I remember reading Devshed almost regularly in the late 90’s. I found tons of good articles there about PHP, which I was at the time learning and using for a variety of personal and professional projects.
But I happened to click on a link to a blog promotion page at Devshed tonight, and I realized that things have changed since 1998.
While it was cool to be back, I didn’t recognize the site. I guess you really can’t go home again.
The biggest change: Ads. Lots of ads. Text ads. Image ads. Flash ads. Banner ads. Square ads. Ads, ads, ads, ads, ads, ads!
So I decided to do something that I saw recently on Digg: grab the page and overlay elements with color according to what they were: content, navigation, and ads. Turns out there are even more ads than I figured.
Here’s the deal:
- Content: gray
- Navigation: blue
- Ads: orange
Here’s the overlay. Can you believe how much of the page is advertising? It looks to be well over half to me. Frankly, I think it’s getting into AdSense scam page territory in terms of how much space on the page is devoted to advertising.
