a quick patch for deleting Adverts, but once I got going and dove into the code a bit deeper to fix the renaming mistake I made in an earlier update I found a bunch more quirks. AdRotate Geo was acting up again and generally what was going to be a small patch turned into a full update with many tweaks and improvements.
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