Rotate Content with Ease, Elegance, and Style
Many of you remember Master Merry-Go-Round.
Yesterday, it was laid to rest.
It provided its service. It made many people happy. It was
elegant software. But it has been superseded.
Content Carousel
has all the good features Master Merry-Go-Round had (and
more, as you'll see).
Content Carousel is not free. It's price as of this writing
is $39.
But, why would a person want to rotate content?
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Rotation can be better than putting everything on
the page all at once.
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Have 6 ads for 1 spot? Rotate them. Keep the most
responsive. Rotate text ads and image ads and
combinations to see which have the best response.
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Rotate a collection of sayings.
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Product images can be rotated. See which get the
best click-through.
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Rotate headlines or other parts of pages to test
response.
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Rotate entire pages to see which work best for your
purpose.
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Sounds, scripts, prices, all can be rotated.
The content may be anything in any combination that web
pages can display in a browser.
Here are a few of the places where we rotate content,
presented here as idea stimulators:
Content Carousel
We cut a bunch of stuff from this article because it
sounded too hipey.
Like Mari says, "They can use the demos and see for
themselves how it works. You don't have to sell them
on the software."
Yet, hype and pushing had been the furthest from my intent.
I'm so excited about Content Carousel, the words just came
out sounding the way they did.
Hopefully, they don't still read like I'm trying to sell you
something. If they do, it's my excitement showing through.
Easy Content Setup
Log into the control panel and paste the content into a form.
Or, instead of content, specify the location of a file from
which to retrieve the content. Or a URL.
Add content. Delete content. Edit content. It's all control
panel easy.
Content Carousel has no built-in limit. Rotate as much as
you want!
Elegant Content Delivery
Content display —
Do you want to display rotated content with JavaScript? On
your own sites? Syndicated on other sites?
You can.
Would you rather use PHP? You can.
Be forewarned that some sites' PHP is configured in a way
that won't allow PHP to obtain content from Content Carousel
with an http://... URL. Not many. But there are some.
If you prefer to use SSI, you can. (SSI can retrieve content
only from the domain where the web page is at.)
If you're swapping entire web pages, you can use any of the
above methods or link directly to Content Carousel itself.
Search engine spiders —
Content rotated with JavaScript might or might not be
indexable by SE spiders, depending on who you talk to.
Content rotated with PHP, SSI, and direct link is indexable
except maybe for JavaScript within the content itself.
Stopping rotation on reload —
In the control panel Preferences, you can specify a cookie
name to use for stopping rotation.
While the cookie is set, every request for content from that
same browser will result in the same content being displayed
(provided the content isn't removed from the control panel
in the meantime).
Statistics with Style
Right in the control panel is a "Statistics" link.
Statistics can be displayed on the web page. And they can be
downloaded.
The visual display has cumulative results, with item counts,
grand totals, and optional daily subtotals. The color of
graphical bars and maximum length are determined by you.
Downloaded files are CSV formatted for easy importing into
spread sheet software.
Specify the date range and other preferences and click the
button.
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You can choose to view or export:
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The titles of the content that were displayed.
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The referring URLs (when known).
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Cookies available at the time the content was
displayed.
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The IP addresses of those viewing the content.
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The browser or spider being used (when known).
Let's talk about the cookies —
Cookies that have been set on the domain where the rotated
content is being published, and are available to Content
Carousel, are logged. The cookies may have been set by
shopping cart software, affiliate link handlers, ad response
loggers, link click monitors, even Content Carousel itself.
When statistics are presented on the page for visual
display, only cookie names are displayed. When statistics
are downloaded, the cookies names and also their values are
downloaded.
One More Thing
The User's Manual is built right into the control panel.
You'll always know where it's at.
Visit the Content Carousel description page and play with the demonstrations.
We think you'll like it.
Question:
Did you find this article interesting and understandable? How can it be improved?
Your response is anonymous.
When done typing, click anywhere outside the box. [more info]
Will Bontrager
©Copyright 2007 Bontrager Connection, LLC Bontrager Connection, LLC
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