Tech Thoughts

First look at the New Google Adsense Interface

2010-11-03T00:28:00.000-07:00

Google has launched a new Adesense Interface for the Webmasters. You will be able to view a link "Try the new AdSense interface" on right hand top corner of your current Adesnese Interface.

Google has this to say regarding this interface:
"The new AdSense has been designed to help you manage your account more efficiently, offer you deeper insights about your site’s revenue, and give you more control over the ads you show. A few of the new things you can do include:

Make changes to your ad units in bulk by visiting the "My ads" tab.
Compare your performance this month and last month under the Performance reports tab.
Visit the Allow & block ads tab to block categories of ads.

I noticed number of changes in my first quick Look:
- The tool is now using rich UI, more efficient and eye catchy.
- The performance report has new columns and some of the old columns are removed. Google seems to have gone Ad Unit oriented instead of previous Page Unit. Instead of Page impressions, its now showing Ad Unit Impression. Similarly CTR is based on Ad Units only. Google seems to have removed the Page eCPM, instead it has introduced CPC, RPM and also Coverage. It may take some time for old users to get used to these new columns.
- The adesense reports now have graphs, which will be helpful.

- You can now run detailed performance reports by ad type, ad size, ad unit, targeting type, and bid type for total earnings and other metrics, over a custom date range. You can also drill down into those reports to view new reports for just one or multiple elements, like channels, ad units, or products.
- My Ad section has also seen changes. The Content ads, Link and Ad Units are merged into single one.

- They have revamped the Resource page adding Twitter,Facebook and Youtube channels.

There is not much functionality changes in this beta version as they need to run the older version along with the new one. I hope going forward they will be adding more features. The UI is definitely attractive and I think it will be accepted by the users very soon.

Look into googles official docs here.

Show all posts in a custom template page in wordpress MU

2010-07-15T03:26:00.000-07:00

I was trying to do this.

1. My front page/home page will display only recent four posts. There will be a link "View all posts" in the home page.
2. The above link will take user to a custom page where all the posts from the main blog will be displayed. The page will have pagination links.

Initally I was trying to make use of query_posts with no luck. With some intense search I could find the trick and now its working fine. I am posting the exact steps here.

1. Create a pnew page with custom templates.
2. The custom-template will have the following code:

<?php
/*
Template Name: Custom-tmplate
*/
?>

<?php get_header() ?>
 <div id="content">
 <div class="padder">

   <?php
   $limit = get_option('posts_per_page');
   $paged = (get_query_var('paged')) ? get_query_var('paged') : 1;
   query_posts('&posts_per_page='.$limit.'&paged='.$paged.'pagename=&page_id=');
   $wp_query->is_archive = false;
   $wp_query->is_home = false;
   if ( have_posts() ) :?>
   <div class="post-index"><ul>

    <?php
    while (have_posts()) : the_post();?>
     <li>
     <?php do_action( 'bp_before_blog_post' ) ?>

      <div class="author-box-index">
       <?php echo get_avatar( get_the_author_meta( 'user_email' ), '30' ); ?>
      </div>

      <div class="post-content">
       <h2 class="homeblogtitle"><a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>" rel="bookmark" title="<?php _e( 'Permanent Link to', 'buddypress' ) ?> <?php the_title_attribute(); ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a></h2>

       <p class="date"><i><?php the_time('F j, Y') ?></i> <em><?php _e( 'in', 'buddypress' ) ?> <?php the_category(', ') ?> <?php printf( __( 'by %s', 'buddypress' ), bp_core_get_userlink( $post->post_author ) ) ?></em></p>

       <p class="postmetadata">
       <span class="postcomments"><?php comments_popup_link( __( 'No Comments', 'buddypress' ), __( '1 Comment', 'buddypress' ), __( '% Comments', 'buddypress' ) ); ?></span></p>
      </div>
     <?php do_action( 'bp_after_blog_post' ) ?>
     </li>
    <?php endwhile; ?>
    </ul></div>

    <?php
    if (function_exists('wp_pagenavi')) : ?>
    <div class="pagenavi">
     <?php wp_pagenavi(); ?>
    </div>
    <?php else : // Use WordPress default page navigation. ?>
    <div class="pages">
     <span class="older"><?php next_posts_link('« Older Entries'); ?></span>
     <span class="newer"><?php previous_posts_link('Newer Entries »'); ?></span>
    </div>
    <?php endif; ?>

   <?php else : ?>

    <h2 class="center"><?php _e( 'Not Found', 'buddypress' ) ?></h2>
    <p class="center"><?php _e( 'Sorry, but you are looking for something that isn\'t here.', 'buddypress' ) ?></p>

    <?php locate_template( array( 'searchform.php' ), true ) ?>

   <?php endif;
   wp_reset_query();
   ?>

 </div>
 </div><!-- #content -->

 <?php locate_template( array( 'sidebar.php' ), true ) ?>

<?php get_footer() ?>

AdSense Recent Announcement: Now serving multiple ad networks

2010-03-17T03:26:00.000-07:00

This is what I do see in a recent mail from Google Adsense. It look interesting to me and waiting for how does it effect the current earnings. Will update on that soon.

"We have launched a new capability in AdSense allowing Google-certified ad networks compete directly within AdSense, which means that advertisers from these third-party networks will be able to compete with AdWords advertisers to show on the Google Content Network.

These new capabilities will automatically be enabled for your account, and you'll see a new section in your Ad Review Center where you can allow or block specific ad networks or all networks except AdWords. Please note that we'll gradually be adding new ad networks to AdSense accounts over the next few months, so you won't see any immediate impact on your ads or your earnings.

To ensure the quality of the ads that appear on AdSense publisher websites, Google will certify all participating ad networks for adherence to our standards for user privacy, ad quality, and speed. Some participating ad networks use targeting methods similar to Google's interest-based advertising to show more relevant ads to users on the sites they visit. These ad networks won't be permitted to collect data from your site for the purpose of subsequent interest-based advertising, but we'll allow networks that comply with user privacy guidelines to show ads using these tools. Publishers can opt out of user interest targeting from these ad networks, and Google has changed our requirements for third-party ad serving to reflect this.

We are currently only accepting ads from Google-certified ad networks in North America and Europe, but we will make this feature available to ad networks in additional parts of the world in the future."

Google Analytics offer for free adword adevertisings

2010-02-18T01:57:00.000-08:00

One of many webmasters' products provided by Google is "Google Analytics". This tool help webmasters to optimize websites with detailed traffic reports. Like any other website statistic product, Google Analytics also provides graphical representaions of unique visitors, page views, Search Engine hits, etc. Not going much detail into the product, webmasters are welcome to try it themselves find the cool features.

Another good news to the webmasters who create accounts in Google Analytics may get a nice free 2500 INR (Indian Rupees) offer on Google adwords. So, it is a nice opportunity to explore Google Adwords and also popularize the new website you have built. After months of enrolling into Analytics, webmaster gets the offer mail with redeem code.

Just sign into adwords with the same account as Analytics and enter the redeem code provided in the mail in the "Billing Preference" section. Rest of the adwords configurations are easy and can be customized as per the webmasters' need.

Convert Date to millisecond format (millsec from epoch) in PLSQL

2010-02-17T02:42:00.000-08:00

I have already explained in a previous blog how to convert the Java date in millisecond format into human readable format. In this blog I will explain how to do the reverse using PLSQL.
This kind of requirements come up when various applications run on the same database, same tables but applications use different techonologies. Some table may have stored the timestamp in the Java's format but an application written in PLSQL may want to update the timestamp.

The following PLSQL function will do the job:

FUNCTION get_epoch_timestamp(curr_date IN TIMESTAMP) return NUMBER is
l_ep_tmstmp NUMBER;
BEGIN
select
EXTRACT(DAY FROM (curr_date - to_timestamp('1-1-1970 00:00:00','MM-DD-YYYY HH24:Mi:SS')))*86400000 +
EXTRACT(HOUR FROM (curr_date - to_timestamp('1-1-1970 00:00:00','MM-DD-YYYY HH24:Mi:SS')))*3600000 +
EXTRACT(MINUTE FROM (curr_date - to_timestamp('1-1-1970 00:00:00','MM-DD-YYYY HH24:Mi:SS')))*60000 +
ROUND(EXTRACT(SECOND FROM (curr_date - to_timestamp('1-1-1970 00:00:00','MM-DD-YYYY HH24:Mi:SS'))),3)*1000 into l_ep_tmstmp
from dual;

return l_ep_tmstmp;
EXCEPTION when others then
return 0;
END;

The above function can be called like this to get the millisecond format for the current timestamp:

SELECT get_epoch_timestamp(systimestamp) from dual;

Convert Java Time in millisec to readable Date format

2010-02-15T23:22:00.000-08:00

In Java, Date object represents time in milliseconds from the "the Epoch". The Epoch is nothing but distance in time from January 1, 1970, 00:00:00 GMT, measured in milliseconds.

There are situations when you would want to convert the date time stored in this millisecond format into human readable normal date format. The time in these scenarios will be stored in a Long variable. The following class will do the job for you:

package test;
import java.text.SimpleDateFormat;
import java.util.Date;

public class CalculateDate {

public CalculateDate()
{
}

public static String getCurrentDTG (long l_time)
{
Date date = new Date (l_time);
// Specify the date format you want to display
SimpleDateFormat dtgFormat = new SimpleDateFormat ("E-dd-MMM:HH:mm:ss-yyyy");
return dtgFormat.format (date);
}

public static void main(String[] args)

{

// The time in millisecond
long l_t = 1250620345001L;
String strDte = getCurrentDTG(l_t);
System.out.println("Date :"+strDte);
}
}

The output of the above code will be:

Date :Wed-19-Aug:00:02:25:001-2009

The string passed into SimpleDateFormat instance will decide the Date format to be displayed. In this example following conventions are used:
E          - Day in Week, e.g Wed
dd        - Day of the month in number
MMM - Month in three character string
HH       - Hour in 24hr format
mm       - Minute in number
ss          - Second in number
SSS      - Millisecond in number
yyyy      - Year in number , e.g. 2009

toString() method also converts Date into a readable format as follows:
dow mon dd hh:mm:ss zzz yyyy
But the developer will not have any handle to change the above format. So the above code is a preferable way of doing the same.

To Start and Shutdown an Oracle Database Server

2008-12-30T22:15:00.000-08:00

You can blindly follow the steps below to restart an Oracle Database server(9i and above) in an unix server.

1. Logs into the machine where the Oracle Database server resides as 'Oracle' user.
2. Go to the sqlplus executor of the Database instance of the Database you want to restart. You can achieve this by the following command:
$chgsid

This will list down the Oracle servers in the machine and you can just opt for the instance you want to restart.

Or you can directly execute the following:
$ {ORACLE_HOME Path}/bin/sqlplus

Execute the following sqlplus command:

$SQLPLUS / as sysdba
or
$SQLPLUS "/ as sysdba"
The quotes are needed for 9i server.

3. The above command will take you to the sqlplus prompt. Execute the following to stop the server:

SQL>shutdown immediate;

After successful shutdown execute the following command to start the server:

SQL>startup;

The server should startup successfully. And you are done with the restart.

If you want to know details of the above commands read the following:

SYSDBA: This is an administrative user which has the ability to perform high level administrative tasks like starting, shutting, backing up the Database. This user doesn't have privileges to view the user data. Similar user to SYSDBA is SYSOPER.

SHUTDOWN: sqlplus command to shut a DB server down. It has three options:
SHUTDOWN
a. Default(No parameters passed) : It will stop the server after all the tarnsactions get completed in the DB.
b. immediate: This option will terminate all sessions and rollback any incomplete transaction.
c. abort : This will kill all the process and abort the sessions without any rollback to the transactions.

STARTUP: The default Startup command when no parameters passed into it, will start the Database, Mount it and then opens it for normal usage. All these three stages has different significances and useful for various database recovery processes.
The START stage just reads the init.ora files of the Databse. This file's location can be passed as a parameter to the startup command:
SQL>startup pfile=

In the MOUNT stage it reads all the control files and determines the data files locations.

In OPEN stage it opens all the data files located in the mount stage.

In some recovery process, the DB needs to be just started not even mounted. The command to be used in this scenario:
SQL> startup nomount;

In other recovery processes the DB needs to be just mounted, so the command used:
SQL> startup mount;

Why do I get bad rank in google search after title change?

2008-12-29T02:09:00.000-08:00

It's been more than two years for me while working on few small websites I own. I started from the ground zero level and with constant efforts I gained some good amount of knowledge in website optimization. I will share few of my experiences here whenever I can manage time wo write it down.

My experience says, google is becoming too strict and you need to be very careful to build or modify your website. If you loose ranks in google, it's always difficult to get good amount of traffic.

One of my recent experience with google is that if you change or optimize your <title> for some well established pages of your website, you may see a steep fall in your google ranking. I am not talking about the 'page rank', but I am talking about the search rank in google. I tried optimizing the <title> for around 10 important pages including my index page. And the penalty was too huge. I was dropped from a search rank of 3 to below 60 for some 'specific words' when google crawled those pages. Ironically I optimized my titles for those specific words only! I searched around google and found that this is very known fact that the rank sinks if you change the title until and unless you are a big player! I just banged my head to find a solution but didn't find any. Everywhere there was mention of only negative things.

My web traffic started decreasing drastically(200%) so I looked for the options described by other SEO experts and found the only solution will be to restore the pages to the old titles. But I was adamant and didn't want to opt for old titles which seemed to be very dirty for me. I decided to opt for observe(not wait) and watch! I knew I didn't do anything wrong or over optimized, then why should google punish me? I closlely observered my rankings in various times of the day. I found it was very much fluctuating across various google datacenters. At times I used to get a rank 0f 30 while at different time 60 in the same day. I kept on checking the ranks every day in at various times. Initially I found the trend was going downwards, i.e. kept on losing losing the rank day by day. After couple of weeks my ranks seem to be stabilized at around 70, page no 7. I kept my patience for two weeks but it was still in the same rank. After these stabilized two weeks, one morning I found my rank to be at around 40th rank. Though later in the day I saw myself in the 7th page, it gave me a confidence that my page is ranked well in some datacenter.
I kept on watching and found in the morning the time the ranking was improving almost on daily basis. Though the other datcenters still giving me a rank of 70! There was a time when I used to get a rank in top 10 in morning while around 70 in other times! But slowly the other datacenters started showing improvement. And my average ranking started improving. Within two-three weeks all the datrcenters synced up. And finally I got a whooping rank of 2! Now it seems to be fighting with number 1 contender!

So the gist of the story is that, don't be frustrated. If you haven't over optimized the whole page and just cleaning up the <title> to contain better texts, then you will get a better result in few months if not immediately. In my case, the whole process took me around three months.
And this is applicable to google only, I found other search engines like yahoo , live, msn didn't penalized me. In fact I got good results in those search engines once my pages got crawled.