Today I logged in to my Google Adsense account and saw a new tab - Referrals. Refer a slice of your visitors to Google Adsense and earn money. Well, at last Google is going to giveout their most generous offer to publishers - a promising $100 for an active referal. Uh! what does that mean? Simple. You get your reward when the reffered member successfully earns her first cheque.

How do you refer friends? Apply for an account and put their graphics in your sites. Googe will track all track all click activity henceforth. See how my graphic looks like (No need to click. It is an affiliate link) :

Any catch so far? Well, the answer is yes and no. It may take for ever to get your referal fee if the referred member site’s CTR is low. Or even if the site earns it in one day or so, still it will take 1 month to get your money.

Then why yes? Because Adsense is a solid service. Yahoo Publisher Network is only available for US residents and MSN counterpart is still not available.

I contacted my current webhost and asked whether they support Ruby. As expected, they said a clear ‘no’. So I fired up my browser and found certain Rails web hosting companies so far. The most comprehensive list is at official Rails Wiki and one more with rather useful comments are here.Choose any host but look for FastCGI in the spec list. Otherwise, your app will be loaded to memory on each request and it will mess up the server. So the app and the server - both will be damn slow.

Ambitiouslemon (Now signups suspended), non profit community, is supposed to offer free rails hosting plan. Their features list is very appealing. Take a look and you may get an account today or tomorrow.

Anyway the best way to try Rails is installing the packages in Windows or Linux and test app.