I have four blogs and all of them run several Google Adsense content ads.  I wanted to figure out how to track which blogs and which specific Adsense content was working better than others, so I found the best way to accomplish this was to leverage Adsense Channels.  These you can setup yourself on Google Adsense and you can create as many Channels as you want.

For my in Post Adsense Ads, I use the “All in One Adsense and YPN!” plug-in which allows you to directly specify your Google Adsense Channel you want to use:

I have channels setup for my Rock Along Productions Skyscraper, My Dragon Blogger In Post, My Dragon Blogger right skyscraper, My Wanderer Thoughts in Post and my Personal Blog (JustinGermino.com) In Post.

(click for larger image)

So now when I view my Adsense reports for December and factor in Channel reports, I can see which of my Channels brings in the most money:

(I encourage you to click this one for larger image, it is worth looking at in detail)

With this screenshot I can tell my dragonblogger.com draws in the most adsense for December $8 of my $11 dollars so far this month. The odd thing is my inpost header channel has a higher number of clicks, but my right skyscraper add brought in slightly more earnings on about 1/2 as many clicks, so therefore must have had more follow through. I also noticed how the ads were performing on my other blogs.

If I were to average over several months and see that certain ads and locations were performing well but others were drastically doing lousy, I would remove them altogether or reshape them and put them in a different location on my blog post. Using Channels you can eventually learn patterns on where to place your Google Adsense ads for maximum effectiveness on your blogs. You can then leverage this information and use that location to put other prime advertisements in theory as well.

-Dragon Blogger

I loved the Admin Management Xtended plug-in for Wordpress 2.6 which allowed me to easily update categories and some data for my posts without having to go into each and every post.  Wordpress 2.7 now features a built in feature called “Quick Edit” which allows you to perform similar work and pretty much nullifies the need for the Admin Management Xtended plug-in.

(click for larger image)

Wordpress 2.7 Quick Edit allows you to very easily modify the Post Title, Slug, Post Date, Categories, Tags as well as you can disable comments and pings on posts if you prefer.  You can also set a post as sticky right from quickedit, which makes the post always appear at the top of your blog homepage.

I do find however that Quick Edit seems to have an issue with my podpress plug-in on all of my blogs, and the Sticky Flag will work, but you will get this error when you submit your changes:

Warning: Attempt to assign property of non-object in /mnt/local/home/germinoj/wandererthoughts.com/wp-content/plugins/podpress/podpress_admin_class.php on line 673

So if you remove the PodPress plug-in, you won’t have any issues at all.  Bluberry Powerpress is a better plug-in for podcasting anyway and doesn’t trigger any errors with the Quick Edit.

Note: Since you can set a sticky post directly from Quick Edit, You technically don’t need the WP-Sticky plug-in I posted about earlier, but that plug-in is still helpful for announcements and letting you know which post is a sticky post right from the main edit post screen.

So take advantage of the Quick Edit, you can sort filter all of your blog posts by a specific “Category” and then use quick edit to rapidly change categories, I often do this for all my accidental posts that are still uncategorized.

-Dragon Blogger

So in doing various readings and checking out new things online I came across a new search engine called Scour.  This is an online search engine that collects search results from Google, Yahoo and MSN and displays them on one page.  However this search engine does something very unique in that it creates an account for you and gives you points for every search you do.  In addition you can rate Thumbs Up or Thumbs Down the search results based on whether they were helpful to you.   You get a point for each rating and a point for each search, you also gain 150 points for signing up, and 25% of the points if you get your friends to sign up and link to you.

So what do these points get you?  Well you get Visa Gift Cards once you accumulate enough points, 6500 points gets you a $25 Visa Gift card which can be used anywhere.  Think about it, if you do 30 google searches a day and you use Scour instead of Google itself you would get 1 free $25 gift card per year just from using scour.  Since you can gain up to 300 points per day by searching and voting in theory if you do heavy amounts of internet browsing and searching you can earn a $25 gift card every few weeks if you use your max points per day.

This to me is totally worth it, so I have set Scour as my homepage, and intend to use it to replace my normal google queries.  You can even download the Scour Toolbar for Firefox and use it instead of your Google Toolbar, so you remember to get points for your searches.  So far I have only been using the service for four days, and I am very curious to see how fast I accumulate my first $25 gift card.

Let me know what you think of it, and if anybody already uses it.  If you don’t use it, it already queries the top 3 search engines, so there is no reason not to use it really.

Here is what the basic screen looks like showing you your points:

This is what your home profile page looks like showing you how many points you have earned and where they have accumulated from:

If you have a large friend network, I encourage you to invite them to use scour, if you know 10 people who join through you and do 10 searches per day, you would be getting an extra 25 points per day just from them using the service.  This could add up pretty quickly if you actually have many friends who don’t mind switching their search engine.

So if this interests you, sign up for SCOUR HERE and let me consider you one of my friends for referring you.

-Dragon Blogger

Today I downloaded and installed the Twitme wordpress plug-in which allows you to configure your wordpress blog to automatically send out a tweet notifying your followers of your latest blog post.  This is a valuable plug-in and prevents me from having to manually log into twitter and send updates when I update each of my 4 blogs.  This will do it automatically and save me at least 10-15 minutes per day in manually updating.  But I found the Twitme plug-in has other applications as well and should be customized a little for a better auto-tweeting experience.

This post will walk you through completely configuring the Twitme Wordpress Plugin for Wordpress 2.7

Step 1 - Download your Twitme Wordpress Plugin <- Click Link to download it

Step 2 - Copy the plugin via ftp or scp to your wordpress blog site (place in the <site>/wp-content/plug-ins) folder

Step 3 - Open your wordpress dashboard, click on plug-ins and activate the plug-in.

Now that the plugin is activated you will see a new sidebar module called “Twitme” that appears under your Settings module.

Step 4- Click on the Twitme Settings Link in the Twitme Module

Step 5 - Enter your Twitter ID and Password in the Twitme Settings

Step 6 - Customize your Twitter Message (I didn’t like the default, I like using the %POSTTITLE% reference so that the post title name displays instead of just %BLOGNAME% which is the default.

Step 7 - Make sure Enable Auto Post is selected (it should be by default)

Step 8 - Turn “Use Short urls” on, this way your URL’s will be shrunk via tinyURL so that your tweet doesn’t risk exceeding 140 characters

Step 9 - Turn off “Notify New Followers” this is one annoying feature and you should disable it, it is one of the top peeves by all twitter users and nobody wants to see dozens of auto thank you’s every day.

Step 10 - Click “Test Now” you should see that your credentials worked and see a success at the top of the page.

Step 11 - Write a Post and Publish It

Step 12 - Click on the Twitme module “Twitme” link

Step 13 - Confirm that you see the Post ID and date that it was submitted to twitter, you can also resend for re-tweeting at any time.  (Click to enlarge image below)

Note:  Don’t click Submit All, this will spam out all your recent posts and blast out many tweets which really annoys people.

That is pretty much it for how to setup and configure Twitme and confirm that your posts are being published on twitter.  Check twitter and confirm the verbiage is to your satisfaction and if you don’t like it, play around until you like what the auto tweet’s say.

Now some of the other features of the Twitme plug-in include being able to see all of your followers 100 at a time on the wordpress dashboard, you can also easily direct any one of them by clicking on the direct symbol.  Clicking on their logo will create an @reply to the user, and clicking on the trashcan symbol will delete the follower from your dashboard.

Now at the bottom section of this page you can post tweets, see your most recent followers tweets, check your inbox for direct messages, check your outbox for your recent outgoing direct tweets and reply to tweets and set favorites.  It is like a fully developed web twitter client inside your Wordpress dashboard and casual twitter users probably won’t ever have to go to twitter homepage again and can do all their twitter posting right from their wordpress dashboard.

So now that I have shared everything I know and have learned about this plug-in let me know if you find this post helpful and if you enjoy my technical manual type posts.  If you enjoy this post Stumble or Digg away.

-Dragon Blogger

I finished upgrading the remaining three of my blogs to Wordpress 2.7 so all four now are running the latest version of wordpress.  I am still finding out new stuff every day and the new interface takes some getting used to, but I am liking it very much.  Here are some tips I have learned right off the bat.

First, if you don’t care to see certain tabs on your dashboard you can remove them altogether, by clicking on the “Screen Options” button at top right and then unchecking the segments you don’t wish to see, here is an example of a few I have unchecked to make more room on my dashboard.

(click for larger image)

I liked dragging some of my important dashboard modules around so that my interface has everything I need right at my first glance, so far I don’t see much use for the quick posting as you can’t use your SEO Title Tags, Tags to Technorati, or other post related plug-ins with the quickedit. You also can’t easily categorize your quick edit posts on the fly, I think it is good if you are doing many posts a day and giving updates every few hours, but for posts that you want to enhance for SEO it isn’t that helpful and takes more time in the end to have to go back and update the post manually.

The other thing is I have a comment image plug-in which shows the user’s image called “Easy Gravitar’s”, It was great at showing a double image in the comment when you view the post, but now when you look at the comment in the dashboard, it skews the 2nd image so that it renders fairly ugly in the new Wordpress 2.7:

So I have decided to remove the Easy Gravitars plug-in just because the dashboard comment module doesn’t look good to me. I require things to be cosmetically pleasing when I look at them, or I get annoyed and frustrated at my own interface. One other thing I noticed while creating this post is when you insert images, I can’t tell if its one of my plug-ins but after the 1st image the image details are minimized and you have to open it up and then select “insert into post”, but it does seem to remember if you selected Full Size previously it defaults to that for second image as well.

Thats all I have to share so far, I will post more updates as I learn more and play around with Wordpress 2.7 more.

-Dragon Blogger

So I have decided to upgrade one of my blogs to Wordpress 2.7 and see what all the hype is about and test out some new features.  At first I was extremely disappointed with the new dashboard, I couldn’t find links to anything.  I then learned that some of my plug-ins “Lighter Menu’s” specifically actually prevents you from seeing the left column bar in Wordpress 2.7.

I troubleshoot this by deactivating all of my plug-ins and when the left column reappeared I added my plug-ins back one at a time until I figured out which plug-in was the culprit.  So now I can display the proper Wordpress 2.7 dashboard:

Click on Image to Enlarge:

I have only upgraded one of my four blogs at this point and may do the other three this weekend. One good thing about my hosting company is I have full SSH access to my servers so I can just tar up my existing directory and deploy the wordpress update, I have easy back out steps if necessary.

So far the plugin activation and deactivation is lighting quick compared to Wordpress 2.6.x even when you do bulk activates or deactivates. The homepage itself is more useful and streamlined, I also love the quickpost where you can just type and do some minor format changes and immediately post right from the wordpress home page. Though if you do complex tagging, or have SEO plug-ins you have to write the post the normal way.

One of the main features I am looking at implementing is a sticky post, kind of like a mini home page above your current posts, this feature will be very useful for getting across a message and will go along way to allow companies to use blogs as their primary site types in my opinion. I want to get a sticky post to work on the Rock Along Productions blog, since when people visit they don’t realize that there are new posts they just see the static page.

Note: Static page is a permanent static blog front page, but sticky post will only show 1 of your sticky posts on top of all the others, so you still see your current posts under your sticky post. This is why sticky post is valuable.

I will report more as I learn new features and functionality and see what new plug-ins take advantage of the new Wordpress 2.7 in the meantime check your plug-ins carefully, I already had 3 invalidate from the upgrade, so I am sure many plug-ins may have problems until they release updates.

-Dragon Blogger

This morning it appears as if Entrecard is down again, I get application errors and can’t get to my dashboard, drop inbox or several other area’s of the application.  For bloggers that depend on the Entrecard service the longer it is down the less drops people can do and it means a traffic hit to their web site can result for that day.

Entrecard suffers an outage usually at least once every week or two and it is long enough to be an inconvenience to droppers and users of that service.  I myself get most of my traffic to my poetry blog through Entrecard, as poetry does not span google search engines well, so most of my readers are brought in via Entrecard.

Still the service has been lightning quickly lately and I hope it stays as fast when the finally bring the service back up.  I have told my readers that Entrecard was one of the quickest and easiest ways to build a network of bloggers that you can meet and eventually collaborate with.  Entrecredits also are useful for putting free Advertisements on other blogger’s sites in the Entrecard network.

Hopefully the Entrecard site will be restored soon.

-Dragon Blogger

I had to completely uninstall and reinstall my Firefox browser the other day due to some javascript and xml errors that prevented me from accessing any of my addons.  This was caused when I updated to the latest version of Firefox.

Well since I had to rebuild a fresh Firefox and download all of my addons and extensions all over from scratch I thought it would be a good idea to share with my readers the primary Firefox addons that I use and tell you about them and what I use them for.

Here is snapshot of my addons, courtesy of the All-in-One Sidebar plugin.

• All-in-One Sidebar

This plugin creates a bar to the left of the Firefox browser which gives one click access to bookmarks, history, downloads, addons, web page source code and several other things. This plugin prevents the need from using the drop down menu’s at the top of the screen 80% of the time for me.

• DashBlog

This addon allows you to cut/paste clips from any website and save them directly to your desktop, this prevents you from having to do a print screen and then cut/paste just what you want in a paint program, and skips a step making it easier to clip sections or logo’s from web sites and add them to your blog. You can also grab video’s and mp3’s from a web site, but I use it strictly for the cut/pasting of snippets from a site.

• Download Statusbar

This addon allows you to see the status of your downloads at the bottom of your Firefox window, it shows a progress bar so you can easily see when your downloads completed and you can click on them and install them, or remove them from the browser from there.

• DownloadHelper

This is Video Download Helper and is quite useful for downloading flash video from various websites including Google Video and YouTube.  When you want to download a video to your computer, this is one of two major plugins that I use.

• Fast Video Download

This is the 2nd addon that I use to download youtube video’s to my desktop, it is faster and allows for 1 click downloads, but sometimes flakes out or doesn’t download and I fail back to DownloadHelper if that happens.  It is faster though and works most of the time.

• Firebug

Hands down if you maintain any type of website or blog Firebug is essential it lays out all of the code and categorizes it, lets you browser through the CSS, Javascript, HTML and actually make changes on the fly to the code and lets it render so you can see the results in real time on what the site would look like with the modified code.  This is an essential tool for anyone who needs to debug websites, especially stuff in hard to find CSS area’s, and when blogs have so many CSS files and PHP files, this is a great addon for finding that hidden stuff.

• FireFTP

This is the standard if you do file transfers between your PC and any web servers, I use this to upload files and images to my blog sites, it is very easy to use and has a norton commander style interface so it is very easy to just drag and drop files from your source to your destination.  Great FTP client that opens as a new tab inside of FireFox.  (I wish it supported SCP and SFTP, it would replace WinSCP if it did).

• Fission

This was a new one for me, but I liked it so much when I got it I had to add it.  This makes the progress bar show right in the URL bar when you hit a site.  It took some getting used to, but now you see the progress meter behind the actual typed URL at the top.  This makes it just like Safari browser progress bar.

• PDF Download

PDF files when opened in any browser consume lots of memory and tend to have flaky problems for me with Firefox, this allows me to easily just one click download PDF files so I can open them with FoxIT  Reader which is better and much much faster than Acrobat Reader.

• StumbleUpon

Every blogger should stumble once and a while, I just recently got into Stumbling, and use this as my tool to move around and find random stumbled posts.  I use it to sometimes upload posts as well.

• Torrent Finder Toolbar

Nobody should pirate anything, piracy is illegal.  However if you are in the torrent scene and need to find stuff, there is no better addon for firefox.  Torrent Finder Toolbar will search through all the major torrent sites to find what you are looking for and saves enormous amounts of time.  Useful for finding freeware, shareware, or any other types of files.  I should warn you, 75% of everything you find on torrent is infected with trojans and malware be warned, if you are looking for freeware or software, get it from opensource or company websites instead of Torrent, much of the freeware is contaminated.

• United States English Dictionary

This adds a much more accurate and helpful spell checker to Firefox, so when you right click on words in your blog posts, it will auto correct them.  Not much else to say about it.

• Summary

So that is my primary golden list of addons and extensions for Mozilla Firefox, and I have used dozens of them over the years.  I am more than happy to hear what extensions and addons my readers use, so if you have any to recommend please let me know.  I know about Alexa Toolbar…etc but I had so many toolbars it was slowing my Firefox down tremendously.

-Dragon Blogger

For some reason the update to Firefox 3.0.4 caused a ton of problems in my system, the first and foremost being that the moment I installed Firefox update 3.0.4 every one of my add-ons was malfunctioning.  I would open my tools -> add-ons screen and when I tried to click options for any add-on, it would crash and lock up my firefox process.

I would get a popup error that said the following, when trying to update, install or modify any of my add-ons.

Firefox could not install the file at <blah blah>

Error Code
-203

Unexpected Installation Error

This led me to look at my error log which was completely loaded with error messages and garbage about js files, scripts, null file paths…etc.

I am going to try uninstalling cleaning up my registry and re-installing FireFox, but this really bugs me and I hope I can get it repaired. I am using Firefox only for a few specific add-ons now, Google Chrome is my default browser, but I still need Firefox for a few toolbars and Dashblog plug-in.

PS. My Google Chrome hardly loses cookies anymore, I don’t know if there was an update but the browser has been much more stable lately for me.

-Dragon Blogger

In a pleasant and welcome change the new StumbleUpon web interface finally allows you to change your StumbleUpon password from the preferences screen. The original StumbleUpon interface does not allow you to change your password at all, you are forced to download the StumbleUpon toolbar to change your password.

StumbleUpon did not force the new Web Interface to all users, you instead must select and convert to the new Interface. To do this you log into your StumbleUpon account, at the very top of your home screen you will see the following:

Click on the Try New StumbleUpon to convert to the new interface.  Once you do this you can then click on your preferences, where you will see a new Change Password setting, which doesn’t display in the old preferences Interface.

Now you no longer have to remember your obscure StumbleUpon password and can navigate StumbleUpon via the web with ease.