My First Google Check

I have done this many times but I only have a vague recollection on what I did. I’m sure some of folks are like me, create the ad, post the code and forget about it. If we want to re-use it, just copy the same code and paste it into another site.

AdSense has evolved over the years and while the basic fundamentals is still the same, blogging it down now not only serves as my memory bank but to also find out any changes if any.

1) Click on AdSense Setup Tab

2) AdSense Setup page
Click AdSense for Content (most commonly used for websites)

3) AdSense for Content page
The Wizard page is good for the novice but it’s prettyu troublesome to keep clicking ‘next’. Since I already have prior experience with AdSense, I will click on the “Single page” which will show me all the settings for the Ad.

4) Ad unit (Image vs Text)
There are pros and cons but generally, visual ads are more limited and hence a slight higher CPC and CPM. Of course, I can always choose both but depending on the nature of your website, it may be good to be more specific.

Here’s some readup which will be useful:
http://hubpages.com/hub/DoAdsenseImageAdsEarnMorethanTextAds
http://freebloghelp.com/google-adsense-text-vs-image-ads/
http://www.blogztr.com/18/are-image-ads-beneficial-to-your-adsense-earnings

5) Format
Self explainatory. The Ad Formats page link has been around as I can remember and it is still extremely useful.

6) Colors
If only Google is able to provide a much more comprehensive color scheme. For now, I refer to this site for all my color needs. The key element especially for text ads is to blend in with your site.

7) Fonts and Corner Styles
Leave as default Didn’t find anything useful.

8) More Options – Alternative ads or colors
If there are no relevant ads, AdSense will by default serve public service ads or your customized ad. Sounds useful but if If you ask me, if there are no ads from AdSense, I wouldn’t even bother setting the Ad unit in the first place.

9) Channels
Very under-rated. I hope Google can do something to highlight its importance. When I first started with AdSense, I thought Channels was a waste of time. However, now I know that channels are important for tracking your ads e.g. what are your most profitable ads. Ain’t that important?

It’s a good practice to give a meaningful name to the channel for easy reference.
I name it in this format -> Site Name, Ad Size, Location. e.g. GeekLog_468×60_After Header

10) Ad Sense unit name:
Again, a meaningful name is useful. I usually use back the same name as the channel.

11) Save the code and I am done.

Google stats that I have to wait for ten minutes. If you have already waited for more than an hour and no ads appear, chances are you may have mess up a certain step e.g. code was change accidentally, pasted in the wrong location of your site etc. The worse case scenario is your account has been suspended but that is unlikely to happen unless you screw up big time. That will be another story…

know your enemies and know yourself, you can win a hundred battles without a single loss.

Sun Tze

In order to become a effective finance aggregator on the Internet, I must first know what similar sites are doing so that I learn from their strength and exploit their weakness. Below is the list of the most popular finance aggregator sites.

pfblogs.org

1. pfblogs.org
Tagline: The Aggregator
Title header: The Ad-Free Personal Finance Blogs Aggregator
Favicon: Dollar Sign
Google Page Rank: 5

As I have plans for a logo, it will be helpful to look at what others have. I also wanted to have rough gauge of the popularity and I used Google page rank. Granted it may not be the best or most accurate assessment but the information is easily available.

Interesting this site have another URL http://www.pfblog.org/ that links to the same site. Smart move since it is common to miss out the letter ’s’.

On last count, this site aggregates over 700 sites and has approximately 137,000 items which work out to 2.7 million entries. However when I go to the last item, there was no entry. Nevertheless, I think the total number entries may still be in the thousands.

It makes me wonder, why would anyone want to visit such a site? Although it has tons of entries, it doesn’t provide any meaningful information. Although there is a search function and a attempt to add categories, finding meaningful information is a nightmare. Aesthetics  is basically zero. You will easily be overwhelmed by tons of words.

To stand out from the tons of entries, pfblogs has a program known as “Friends of pfblogs”, it’s basically a paid membership and your entry will be listed with a star.

Personal Finance Buzz

2. pfblogs.org
Tagline: The best money and finance articles
Title header: Top Buzz | Personal Finance Buzz
Favicon: PF Buzz
Google Page Rank: 3

Owned by the same person who started MoneyNing Personal Finance. Visually, it looks better and less wordy. Probably due to the addition of small pics and icons and because it aggregates less sites. On top of the usual search function, it offers more categories and a voting system. It even allows for comments. However, most of the comments are more on advertising. In addition registration is required. I don’t quite understand what is the top users column though.

Financeoid.com

3. Financeoid.com
Tagline: financial news aggregator
Title header: Financial News by Financeoid.com
Favicon: Nil
Google Page Rank: 0

Crawls more than 15,000 fiinancial/business blogs and ranking all posts. Rankings are based on Karma points – calculated with their proprietary algorithm based on several factors. You can also create custom pages and news alerts with some specific keywords and topics, You can also subscribe to RSS feeds of your custom pages. This is very similar to popurls.

In addition to RSS feeds and Google bookmarks, it is also linked to all the major social networking sites i.e. facebook, twitter and myspace. Definitely, one of the better sites I have come across so far, although I’m puzzled why the page rank is zero.

skygrid.com

4. SkyGrid
Tagline: Nil
Title header: Receive high quality financial content, in real-time
Favicon: Greenish Square Logo
Google Page Rank: 5

First impression is that it is a very posh and professional site. User registration is compulsory before you can go any further which is pretty sucky. To entice you to register, there are a few video testimonials which I feel is pretty fake. Although visually appealing, I can’t help but feel that the default page will be cluttered with animation and pictures. Definitely one to look out for but the last blog update is in August 2009.

5. Finance aggregator
Tagline: Yes - non English
Title header: Finance Aggregator. News Finance, Trading, Forex, Finance Aggregator
Favicon: Logo of a stock chart
Google Page Rank: 0

The first non-English site that I came across. Not much to be said since I do not know understand the language but its pretty similar to Financeoid.com, even the page rank is the same – zero. The URL is pretty valuable though.

6. www.abilityfinance.com.au
Tagline: Finance Broker Home Loan Application
Title header: Finance Aggregator. News Finance, Trading, Forex, Finance Aggregator
Favicon: the word ‘af’
Google Page Rank: 2 (based on parent site)

The aggregator site is actually a micro site. Nothing to shout at but it has a category (”Loan Calculators”) which gave me an idea. On top of just providing feeds, I can incorporate some useful tools or links  to calculate brokerage fee, housing loan etc.

7. BLOGHOO
Tagline: Personal Finance Blog News
Title header: Personal Finance Blog aggregator at Bloghoo.com
Favicon: Nil
Google Page Rank: 1

This layout was my original plan. There are already custom made wordpress themes like this such as OneNews and more recently accumulo. I was actually pretty excited about accumulo but somehow I feel that I am limited by the theme. Although I can always customized it, I still feel that it will be difficult.

The other plan is to use Thesis theme and a feeds plugin. This will definitely requires more customization but I know I can trust the Thesis community. However, finding the right plugin may be a problem.

After some thought, I will go ahead with the Thesis them with feeds plugin. I will create a something similar to Financeoid.com but more visually appealing and more user friendly.

The next question is how…

…back to the drawing board.

After a long and hard thought, I have come to the conclusion that I can’t. However, that doesn’t mean I should throw in the towel. Let’s take the analogy of a small time investor versus the big time investor. In a bullish economy, the big time investors with their millions and billions will almost make more money than their small time counterpart and they are usually the ones who would be able to dictate the price of their stock. Given their unfair advantage, shouldn’t small time investors give up? However, there will always be small time investors and while the big boys are earning millions and billions, the small timers are contented with their tens of thousands.

Coming back to my blog aggregator. The big boys like Yahoo and MSN can have millions of visitors a day but if I can have a thousand or two a day, it will still be a achievement for me.

How can I do it?

Going back to the investors analogy, I have a few ideas.

• Don’t compete. In the same way that most small time investors usually don’t bet against the big boys, I should instead look for opportunities to work with them. I have been approached to act as a middleman to liaise my authors with them and I have taken the opportunity to request to have my site link published in their microsite.
• Agility and Flexibility. Due to the large amount of shares to be acquired, a big time investor will need time. Also, if it is a institutional investor, there will be a set of guidelines to adhere too. Similarly for the microsites, the will have to vet through the blogs and authors before deciding if they can be published. In addition, the quality of each individual post is subjected to the approval of the editorial team. I have no such rules or restriction. As long as it is not abusive or offensive, I will and can publish it.
• The Number Game. This is a double egde sword. I will think that the big boys will eventually settle for a few established blogs – those that can regularly contribute good quality articles. I can always allow my site to grow to aggregate say one hundred blogs but more is not always good. The site may get too cluttered and deter readers. The authors too may not get the traffic that was intended since there are no so many blogs. I will have to find a balance point.

The next step to embark is how to do it.

JS.Small-C Trojan Horse

A reader inform me that my website has been hacked. It shouldn’t come as a surprise since my wordpress is not the latest version and the Internet is not exactly a ’safe’ place but then again, why of all the millions of websites must it be me?

Luckily my site is still accessible but the most frustrating part is that I had a hard time figuring the problem as my AVG scan is not showing any problems. After consulting with my my friend, I found out that  Avast antivirus detects the problem. I finally manage to simulate the error message as shown in the picture above.

After searching the web for an answer, I found some clues to where the problem might lie -> http://forum.avast.com/index.php?topic=55017.0 The solution states to delete the particular malicious code from header.php but when I open directly from my ftp (I’m using fireftp in Firefox), the code cannot be found. I decided to check my backup which was done this morning and the malicious code can be found.  I finally decided to login using cpanel, file explorer to open the header.php and successfully deleted the malicious code.

I’m not going to figure out why when I FTP the file, the code is missing. I will rather spend time changing all my passwords and preparing myself to upgrade my Wordpress.

On a final note, I must emphasis the importance of doing regularly backup especially for a lazy person like me who don’t update Wordpress. In the worst case scenario, you can still restore everything from your backup.

This tagline suddenly pop up in my head while looking for some information on the web. We know that the possibility of the web is endless but what can we do to harness this endless possibility?

It has been a very busy month, juggling between a new course, projects and travel plans. I shall not yak too much on them. As Confucius will say, what past is past, lets not brood over them. Future and fate is unpredictable and you have no control over them. However, the present is in your hands. Hence, I’m going to take one step at a time.

I am going to transform this site to a personal site. It will get a little messy with lots of unrelated topics coming together but with proper categorizing, I believe it should not be too much of a problem. This is not a recommended SEO technique of course but it’s not going to stop me from aiming for a high traffic.

There will always be something that I can do to achieve this. Lets take it one step at a time.

Loopback Interface: A logical interface that can be use to test if the router is up. Note that a physical interface that is down does not mean that the entire router is down. Used in Cisco for intermediate and advance features.

http://www.networkliquidators.com/article-cisco-ccna-exam-tutorial-loopback-interfaces.asp

FastEthernet: a collective term for a number of Ethernet standards that carry traffic at the nominal rate of 100 Mbit/s, against the original Ethernet speed of 10 Mbit/s.
Source: Wikipedia

Serial Interface: interface that allows sending of data one bit at one time, sequentially.

V.35 Cable - Serial and DTE

DTE DCE

Basic rate interface (BRI, 2B+D, 2B1D): is an Integrated Services Digital Network (ISDN) configuration defined in the physical layer standard I.430 produced by the ITU. This configuration consists of two 64 kbit/s “bearer” channels (B channels) and one 16 kbit/s “Delta” channel (D channel). The B channels are used for voice or user data, and the D channel is used for any combination of: data, control/signalling and X.25 packet networking. The two B channels can be bonded together giving a total data rate of 128 kbit/s
Source: Wikipedia

Auxiliary port: A physical connector on a router that is designed to be used to allow a remote terminal, or PC with a terminal emulator, to access a router using an analog modem.

Console port A component of a router or switch through which commands are entered into a host. (Use a flat console cable)

http://www.proprofs.com/mwiki/index.php/Ultimate_Cisco_CCNA_INTRO_Glossary_&_Acronyms

Gateway of last resort (Default Route): A default route, also known as the gateway of last resort, is the network route used by a router when no other known route exists for a given IP packet’s destination address. All the packets for destinations not known by the router’s routing table are sent to the default route. This route generally leads to another router, which treats the packet the same way: If the route is known, the packet will get forwarded to the known route. If not, the packet is forwarded to the default-route of that router which generally leads to another router. And so on. Each router traversal adds a one-hop distance to the route.
Source: Wikipedia

A. This is easily done by editing your WordPress template files to give the post permalinks a target="_blank" attribute. (You can edit template files directly from the WordPress administrative interface using Appearance –> Theme Editor, or you can edit them in a text editor on your own computer and upload them to your theme directory.)

The Templates section of the Documentation Wiki documents the template tags that FeedWordPress provides when it is activated; the only one that you may need to use here, though, is is_syndicated(), if you want syndicated posts to open in new windows but want local posts to open in the same window. To do that, edit your Post Loop in the Main Index Template (index.php), Archive (archive.php), and Search Results (search.php) template files. Find the section that displays the headline for each post; it should look something like this (it will differ a bit from theme to theme):

    <?php while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>

        <div <?php post_class() ?>>
            <h3 id="post-<?php the_ID(); ?>"><a href="<?php
            the_permalink() ?>" rel="bookmark" title="Permanent
            Link to <?php the_title_attribute(); ?>"><?php
            the_title(); ?></a></h3>

Now edit that so that the <a href="..."> element includes the attribute target="_blank".

    <?php while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>

        <div <?php post_class() ?>>
            <h3 id="post-<?php the_ID(); ?>"><a href="<?php
            the_permalink() ?>" rel="bookmark" title="Permanent
            Link to <?php the_title_attribute(); ?>"
            target="_blank"><?php the_title(); ?></a></h3>

Or, if you want to make it so that syndicated posts open in new windows, but local posts do not:

    <?php while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>

        <div <?php post_class() ?>>
            <h3 id="post-<?php the_ID(); ?>"><a href="<?php
            the_permalink() ?>" rel="bookmark" title="Permanent
            Link to <?php the_title_attribute(); ?>" <?php if
            (is_syndicated()): ?>target="_blank"<?php endif;
            ?>><?php the_title(); ?></a></h3>

Save the changes to your template file and reload. Now the permalinks behind each post’s headline should open in a new window.

For those who like me want to be able to extract the raw data from MRTG for analysis but do not understand what it means, refer to the following:

http://oss.oetiker.ch/mrtg/doc/mrtg-logfile.en.html

Just to highlight a little more on the UNIX time stamp, I used excel to convert into date and there is a slight change to the formula. The ; should be rplaced with ,

= (x+y)/86400+DATE(1970,1,1)

Y is your GMT time in seconds. E.g. my GMT is +8, hence Y is 8hrs x 60mins x 60s.

Finally do remember to change the column category of your excel column to date and time hence you will be seeing garbage.

If you are still unsure, you can refer to the following website which automatically converts the UNIX time stamp for you.

FeedWordPress Plugin Customization

1)  Download and installed FeedWordPress Version 2009.0707

2) Require to upgrade of MagpieRSS after activating plugin (normal).

3) Syndicated a test feed (http://thefinance.sg) and found a whole long list of unwanted code appended to each post. After testing on other feeds, realized that the rest are ok and the problem is only on my feed.

4) Increased the excerpt length of the feed by editing ../wp-content/plugins/feedwordpress/syndicatedpost.class.php (L74 and L75)
Change the code to:

if (strlen($excerpt) > 503) :
$excerpt = substr($excerpt,0,500).'...';

5) How do I make the permalinks for post titles open in a new browser window? or [Private]

Note that since I will be making changes to index.php, archive.php and search.php in the theme folder, I will have to make sure I modify the files after each theme upgrade.

For thesis theme, I have to modify custom_functions.php. Not going to do this because the general consensus is that opening in a new window is bad.
Beware of Opening Links in a New Window [Usability and Information Architecture]

6) How to make feedwordpress retrieve only a short excerpt and not the entire post? Feedwordpress : truncate the article

Finally found the solution. Look for the file syndicatedpost.class.php and insert the code below above line 66.

 $content = substr($content,0,500).'...';

It is basically similar to to the excerpt code, it will retrieve from 0 – 500 words and post it into the content. Hence my code look something like this now.

$content = $this->item['description'];
endif;
$content = substr($content,0,500).'...';
$this->post['post_content'] = apply_filters('syndicated_item_content', $content, $this);

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/feedwordpress/

7) Point Permalinks to the local copy on this website.

Go to Syndication -> Posts -> Under ‘Links’ -> point to local copy on this website

8) Add a ‘Read full article’ at the end of the single syndicated post

Put this signature code to Thesis Theme,  custom_functions.php

// Signature -> http://diythemes.com/forums/showthread.php?p=74152#post74152
function my_signature() {
if (is_single() && is_syndicated()) { ?>
<p><a href="<?php the_syndication_permalink() ?>" rel="bookmark" title="<?php the_title(); ?>"><br/>Read the full article &rarr;</a></p>
<?    }
}
add_action ('thesis_hook_after_post' , 'my_signature');

9) Next post permalink is ’screwed’

Auto-resolved. I guess is because of point 7 – Point Permalinks to the local copy on this website.

Thesis Theme Customization

1) Rename ../wp-content/themes/thesis_151/custom-sample folder to ../wp-content/themes/thesis_151/custom
Feel really dumb – spent several hours figuring out why I couldn’t customize the theme.

2) Edit ../wp-content/themes/thesis_151/custom/custom_functions.php. Note that there is no ‘?>’ at the end – spent sometime combining the code together. Read the code below on the customization done so far.

<?php
// Adjust teaser lenght - http://diythemes.com/answers/customize-teasers/
add_filter('excerpt_length', 'my_excerpt_length');
function my_excerpt_length($length) {
return 100; }

// Remove comments -> http://diythemes.com/answers/change-0-comments-display/#rem_brac
remove_action('thesis_hook_after_post', 'thesis_comments_link');

// http://diythemes.com/forums/customization/5715-read-more-link-not-showing-post-excerpts.html?highlight=read
function home_read_more() {
if (is_home() || is_archive()) { ?>
<p><a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>" rel="bookmark" title="<?php the_title(); ?>">Read the full article &rarr;</a></p>
<?php }
}
add_action('thesis_hook_after_post', 'home_read_more');

// Adsense Ads -> http://diythemes.com/forums/customization/10748-adsense-ads-under-nav-menu.html
function my_adsense_code () {
?>
<br/>
Adsense Code
<?php
}
add_action('thesis_hook_before_content', 'my_adsense_code');

- Still waiting for someone to guide me in implementing rotating javascript ads in the multimedia box.
- Figure out the best usage of the multimedia box

- Figure out how to categorize the feeds into three main headers – personal finance, investing and trading or should I rename my headers.

- Add the google ad after each single post

- When upgrading Wordpress, always do a manual upgrade so that we knowwhat files we are changing. http://codex.wordpress.org/Upgrading_WordPress

- Upgrading thesis http://diythemes.com/thesis/downloads/

- Testing feedburner if email subscription will show the read full article else may need to truncate the feeds. Changed thesis Syndication/feed to Feedburner

- Testing various ads. Google adsense all completed.

Monday 19 oct’09, 12:44pm (GMT +8:00)

- Installed FeedWordPress.

- Encounter the problem when activating plugin.

- Click Upgrade and upgraded successfully. “Congratulations! Your MagpieRSS has been successfully upgraded to the version shipped with FeedWordPress.”

- Go to http://feedwordpress.radgeek.com/ to understand how the plugin work. Registration is required.

- Entered three feeds and waiting for them to appear. Not sure how the post will be attributed to the author.

- How do I make the permalinks for post titles open in a new browser window?

- Problem: there is a whole long list of unwanted code after each post. Suspect that it could be due to updating Magpie. Decided to do a clean install and test it on another folder.

<p><a href=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/sBXRImxtRJQWcNvi0Z4P0vnewhg/0/da”><img src=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/sBXRImxtRJQWcNvi0Z4P0vnewhg/0/di” border=”0″ ismap=”true”></img></a><br/>
<a href=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/sBXRImxtRJQWcNvi0Z4P0vnewhg/1/da”><img src=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/sBXRImxtRJQWcNvi0Z4P0vnewhg/1/di” border=”0″ ismap=”true”></img></a></p><img src=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/thefinancesg/~4/4kjDcH7Xvc8″ height=”1″ width=”1″/>