Ryan Malesevich's Blog: WP Plugins: Adsense Beautifier
546947
Ryan Malesevich is back today with a look at another handy WordPress plugin - Adsense Beautifier.   I'm here to let you guys in on a little secret. From what I hear, if you're using Google Adsense, if you add images next to the ads it helps through with your click through rate. And a better click through rate means higher revenues. Now, I've never done it but I hear it works out pretty well. So how exactly would you go about doing that? You could do it manually, but where is the fun in that?   He talks about what the plugin does - generate the Adsense code for you, without having to go back to Google each time. It supports most of the syles that Google offers currently, but a few are left out. It also helps arrange the ads to make it easier to place them on the page.   Installation is easy, and complete details on the plugin can be found on the project homepage.
556415
Utilizing All the Features of Google Adsense  Many website owners know that Google's Adsense program is a great way to show targeted ads on your site and make money at the same time. Google offers many features that you may not know about. Let's take a look at a few of them.  Colors: ...
390531
Joshua Eichorn has found a tutorial someone else has written on creating a stock lookup plugin for WordPress with his HTML_AJAX package.    The only problem I see is the code won't work in PHP5 since introspection will return the method name as GetQuote instead of getquote.   He gives the code changes you'll need to make to get it all working in your PHP5 installation, and includes another option as well - registering all of the functions you want to use instead of just automagically using them.
373292
Google Blesses Blogger Users with AdSense Advertising  Blogger, having replaced the default Google powered AdSense ads with a search enhanced Blogger task bar, has recently announced that they will now make Google AdSense advertisements available to Blogger members and other personal blog owners via a new program. Biz Stone, a Google ...
69952
Yahoo Publisher Network has made some updates to its quality guidelines and program policies.  The change which sticks out the most is the limitation of three ad units per page. Google AdSense works in a similar fashion, with the maximum amount of contextual network ads being set at three. Yahoo has defined some simple quality guidelines [...]
463420
Striking out against spammers (sounds good already!) Lycos have developed a screensaver that should help to put the nasty blighters out of business.
516816
If you search for Yahoo Microsoft, this page is the second hit. I like that of course. It's generating a fair amount of flow, since the combination of Yahoo and Microsoft is a pretty hot topic. Keeping the topic going, I think it's pretty amazing that Microsoft wants to buy Yahoo, but then again, which of all their web efforts has captured our imagination? At least Yahoo has Flickr, and when they try something new, we all try it with them (often with not the greatest results). The rambling continues... If Yahoo is into poison pills, try this one out.  Reserve 5 percent of Yahoo's common stock for blogger options. Put us to work to find new businesses for Yahoo, ones that are relevant to our world. When we find them, reward the bloggers with a significant upside stake in Yahoo's future, not the airy-fairy kind, but real stock that we can trade. Handled properly, it could raise shareholder value by much more than 5 percent. Just the kind of deal they pay you to do, oh Yahoo gods and board members.  Of course it'll never happen. It's an idea like the one I keep proposing for newspapers -- that they hire their public editors from the public, independent bloggers with no journalism experience, with no undue reverence for the institutions so revered by journos. They're going away, just like Yahoo is (sad but true). Now what will rise in their place? Imho, something that's home grown, with the integrity of the people, in our interest. The more they invite the public in, the more clued in they will be when we figure out where we want to go with news on the web. It's why I'm excited about the Obama campaign and why I keep giving to it (I'm up to $400 now). I'm excited because so many other people are excited.  I like his idea about tuition for public service for college students. It's so simple. People want to be involved, they want to use their energy and creativity to solve problems. In the 20th century we were couch potatoes. In the 21st we do it for ourselves.  The first tech company that fully embraces this, not just in the form of User Generated Content (what an insult) but by giving us power (that comes from stock) will rule the world. If Y! had the guts, it won't be long before they're making tender offers to buy out Ballmer.  BTW, I think I understand why Ballmer wants Yahoo! When Yahoo engineers wake up they program stuff like Yahoo Live, which is pretty cool and runs on the web, and while it steals ideas from smaller companies, it adds some pretty cool stuff of its own. When Microsoft engineers wake up they program stuff like Vista, a multi-year, multi-billion dollar waste of money, time and customer goodwill. They can't do another Vista without wrecking the franchise. Now the question is -- where do they go for growth? That's what Yahoo is for.
647262
In a new post to his blog today, Mike Potter talks about the WebORB for PHP software and a new feature based on Adobe technology - a Flex-based console.   [It] includes a service browser, as well as a number of useful examples, showing both the client side code (in Flex) and server side code in PHP. The getting started guide (again, built into the console or available on the web) provides a good tutorial for creating your first WebORB powered application.   He likes the project overall, but notes a small issue he has with starting a new project - a prompt to use the Flex Data Services. Overall, though, he has high hopes for the future of the project.
155032
Links to this week's topics from search engine forums across the web: SEO for an eBay store? - Who Benefits Most from 3 AdSense Ads Per Page - What SEO Guarantees Do You Offer? - Keywords In Quotes Vs. Keywords In Italics - Yahoo Local Match & Yellow Pages
255251
A few simple changes--and some useful keyboard shortcuts--let you work faster and smarter in your browser.
92811
New widgets help personalize maps with dynamic content from diverse sources.
343797
As a companion to the podcast version of his review, Matthew Turland has posted his comments in text form over on his blog today.   I received an e-mail recently from a very nice gentleman at Packt Publishing - their representative asked if I would be willing to review one of their books, namely PHP Web 2.0 Mashup Projects by Shu-Wai Chow. Reviewing books is not something I had done before, so I thought I would give it a good old-fashioned college try.   He mentions the size of the book (and how it's not an indication of the quality) and the basic structure of the book, including spotlights on some of the specific topics covered.
726584
I&#8217;m not sure if the Google Ajax Search widgets are new or not, as Google has been developing web publisher widgets based upon Google API&#8217;s for a while, but the implementation of such Google Ajax Widgets is getting easier and easier. In the same tradition of Google AdSense&#8217;s Related Links, content supplied by various Google Search [...]
116664
Found in the search marketing forums: AdWords Monitoring; Life Without the Little Green Bar; Help With Starting; and more.
768782
On the ProDevTips blog today, Henrik has posted about an alternative to the popular Akismet plugin for the PHP blogging tool, WordPress, to help prevent even more comment spam from making it past - WP_Hashcash.   WP Hashcash is an antispam plugin that eradicates comment spam on Wordpress blogs. It works because your visitors must use obfuscated javascript to submit a proof-of-work that indicates they opened your website in a web browser, not a robot.   He includes the code that he needed to change to get the widget part of the plugin up and working correctly. You can find out more about this plugin from its page on Elliot Back's blog.
558888
On the Inside Open Source blog today, there's a "quick hit" post from Jason Gilmore for WordPress users out there using the WP-Cache and being frustrated by it's functionality during the development process.   I'm using WordPress to build out a blog for a new endeavor, and couldn't figure out why I had to go through a rather unwieldy refresh process (disabling a template and then enabling it anew) every time I changed it from within the WordPress administration interface.   It was the WP-Caching mechanism that WordPress comes with that was causing the issue, so he tracked down where to disable it for the duration of the development time. (Options -> WP-Cache -> Disable It).
588152
Russ asks: Where's the OpenSocial container API? I love Russ because he cuts through all the BS and gets right to the core, most basic question, and he doesn't care who he pisses off. That's my kind of developer. You can't lie to the compiler, when the bits hit the road, you gotta know what garbage goes in and what garbage comes out.  (Ahh programmer's humor!) In other words, suppose I wanted to compete with Google, MySpace, Plaxo and LinkedIn, well, where's the spec that shows me how to do that? Well, of course I don't know, they aren't communicating with riffraff like me, but I have some experience with this kind of stuff, so I can hazard a guess. If they publish a spec,all kinds of projects will likely get started to enable the API in (just for the sake of argument): Drupal, WordPress, Twitter, Pownce, Jaiku, Scripting News (why not add widgets to a random blog), CNN, The New York Times, well you get the idea. There might be lots of implementations very quickly. And that would be it for changes. It would be frozen de facto, they'd have to live with what they have, which given how quickly it was thrown together, probably isn't very good. Not the kind of stuff you'd like to support for the next decade or two. Or maybe they would break everyone, something guaranteed to make them a lot of enemies, much the way Microsoft did, and they were good at migration of APIs.  Google is good at doing AJAXy web UIs, they make users happy, but they're not very good at APIs. This one is a loser, for sure. That's the answer to Russ's question. It's probably not malice that keeps them from releasing details to everyone outside their club, it's pragmatism. They have to try to hold on to it to keep it from becoming even more of a mess than it already is. Just my opinion, for what it's worth. I've been wrong many times before.