Recently, our hosting provider had an issue with our database server. The server has crashed and they were unable to recover the data so they had to restore an old backup. Many members has been lost on this issue, many messages have been lost too. In fact, everything made between May 20th and May 26th has been lost. Because of that we had to shut down the website for about 5 days.

We are sorry for the inconvenience. We now have a more secure backup system so a thing like that might not happen in the future.

I recently added a new feature in iSeduction.net : forums. Forums are a good way to exchange with people around the world on many subjects. Everyone can post on forums.

There is a lot of forums on the web and there was no way I don't add one in my dating site. I don't have as many posts as Plenty Of Fish have but there is a start for everything. Everything needed to post on my forums is a free profile (created here).

The forums can be found at http://forums.iseduction.net.

The technology behind iSeduction.net is ASP.Net 2.0 all the way.

Since I'm a .Net programmer, there was no way I would have picked PHP or ASP for this project. .Net is a complete programming language, not only a scripting language like classic ASP or PHP.

Because I worked for years with the .Net technology I saw many differents ways to create web applications. I personnaly prefer the 3-tier model (explaned here) because it is widely used and easy to implement.

The languages used are 90% C# and 10% VB. Some programmers will say "Why use VB ??". The reason is on the jobs I had they were often using VB.Net so I decided to add some VB. I use this only on the aspx pages. All the modules on the business layer and data access layer are written in C#. There is about 60 modules.

The RDBMS (Relational DataBase Management System) used throughout the website is MySQL.

At first I designed the website to use SQL Server 2000 and it lasted a year. In the first version I was using a lot of stored procedures (about 200). Because I was continously adding new features on the site, I was always creating scripts to update the stored procedures to handle the new tables and new fields. Every time I was running my scripts on the production server I got errors. Every I was trying to backup the production database on my local computer I got errors. Ok I was on a shared hosting so that didn't helped. I rapidly found this very anoying so I starting to think about what I could do to solve all the problems I was having. Allthough I was a big fan of SQL Server (for using it a lot on different jobs) I started to read on MySQL. I was thinking about the day I have to switch to my own server and pay for the license... SQL Server being very expensive, MySQL was a good option.

After reading a lot on MySQL I decided to convert my SQL Server database to MySQL. I started by grabbing a copy of my production database localy and convert data from one database to another with MySQL tools. It took me a while to convert everything because some types (like blobs) gave me some difficulties. After that I started to rewrite all my stored procedures from one SQL language to another. At this time there were more than 200 procedures so It took me a while to convert every thing. After all was succesfuly converted to MySQL, I decided to create a backup of the local database to restore it on the production server. I found that the version on the production server was not accepting stored procedures... bad surprise ! I then thought about the right thing to do and I decided to extract the stored procedures from the database and put them in text files. I then rewrited my data access layer to read the procedure in the text file named like the procedure. I then realized that we canno't have procedural code (like IF, WHILE, etc) when executing a command with the text of the procedure so I had to rewrite every logic from my stored procedures to my C# code.

After all that I was ready to change my database system so I practiced a lot with production copies localy. Because of the blobs (used mostly for encrypted passwords) it took me a while to find the perfect way to convert them so after I've founded the way, I created DTS packages in SQL Server. After the process worked a couple of times I stoped the website, copied my production database localy and executed the DTS package. I them restored the new database in production and... voilà ! Everything was working fine. It was more difficult than I thought but I succeeded.

Google AdWords is one of the best advertising system on the web right now. It consists of contextual ads (text, image, video) displayed everywhere on the web. Anyone who wants to advertise something can set up an account and start advertise the way he wants ! Ads can be displayed on the search network as well as any website using Google AdSense. You can chose to pay for each click on your ads, or pay for a number of impressions of you ads.

Let's start with a little bit of story...
AdWords has been created in 2000 with some limited features. Advertisers wasn't able to create their campaings like they want, they had to pay Google a monthly fee and let them set up their campaign. Google then launched to possibility to create our own campaigns. In 2005 google introduced the Jumpstart service to help advertisers setting up their campaigns. Everything was not as easy as it can be today, so Google had to change their advertising solution to keep advertisers advertising. Now, in 2008, you can set up your own campaign in clicks, and it works very well !

First, AdWords for the Google search network
If you want your ads to be displayed in the right part of the Google search result page, you have to decide which keywords will make them appear. When someone searches for one of the words defined in your campaign, your ad appears on the right side of the result page... in fact, there's some other things to know, like the keyword's auction. In the example on your right I searched for "AdWords" on Google, and a lot of ads appeared. There is 2 places for ads on the Google search result page; top and right. In the example, there is ads in the 2 spots.

Not only your ads will be shown on Google but they will also be displayed on sites where there's the Google search box like this one :

Enter your search terms Submit search form

Secondly, AdWords for the content network
Ads can be displayed on a lot (I mean, a lot) of websites on the net. Every website using the Google AdSense program allows you to advertise on them automatically. You have 2 choices to decide how you want your ads to be displayed on other websites. You can chose websites, or chose keywords. If you chose websites, your ads will be shown on the websites you decided. On the other side, if you chose keywords, your ads will be displayed on any website containing your keywords.

Keyword's auction (CPC or Cost per click)
Because of the great popularity of the AdWords program, Google had to create the keyword auction. This "auction" is used to help advertisers to display ads in the top results if they are ready to pay more than other advertisers. For each keyword there's an auction. The prices changes every day. Price per click for a keyword can be in cents as well as dollars. If you have the keyword "Dating", you will have to pay more than 1$ to appear because there's a lot of advertisers who wants to advertise they dating site. On the other hand, is you advertise for "Kozlowski-Krajewska syndrome" (this is a rare disease), you will be able to pay 2-3 cents per click because no one advertise for this.