One of the recent improvements to my little blog has been moving Google ads from the sidebar to every third post on the main page. In attempting to detect whether a full-size leaderboard ad would fit, versus a banner ad, I’ve found that loading a responseText object from createXMLHttpRequest doesn’t parse Javascript.

Since there really isn’t any good way to get window resolution from PHP, I hacked around it a bit. See, I have one adsense.php that serves up all the ads. I just do a global $adtheme; ‘checkres’ is a special case that includes some Javascript to detect the window’s internal area.

It basically works like this.

if (window.innerWidth >= 980)
{
  google_ad_width = '728';
  google_ad_height = '90';
  google_ad_format = '728x90_as';
}
else
{
  google_ad_width = '468';
  google_ad_height = '60';
  google_ad_format = '468x60_as';
}

And then the rest of the Google adsense variables.