Features System Requirements Installation Users Guide FAQ

The Basic Concept Of Remote Serving

AMS is capable of serving adbars on remote web sites. If you run two or three (or more) web sites on different servers, you can use AMS to control the displaying of adbars on all of them. It will also keep track of the exposures and click-throughs of the banner bars from any of those sites.

Please note that this is an advanced technique, and you should be familiar with the AMS system before attempting to implement this feature.

The diagram below shows the basic concept of remote serving. A web server with the AMS software installed communicates with two other web servers so that all three display banners bars from the same AMS system:

How To Implement Remote Serving

Setting up the other web servers:
There are two scripts that must be installed on the other servers (the servers that don't have AMS):

ams_remote.pl and spider.pl

If you're using the UNIX version of AMS (not WindowsNT), make sure that the permissions of these two files are set to executable. You can do so by typing the following in your command line:

chmod 755 ams_remote.pl
chmod 755 spider.pl

In your web pages, there is a special tag to use instead of the usual AMS SSI call. This tag calls the "ams_remote.pl" script installed on that server:

<!--#exec cmd="/usr/local/etc/httpd/cgi-bin/ams_remote.pl AD:USE_THIS_RELATION"-->

The "USE_THIS_RELATION" can be changed to whatever text you want to use. When the script is executed it passes that rule to the second script "spider.pl", which in turn contacts the server that has the AMS software installed. The AMS system then decides which banner bar should be displayed based upon the rule it was given, and sends that information back to the originating web server.

Of course, before this can work, you must set it up in your AMS Admin Panel:

Setting up remote serving in your AMS Admin Panel:
To serve adbars on a remote website, you'll need to create a new relation in the AMS Admin panel. In this relation, you'll put the same text you added to your exec cmd tags like "AD:USE_THIS_RELATION". This text should go into the "Rules" box as shown in the picture below:

Keep in mind that AMS is very flexible. You could set up different relations for each of the web sites that you're running banners on by setting up different rules for each of the web sites. For example:

You could get even more specific and create relations for particular pages/directories on each web site.

	Choose One The Basics of AMS - Building exec cgi tags - Building exec cmd tags - When to use cgi, when to use cmd - Using .htaccess - Creating a new advertiser entry - Creating a new group entry - Creating a new relation entry - Saving time with defaults Understanding AMS Statistics - Giving advertisers access to their statistics - Examining traffic weighting with exposures - Examining effectiveness with click-thru ratios Advanced AMS Techniques - Double- and triple-weighting individual adbars - Serving multiple adbars per page - Building refreshing adbars - Complex banners with HTML fragments - Mixing exposures from networks - Intelligent & random images - Remote serving of banners AMS and Other CGI Programs - Utilizing the shell version - Integrating with CGI applications - Integrating with HyperThread