Download BlogEngine Source Code (5.83 mb)
This is another updated version of BlogEngine.Net 2.0. The focus of this release is on integration
of advertising with your posts. This advertising is about display of advertisements for affiliate accounts
like Commision Junction, LinkShare, Pepperjam etc. This is some update that I have deployed on my
blog(s) as well and have been testing for some time.
A lot of affiliate programs provide scripts that can automatically detect context of your post and then
display appropriate advertisements. But when you want to have greater control on advertisements then
you are going to need some custom implementation on you end. Good.news is that all these programs offer
web services that can be used to pull advertisements based on some predefined criteria. Another reason
for not using automated scripts from these affiliate programs is that lot of these scripts tend to slow
down loading of pages as well which could hurt performance of your blog.
Advertisements are mainly classified by categories and keyword. These categories may not be same as the
categories you used to classify content of the posts. So what we need is to associate each post with
advertisement categories. Good news is that since search engines do not look at keywords meta tag we
can assign post keywords to search criteria for advertisements.
In this update to BlogEngine, I have added two new tables in database, be_AdCategories and be_PostAdCategory.
Using these tables each post is associated with one.or.more advertising categories. I have updated admin
interface to allow adding new advertisement categories and in post admin interface you can associate
advertising categories to posts.
I have also included a demo advertising engine with the projects. This advertising framework pulls
seasonal advertisement links from Commision Junction. I have included Commision Junction API that
I implemented some time back. You can use this API to pull links, products etc based on some predefined
search criteria. I have also included assemblies for LinkShare affiliate program API.
Each affiliate programs requires you to have some authentication token or key to use webservices.
Instead of hard coding these values I have implemented a.BlogEngine extension AdAffiliateSettings
that can be used to specify these access.tokens and other attributes that can be used with
advertisement API. For now I have included parameters for LinkShare and Commision Junction. You can
modify the code.for this extension to include other affiliate programs.
I have updated TitaniumX skin to make asynchronous request to get random advertisement from frmaework
to display seasonal links. The script runs a timer on 20 seconds interval to pull new link to display.
This is just a proof of concept implementation of advertisement framework. You can extend it
to pull more relevant advertisement links based on categories and keywords associated with
each post. Let me know if you need any help with that and we can work something out.
Upgrade Instructions
Demo
You can see the demo of this integration at the bottom of each post under the section Deals Of The Day. Notice
how the advertisement changes every 20 seconds.
If you run into any problems with this update of BlonEngine 2.0 (WAP version) toss an email to my side and I
will try to get back to you!