OpenX Blog

We’d like to thank you for registering to attend the upcoming OpenX Seminar in New York on Thursday. We are excited to see so much interest in our event and can’t wait to meet you. Based on your submissions we’ve come up with the agenda for the day and here are the details:

9:45 – 13:00 | Registration

10:00 – 11:00 | Beginner Session: What is OpenX?

Oliver George - Community Manager

11:00 – 12:00 | The OpenX roadmap

Scott Switzer - Head of Community

12:00 – 13:00 | Lunch break

13:00 – 14:30 | Tutorial: Setting up OpenX to serve ads

Alex Dean - Engineering Senior Project Manager

14:30 – 15:30 | Advanced adserving tutorials

Scott Switzer and Alex Dean

15:30 – 16:30 | Q&A - Unconference session

Just to remind you – we’ll be at Houston Street Center, 273 Bowery, NY 10002, (map).

Register here if you haven’t done that yet.

We hope to see you there!

OpenX is looking to hire experienced open source developers to take on project based contracts for some exciting new initiatives.

For these projects we need developers with proven experience extending open source content management systems or analytics tools. Location won’t be a factor with this work - we’re happy to run these projects remotely to get the right people involved.

Got the skill… get in touch!
Register your interest by emailing us at tellme@openx.org. Please include a brief summary of your experience and details of one project which you think best demonstrates your experience extending a CMS or analytics application.

Forward this to a friend
Do you know someone who might be interested? Someone you’ve used in the past for one of your own projects perhaps. Please forward this on and encourage them to get involved.

We look forward to hearing from you.

Erik Geurts has posted about how he reduced his client’s page load time using the new single page call ad tag.

“Using the newest version of OpenX, I was able to speed up a client’s website by a factor of 10.”

Single page call is a new ad tag we introduced in OpenX 2.6. It’s designed to reduce the number of requests each web page puts on your ad server which has the happy side effect of reducing the total load on your ad server. Overall, it can make a huge difference to the performance of your website.

Erik’s client made extensive use of the ad server to display and track ads to his website sponsors. This required many individual calls to the server which can slow down page loads so moving to the single page call ad tag made a big difference.

“My client’s blog, funded primarily by sponsors, has 35 zones on every page, and this made the pages load rather slowly. Single page call was designed to remedy this, and we were eager to find out how much faster the site would be after this change.”

By upgrading his client to OpenX 2.6 and updating the website to use the new single page call ad tag, Erik was able to make a significant and tangible improvement to the overall website performance.

“A load time of 12 seconds during the busy hours of the day was reduced to just under 2 seconds. And at night the site even loads in under 1 second.”

“Another advantage of single page call is that it results in a drastic reduction of the load on the ad server, since every page [load] causes only one request to the ad server.”

Find out more from Erik by reading the full article on his blog.

The next OpenX seminar will be in New York and we’d like to invite everyone to come along and find out more about OpenX.

This is our first east coast event and it follows on the heels of the recent west coast event which was the largest and most successful event to date. So New York, advertising capital of America, are you ready to represent?

The event agenda will be based on the feedback you give when you register but we expect there will be plenty of interest for anyone wanting to know more about OpenX, whether you are a website owner, consultant, ad network, or developer.

Scott Switzer, the OpenX Community Leader, and Alex Dean, our Senior Project Manager, will talk you through the most popular topics you’ve requested. There will also be time for your questions and we strongly encourage discussion throughout the day.

Date: Thursday, 2nd of October
Time: From 10am to 5pm
Location: Houston Street Center, 273 Bowery, NY 10002, (map)

Please register and tell us what you would like us to cover. We will email you a more detailed agenda once we have reviewed your feedback.

We look forward to seeing you there!

Whizzing cars, roaring engines, treacherous circuits and passionate drivers… a real treat for all motorsports fans! Auto Racing Daily makes you realize F1 is but the tip of the iceberg. If you need a deeper insight into the affairs of NASCAR, drag racing, drifting, kart racing, motocross or any other kind of racing you could possibly think of, this is the right place.

It makes a great meeting platform for news from all over the world. And it’s not all ‘boys’ stuff’. A separate section on women in motorsports is a real eye opener!

Auto Racing Daily goes beyond the machines and technology. The website is fantastic for the most fervent enthusiasts of motorsports who want to catch up on the latest news. If you are new to the racing industry, it will give you a good opportunity to begin an exciting journey.

Auto Racing Daily was running primarily Google AdSense ads, but as they received more and more requests from prospective direct advertisers, decided to adopt OpenX to manage all their ads across a single platform. Mark from Auto Racing had two friends independently recommend OpenX.

‘Within about 2 weeks I had OpenX installed, the ads in place and working… I was reviewing inquiries and in no time I had secured 3 new advertisers.’

Mark describes what it’s like for him to work with OpenX:

‘It is like having total control over the meta data and being pro active about getting more clicks from visitors. Before we had OpenX installed we could never have done anything like this without waiting for a programmer to get the creative installed and we need to get this done in minutes, not days. Now we can have the ad running a few minutes after we decide to do it.

I am not sure if everyone could use OpenX all the ways I use it, but I know for sure that it works perfect for me.’