Sunday afternoon ad serving

I spent the afternoon today working on the ad server that I mentioned the other day under nearly cloudless skies and cool temperatures (~70°) for August in Cleveland. Code monkeys need a little sun now and then, you know? Of course, I still should be working on the book.

Anyway, what a fun project this has been. Not only did I fix an annoyance in the serving algorithm that caused the impressions served to fall just short of their target, but I added a bunch of features. Now it does pop-ups (as if that'll matter when XP SP2 is out in force) and virtually any type of other rich media. It still does session and frequency capping, and the really scary thing is that it's XHTML compliant. It even works in all browsers correctly (except for Opera, which seems to disregard style-based margins on the body tag).

The only real negative is that it's written in .NET v2, so I can't actually use it yet, but I just couldn't stand to go back to VS2003. What's the time frame for beta 2 looking like these days? ;)

Is it me or is the version of FreeTextBox running here on the blog site really slow?