You might be surprised to hear how much you can help the OpenX community through your own website. Your independent opinion has real value and even something as simple as letting people know you use OpenX can make a big difference.
We know how positive an impact this sort of (buzzword warning) community marketing can have because we’re already seeing its effect, and the impact in website visitors and downloads is significant. It also represents one of the best ways in which you can share your expertise, and help us to build a stronger community.
Here are five simple ways to contribute to the OpenX community from your website.
1. Tell the world you use OpenX with a banner
We’ve designed some new banners for you to add to your website to let everyone know that you’re a supporter of OpenX. It’s a simple way to show that you like what we do!
2. Create new banner designs
We know how creative the OpenX community is: just look at all the professional websites you’ve designed. We would love you to create some new banners to add to our existing set, so send us a new design you want to share.
3. Spread the word about OpenX news and events
You can help us reach out to website owners who aren’t subscribed to our newsletter or RSS feed by blogging about new releases or OpenX blog posts. If, like David Peris and the Carrero brothers, you blog in languages other than English you can make a big difference in helping us reach a larger global audience.
Here are some examples taken from recent blog post trackbacks:
4. Review OpenX on your website
Peer review is pretty much the best press to have. If you think OpenX is helping you to grow your business, why not let people know exactly what’s so good about it?
5. Create a tutorial and share your expertise
A great way for experienced users of OpenX to help share their knowledge is by writing tutorials. These can be as general or as specific as you like, and are the best method of helping your skills benefit the greatest number of people.
Thank you!
OpenX is successful because we have a large, active community of publishers, developers, and consultants that have promotes us through word of mouth. We really appreciate the efforts that you have done so far - we encourage you to do more!
If you have additional suggestions or ideas, please let us know!
Lord Matt shares his experiences managing websites in a series of articles titled how I manage multiple blogs.
Like many publishers, Lord Matt uses OpenX to maximise his ad revenue by rotating ads and comparing their performance.
He also talks about tools which help him do more with less, something which is close to many website owners hearts and it only gets more important as their online advertising needs become more and more sophisticated.
OpenX is popular tool for website owners wanting to save time and maximise their ad revenue. Find out how on our website:
Community is a very important and unique part of OpenX. We have a team of people who continuously reach out to and speak with our community of publishers, consultants, translators, and advertisers. This team has helped build the OpenX community into the largest in online advertising.
One part of our community which is growing the fastest is our developer community. Developers have already embraced one of the upcoming features of v2.7 - a shiny new plug-in framework (well done, Monique and Chris!). A significant group of developers have already written plug-ins to OpenX.
As we build out the plug-in framework, we are in parallel building the OpenX developer community. Chris Nutting, who most OpenX developers know in the forums or IRC, is now our official Community Developer, and will look after OpenX developers full time. Chris has always made himself available to developers, and has tirelessly answered questions on IRC and the forums for the past three years. He is as passionate as they come.
We have always encouraged independent consultants to provide paid services to the OpenX community - it’s an important part of the support ecosystem. Today we’re launching the OpenX consultant directory which we hope will help connect consultants with the OpenX community.
How does it work?
The OpenX consulting directory provides a categorised list of consultants who provide services which may be useful to people using OpenX’s software or services. Using the directory you can easily request support from a consultant of your choice.
Are you looking for paid support?
Visit our consultant directory to find a consultant that suits you.
Would you like to be listed as a consultant?
Find out more and register here if you would like to be included in the independent consulting directory.
This is a new service that we’re excited to launch and expect to develop further. Please send us your feedback. We hope you find the new consulting directory useful!
We would like to invite everyone to join us for the next OpenX event which will take place on 14th of August (UPDATED: see below) in the Pasadena area of Los Angeles, California. It’s a free event open to anyone interested in finding out more about OpenX.
Based on the success of the last event in Germany, we’re going to choose the topics we cover based on the suggestions offered by people who register. This means you can ensure this event is useful for you!
If you’re based in or around LA we’d love to see you there.
We’re excited to announce that the new version of the OpenX ad server has arrived.
OpenX 2.6 builds on our existing open source ad server to offer some great new features to help you take control of the advertising on your websites and make more money online, including:
OpenX API - Save time by automating common tasks and linking OpenX with other systems.
Faster ad tag - Deliver ads faster and reduce your server load using the single page call ad tag.
And that’s just the start! You’ll also find new ad targeting options, UI improvements and much, much more.
The new release has already been fully translated into 11 languages by OpenX community, including Brazilian Portuguese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Romanian, Russian, Simplified Chinese, Slovenian and Spanish, with more translations on the way.
This has been a huge community effort and we’re thrilled to have your support to make this possible. Our thanks go out to the hundreds of community members who helped develop new features, resolve bugs and get this release ready for launch today.
The OpenX team has released a security update to our open source ad server. We strongly encourage all users to upgrade to avoid this issue.
This release (v2.4.8) resolves a vulnerability in the delivery system. In addition, this release includes 13 bug fixes and enhancements relating to password recovery, tracker invocation tags and geotargeting.
The new release of OpenX includes an exciting new feature which promises to save online advertisers lots of time and money: the OpenX API. The new OpenX API gives developers a way to control the ad server so they can automate common tasks and integrate with other applications in a stable and reliable way.
Here’s a quick FAQ that introduces the new OpenX API, describes the key features and explains how it can help you integrate the OpenX ad server into your overall business.
What is the OpenX API?
The OpenX API is a web service. It provides an interface for other applications to control entities like advertisers, campaigns, banners, websites and zones on your ad server.
How can it make my life easier?
With a little TLC, the API can be used to streamline your business processes and automate some of the more mundane tasks to reduce the possibility of “pilot error”. Copying and pasting from one system into another is inherently error-prone, and use of the API could free up your staff to engage in more productive pursuits.
What kind of things can I do with it?
There are lots of different things the OpenX API can do to help make your systems interoperate better. Here are just a few examples:
The OpenX API can be used to integrate your ad server with an existing sales tool, so that when you book a sale, the campaign details are automatically set up in your OpenX installation, without human intervention. You can also link your billing system to pull down statistics and billing information directly from the ad server on demand.
Some publishers have begun to streamline data entry processes using the API, e.g. creating a simple banner upload web-form to automatically upload banners into their OpenX system.
The more geeky users out there have already been experimenting with building interfaces into the OpenX API from other languages. We’ve provided helper libraries and example code in PHP and Java. Python and Ruby clients are already in development by community members.
Does the OpenX API give me complete control of the ad server?
We’ve chosen the most important attributes for this first release, which provides the basic functionality required by most publishers. We expect to expand the functionality in upcoming releases.
That’s all very cool, where can I get more detailed (technical) information?
We’ve written a step-by-step OpenX API tutorial with worked examples for using the API from both a PHP and a Java client which takes you through the basics of connecting to and sending commands to the OpenX API.
We also have auto-generated OpenX API interface specification. This is an intimidating document, but it does accurately describe all the classes, variables and methods which the OpenX API provides access too which makes it an invaluable tool for virgin developers. By way of example, the class associated with the Campaign object is called CampaignServiceImpl.
The new release of OpenX (currently in beta) introduces a new feature, single page call, to serve ads faster. If your websites include more than one ad on each page, then upgrading to OpenX 2.6 will deliver ads faster and reduce the load on your server!
The new ad tag makes one request to the ad server to fetch all the banners needed for the page, hence the feature’s name. This is the reason for the performance boost, too: three individual ad requests puts more strain on the server than one combined request.
Although this new feature also allows the server to perform functions such as companion positioning by combining ad requests together, this useful new feature primarily provides better ad serving performance.
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