For example, while this web site does generate enough traffic to sell some banners, I also mix in my own asking for contributions . That's tedious and a pain to change. But, for some pages, you may want a specific ad and only that ad to appear- for example, I sell exclusive rights to certain pages to banner advertisers. These features obviously require software. There are commercial packages that do this sort of thing, and you can find dozens of free cgi scripts on the web, but once again, none of them did exactly what I wanted, so I wrote my own.
Ad Rotation Let's start with the ad rotator.
This is pretty simple, actually. We'll store the ads in simple files. On a larger system, it would make sense to store this sort of data in a database rather than plain text files. On the other hand, plain text files have the attraction of quick and simple editing. This is an advertiser who runs 4 different banners.