Binary Turf

OpenID Plus for bbPress released

Shivanand Sharma — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 01:19:56 +0000

OpenID Plus for bbPress is a bbPress plugin which implements seamless authentication with OpenID for bbPress forum software CMS. The last known good version was from _CK_ who has been missing from the scene for quite a few months now. Thus I took it upon me to work on it further and refine the functionality. This functionality and a lot more is the integral part of a premium bbPress theme I’m about to release in about a week. But for the plugin, it’s free and licensed under GNU GPL. You can download it from the downloads section and take it for trial. OpenID Plus for bbPress does the following out of the box:

Validate the OpenID provider’s URL.
Redirect you to the OpenID for authentication.
Will fetch at least your email address from your OpenID provider.
Will log you in if you are previously registered with that email address.
Will register you silently with a nick or first name if available from your OpenID provider/profile.
Else will register using your email address as username.
Will log you in on successful registration.
Throw error if something goes wrong.

So at the end you see nothing if all went fine. The registration success screen etc. is all bypassed and you receive your password in a mail for later use. For now you are logged in and you’d not realize the registration at all.

For support queries etc please use the Binary Turf Forums. It will be good to have some feedback so I know how is it being received.

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Backup DVDs with WinX DVD Ripper Platinum

Shivanand Sharma — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 19:05:32 +0000

If you have a hard time copying and backing up the DVDs or if you are just trying to shring a dual-layer DVD to a single-layer disk, WinxDVD Ripper Platinum is the answer. If helps you back up your video DVDs to multiple formats like avi, mp4, mpeg, wmv, flv, mov, ipod, ipad, iphone, psp, 3gp etc. It lets you select the audio and video settings like the quality, framrate, output resolution etc. The good part is that it is free of bloat and is nothing like one of the heavier apps that can be quite complicated and intimidating to new users.

You can also download a copy of WinX HD Video Converter Deluxe from the site which is free for download till 15 March.

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PayPal, RBI and Export Code for payments

Shivanand Sharma — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 18:29:21 +0000

One liner. Amit Agarwal has it all figured out at “Exporter Code For Paypal Payments“.

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PayPal Resumes Withdrawal to Indian Banks

Shivanand Sharma — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 05:22:50 +0000

The following is the email communication that some of the PayPal users in India received today. Evidently PayPal has worked with RBI to amend its system allowing them to send funds to Indian bank accounts. It though remains to be seen what this news signifies for the “exporters”.

PayPal

Dear ,

We have been diligently working with the RBI and our business partners to resume Indian bank withdrawals for the thousands of Indian businesses who depend on PayPal to sell their goods or services in the global marketplace.

Today, we are happy to announce that the RBI has allowed us to continue local bank withdrawals for settlements for exports of goods and services. We are currently making changes to comply with Indian regulations for settlements for exports of goods and services, and we anticipate that, as of Wednesday, March 3rd, customers will be able to use our bank withdrawal service.

As part of the changes, you will be required to fill out a new field entitled ‘Export Code’ when you request a withdrawal. This information is required under the current laws of India in order to identify the nature of cross-border merchant transactions.

On Monday, March 1st, we will be back in touch with specific instructions on how you can move your money into your bank account.

Moving forward, the RBI has told us that PayPal needs specific approvals to allow personal remittances to India, which we currently do not have. Until we get these approvals, personal payments into India will remain suspended. However, if you are an exporter, you will continue to be able to use the PayPal service for payments of goods and services. In fact, with the changes we are making to our system, PayPal is now set to be a
more powerful engine for exporters in India. With purpose codes for export transactions and FIRCs (Foreign Inward Remittance Certificates), you should now be able to get the export related benefits you seek.

You can check the PayPal blog for additional updates.

www.thepaypalblog.com

We thank you for your business and for your patience during the past few weeks.

Sincerely,

PayPal

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6 Things to learn from a hard drive crash

Shivanand Sharma — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 15:34:04 +0000

When storage became an issue and the data started growing I decided to purchase a USB external hard drive. While everything worked out fine for about an year, one fine morning the hard drive disappeared from “My Computer”. And for what eve reason that happened I ended up paying $1200 for data recovery. Here are 5 things we learned from the experience.

Photos are meant to be printed. The average life of a hard drive is about 5 years or 20000 hours. Unless you don’t want to see the photographs beyond 5 years there’s absolute good reason to print them. (And they’ll be viewable by grandpa).
Videos are meant to be burnt and backed up. Sure you can put them in a USB thumb drive to view them on your LCD TV but you do want to have a DVD handy so you can watch them from the comfort of the living room.
Hard drives are not meant for critical data. Fine if you are storing linux distributions and torrent downloads. But for office work, documents personal data you want something more reliable. Just backup your critical data to DVDs or use a RAID 5 setup. It’s simple — if you store data on a single disk you probably don’t need the data.
Choose recovery services wisely. I was extremely impressed by this YouTube video about a recovery technician explaining how easy it is to recover data and why other companies charge so much. While they mocked about how easy and simple the recovery process is trying to bust off “trade secrets” of the industry, don’t be fooled. They even claimed recovering for forensics and crime investigation. We ended up sending the hard drive to them. Well they couldn’t recover from a trivial firmware issue. They were cooperative though. We eventually paid them to ship the hard drive to another recovery service provider. This has the double risk of further worsening the hard drive the failed hard drive been shipped twice. Our shipped hard drive was received by them in a case ripped open to the center. Glad that the hard drive though wasn’t missing.
It’s all about cash. You will eventually pay a hefty amount for a successful recovery. Have no doubt about it. And don’t be fooled by the warranty on your existing drive. That seemingly inexpensive drive will cost you a fortune when it fails. And when it fails the last thing you’ll want is to return the failed drive — not unless you’ve recovered your data and paid the ransom.
Keep your data organized — it eases backups. You don’t want to be hunting through countless directories trying to locate data that is critical and needs backup. You’ll do it once and avoid it in the future. So develop a practice of keeping data organized.

As of this date Western Digital Hard Drives are the most stable hard drives out there (that’s not to say they won’t fail). So when you buy, check the crash stats of various manufacturers. We are still waiting for the hard drive and hope that we don’t receive it in a ripped off case. We didn’t have a backup of some of the critical data from last few months and we paid dearly. Be wise and backup now.

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bbPress evolves into a Wordpress Plugin

Shivanand Sharma — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 07:57:55 +0000

For most producers of “killer applications”, it is virtually impossible to grow beyond the phenomenon of their “killer app”. The same seems to be the case with Wordpress. Ignored and neglected for quite some time now, bbPress — the forum CMS (software) by Wordpress — is trying to find its way into the Wordpress user community as a Wordpress plugin. Additionally the motivation could be Matt’s desire to drive Wordpress into a full-fledged Content Management System (envisioning it to become the new-age Drupal). Most of your would remember that in WordPress 2.9.x they introduced the long awaited custom content types (only ‘post’ and ‘page’ existed till then). bbPress was hacked out of minibb — a lightweight forum software — by Matt on a weekend in year 2004. While Wordpress forums had been running minibb, they transitioned to bbPress. In a recent chat session in Dec 2009 they brainstormed the idea of turning bbPress into a Wordpress plugin.

WordPress itself became the blog CMS of choice for the blogging masses because of the easy availability of beautiful Wordpress themes. bbPress on the other hand has been struggling to make its presence felt from the ground up. This change will allow bbPress to stand on the solid foundation of Wordpress documentation, functions, themes, wide developer community and the likes. On the other side, the expected competition to vBulletin or Invision Power Board is quite not coming. Phpbb has made a decent effort and is one popular alternative; but wouldn’t something as customizable as Wordpress be nice? Well bbPress it should have been. As of now it has already made an entry into the wordpress plugins directory as bbPress. And at the moment all it does is get uploaded and installed as a plugin and nothing else. So much for bbPress. But we are still wondering if Wordpress will ultimately evolve as Wordpress MU and other offshoots like BuddyPress will also merge into a possible glob of bulky software and eventually still be competing with Drupal? What do you say?

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Top 10 Forum Designs

Shivanand Sharma — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 17:21:45 +0000

Well designed forums form the base of a strong community. Here are our top picks on forum design.

Typophile Forums — Typophile as the name suggests is all about typography. The design thus as expected is top notch, elegant, usable and beautiful. We also guess it is powered by Drupal.
Adobe Forums — Adobe forums are powered by Jive Software’s Clearspace. The design again is top notch, well laid out and beautiful. We had our share of difficulties of deciding for the first position between Adobe and Typophile. We are still not sure so suggest us your top pick in the comments.
Wordpress Support Forums — Wordpress support forums are powered by bbPress. The forum looks slim, streamlined, elegant and navigable. But guess what… we actually liked for it’s front-page which is also an example of an excellent landing page. If you run a forum make sure that your front page is as usable and inviting as this.
Estetica Design Forum — This one is unique in its navigation. The sections are laid out in the left sidebar and the forum also features a right sidebar for other sections and widgets. We liked the header though. This one is powered by vBulletin.
Smashing Magazine Forum — This one was quite obvious and one very usable design running on phpBB. This is an excellent example of how a GPL forum software like phpBB can do wonders provided you take care of the design (read “architecture”).
CGTalk — Another great example of a well designed vBulletin forum. The problem with vBulletin is that the design has become the de facto standard for forum layout and style. So it is good to find some fresh and creative designs running on vBulletin.
TeeFury — This one has a truly minimalist design yet an attractive one using icons and gravatars very effectively. We term this as creative and highly usable. Apparently it runs on a lesser known Forum CMS/software or a custom one.
Firefox Support Forum — A clean, minimal design with bare necessary content on the front-page, this one makes for a very effective landing page too. This one is powered by TikiWiki CMS/Groupware.
Stylegala — An example of minimalism in forum design, this one has an excellent and unique navigation which relies on tags and views. Try browsing it to get a feel of how things work.
deviantART Forum — A forum of one of the more popular art sites, the DeviantArt Forum is a seamless integration with the main site. It is difficult to tell which CMS it uses though. Simple yet effective and excellent integration.

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Thesis Theme Customization e-book: Free giveaway by FourBlogger

Shivanand Sharma — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 16:02:29 +0000

FourBlogger is giving away an e-book containing extensive Thesis Wordpress theme customization guides. FourBlogger have been writing thesis tutorials and they’ve done more than 60 video tutorials for Thesis. This guide is a compilation of all their tutorials as a PDF e-book. While this guide is free to download and use, there are two points to mention:

You are not authorized to sell it.
You are not authorized to change the e-book is anyway.

Additionally you can follow FourBlogger’s YouTube channel for their video tutorials. Oh, here’s the download link to the free Thesis Theme Customization e-book.

This article has been brought to you by FourBlogger. Sponsor an article.

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Who Stole My Hard Drive Space? SequoiaView finds it out

Shivanand Sharma — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 16:33:58 +0000

You’ve been using your computer for about an year now and all of a sudden you realize that your harddrive is full. Well where did all the space go? Not only as a user but as a server administrator or an IT guy you want to find out how to clean up your server off the unwanted files which eat up all the storage space?

SequoiaView comes to rescue. SequoiaView was developed by the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science of the Technische Universiteit Eindhoven. It is based on the intelligent idea of using a pictorial view to represent files and free space on the harddrive. You can right click a block to explore the directory and check out the files etc. SequoiaView comes in installer and zipped formats. Here’s a screenshot of what it looks like on the screen.

SequoiaView is freeware and can be downloaded from the SequoiaView homepage.

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PayPal India Fiasco: PayPal finally states the reasons

Shivanand Sharma — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 03:48:20 +0000

Anuj Nayar from PayPal commented on a few posts on Binary Turf informing us about the formal announcement on PayPal’s blog answering some of the queries on the Indian episode. Evidently, it was RBI (Reserve Bank of India) the financial regulator which notified PayPal of certain changes in the policy at the last moment due to which PayPal had to reverse the personal payments. Additionally PayPal suspended withdrawals to Indian bank accounts and all the withdrawals initiated during this period will be reversed to your account. This should be fixed in a few days. Here’s the complete announcement.

While we do understand PayPal’s willingness to protect their brand and customers we find that the lack of communication, announcement delays and poor customer service are some of the reasons why PayPal’s image in India may take a hit.

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Top PayPal Alternatives

Shivanand Sharma — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 17:29:59 +0000

Here’s a list of PayPal alternatives. While we couldn’t try any of these and are working to finalize one for ourselves we thought you might want to checkout what suits you the best. Additionally we’d like to hear if you are already using anyone of these and what you have to say about them.

What do you suggest?

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Practice Caution with Experimental AMO Addons

Shivanand Sharma — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 18:16:02 +0000

All Firefox users love addons. They are one of the primary reason that Firefox is the most popular browser today. But while Firefox is a secure browser (and you can count on it), the addons that you install could compromise its security. Thus as an AMO Editor who tries to contribute to the purpose by reviewing addons in my free time, I’d like to share this incident.

One of the users of Firefox — CatThief — brought this to our notice, so due credit to him. We at AMO found two addons containing malware which managed to reach the public due to their experimental status. Experimental addons are the ones which are not reviewed by our editor team at AMO and are made available to the general public with a warning — that the addon is experimental and has not been reviewed/approved by Mozilla. You can read more about the incident at the Mozilla Add-ons Blog.

Thus take extreme caution when installing experimental addons. You never know what is in them and they are still pending review by the Editor team. As a result of this incident we have updated our addon validation tools to detect viruses better. Nevertheless practicing caution and being aware are your best defense against malware and security breaches.

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PayPal Debacle: 15 lessons learnt

Shivanand Sharma — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 16:56:45 +0000

There is a lot of hatred and criticism about PayPal and its practices. And after what happened to the Indian customers we realized that we learnt these lessons the hard way.

No Protection from Arbitrary PayPal decisions: Their decision is final and cannot be appealed.
No prior intimation: PayPal didn’t intimate India based users about the recent change in their policies did they?
No adherence to regulations: The PayPal payment service is regarded as a stored value facility under Singapore law. The Holder of the PayPal stored value facility, does not require the approval of the Monetary Authority of Singapore.
Customer Service: “Effective customer service requires significant personnel expense, and this expense, if not managed properly, could impact our profitability significantly.” Thus their emails are like replies from automated bots.
Premium fees for brand recognition: PayPal does charge higher fees due to its brand and recognition which though doesn’t amount to much.
Breach of trust: More often than not you’ll face more injustice from PayPal than damage from fraudulent activities. Through our years of experience with PayPal there were no monetary damages from fraudulent activity and maximum from PayPal’s activities.
Always have alternatives: Keeping all your eggs in one basket is not the way of the wise.
Never leave spare balance: You never know when PayPal may freeze your account. As you understand they easily get away with arbitrary decisions. So keep withdrawing periodically.
Favoring the buyer: PayPal’s attitude is more oriented towards buyer protection than sellers. Buyer complaints are settled without interacting with the seller.
Money reversal at will: PayPal TOS state they can choose to reverse transactions at will.
No real merchant account: Real merchants have real merchant accounts and do not direct their customers to PayPal.
Get refund and the goods as well: A compliant by buyer about not receiving the goods easily ends in them getting the refunds and getting to keep the goods as well.
You Waive Your Credit Card Consumer Protection Rights: As soon as you accept their terms and conditions.
PayPal is the investigator, judge, jury and executioner.
Avoid PayPal: This is what we learnt with the above 14 points.

What is one thing that you’d add to this list? Also see Wikipedia PayPal Criticism, Facts you didn’t know about PayPal, Freelancers beware of PayPal and PayPal Evil.

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The Ultimate and Complete Guide to AdSense

Shivanand Sharma — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 09:35:32 +0000

AdSense is the popular choice for the majority of bloggers and webmasters when it comes to monetizing their site. Here’s Binary Turf’s Ultimate and Complete Guide to AdSense Implementation. We’ll attempt to focus on all considerations to maximize AdSense returns and revenues while retaining visitors and traffic etc. Additionally you can also save this as a PDF e-book using the link at the bottom of the article.

Before You Begin
Implementation
- Blending, Complimenting and Contrasting
- Blending vs Complimenting vs. Contrasting
- Image vs. Text
- Ad Formats
- Placement
- Color considerations
- Web-Design considerations
- Fonts
How to Get Better Paying Ads
How to Get Traffic
Improving Earnings
Premium publishers
Reference and Resources

Before You Begin

Here are a couple of prerequisites before you begin implementing our suggestions. If you are reading casually don’t bother.

You’ll need and AdSense account. This will ensure that you have have been approved by the AdSense team with an approved blog or a website.
A working AdSense Account: If you have issues with the PIN or any other issues, this article may not help.
Read the AdSense Program Policies.
Familiarity with web tools. You should be comfortable setting up and managing your site etc. Familiarity with AdSense, advertising and related jargon.
YMMV: Your mileage may vary.
Binary Turf Disclaimer: Please do not hold us responsible for the outcomes of using our advise. We are not responsible if you violate the AdSense TOS. Additionally, this guide is not for the beginners. This is for AdSense publishers who have at least a few months of experience with earning through AdSense.

Now that you have a website, an AdSense account and we assume you’ve already been making some money, let’s try to make more out of it.

Implementation

There are many factors which come into play during the on-site implementation of AdSense code. The majority of these considerations are related to advertisement visibility. Thus a lot of science and theory goes into backing up our advice.

Blending, Complimenting and Contrasting: Blending makes the ads appear inline with the content and blend with it. This is different from obfuscation though so make sure you do not confuse your visitors else you violate the TOS. Complimenting means you want the ads to use the site colors and theme like using the header background color for the background of the ads etc. Contrasting means you are using colors which contrast your site colors. Like having yellow ad background on a site with green or black as the primary color.
Blending vs. Complementing vs. Contrasting: All other things being equal, basically more clicks mean more money. Blending the ads makes them look like the actual website/article content. While adverts which stand out attempt to attract visitor attention by their visibility. As a safety practice and to abide by the TOC, if you are placing the ads in the content, ensure that you leave a decent margin around the ads. This will make sure that Google does not accuse you of confusing the visitors. When blending the ads, make sure that ads do not have a border, the background is that same as that of the content and the links have the color of the links in your content. If you are blending image ads there’s not much you can do. But you can try to place the ads in the place of the post-image thereby replacing it or moving it down the post. Blending works best for in-content ads and complimenting and contrasting works better when ads are implemented in sidebars or adjacent to the post because they are able to draw visitor attention with their colors.
Image vs. Text: Generally speaking, image ads work better when they compliment or contrast the post/site/blog content and text ads work better when they blend. However the ability to customize the text ads means you have more control over how you want to implement them — blend them, compliment the content or create a contrasting effect. Google has its own algorithm which decides whether to show text or image ads. However depending on your preference you may want the ad units to be only one kind — image or text. There’s no clear winner here though we’ve heard claims that one works better than the others. However in our experience its how you implement that is more important that the kind of ad-units you implement.
Ad Formats: When blending make sure to use an ad format which aligns and lays out well with the content. At other times use the generally popular ones recommended by AdSense while you create the ad-unit.
Placement: If you are blending the ads they generally perform the best when placed in-content. However contrasting ads are more likely to perform better when places adjacent to the content like in sidebars etc. Place the ads above the fold where the visitors will notice them without having to scroll down the page. Ideally your page length shouldn’t be more than 1.5 times the vertical screen resolution of the majority of visitors. You can check out the screen details of your visitors if your web analytics program allows you to.
Color considerations: Color considerations mostly come into play when you are implementing text ads and want to retain the beauty of the web design and when you want to contrast the ads. At other times you basically use the colors of the site or the content. Here’s a handy tool to generate a color scheme for contrasting and complementing colors. (Note: Contrasting and complementary colors have a different meaning in the context of color-theory. In this article we’ll use the words as adjectives and not in their literal meaning in the color-theory context).
- Colors on the opposites sides (of point O equidistant from the center) always create a contrast. Though you’ll still find certain other color combinations to create good contrast like yellow on green or black.
- Colors on the same side of point O create a monochromatic effect which better compliment each other. You can rotate this arm on the center O to get colors you want. In most cases they’ll create beautiful color combinations.
Web Design considerations: Ads deteriorating the site design, look and feel is a major concern of publishers. Ads get blended in a minimalist design or just plain simple web page. But for a beautifully themed wordpress blog effective implementation means retaining the look and feel of the design while being to make revenue from ads. Well designed sites are orderly and organized. No doubt these sites are built for long term visitor loyality. As such placing ads such that they are not obtrusive or confusing becomes very important. Thus make sure to use the elements of space, border and colors to distinguish the ads from content while keeping the effect subtle. Google sets the best example here. Remember the Google Search results containing the sponsored links? The ones which show at the top have a subtle yellow background and the ones on the right have a subtle blue border. Such implementation not only retains the look and feel of the design, it also ensures maximum benefit for advertisers, Google and you above all. Such ads have a better conversion rate too.
Fonts: In our experience the default AdSense font or Verdana appeared the most legible. Others showed up small or illegible and also performed poorly. Larger font sizes increase the visibility however “larger” and “medium” are relative sizes and render different text sizes for different layouts. For certain ad formats they have no effect at all.

Additionally Effective implementation of link ads, AdSense search units, AdSense for feeds, AdSense for mobile and AdSense for Domains are the things you want to use for maximum monetization.

How to Get Better Paying Ads

The better the targeting the more the ads are likely to make you revenue. Having better targeting is a result of good SEO while better paying ads could also relate to the niche of your site or blog. Thus, let’s break it into two parts.

SEO: Search Engine Optimization or SEO effectively ensures that your site shows up to the search engines and bots as what it is intended to be. Thus the layout and content should be semantic. To see how your website appears (more or less) to a search engine try to see your site in an all text browser like Linx or disable all javascript and CSS in your browser or the site itself. What the search bots see additionally see are the meta tags, the page title etc. The wordpress theme by default takes good care of the SEO mechanics however ensure that you place the relevant keywords in appropriate place like the meta description, headings etc. When the AdSense bot knows what your site actually is about, AdSense will show more relevant advertisements which are more likely to be useful to your visitors. Additionally use AdSense section targeting and visit our recommended reading SEO links.
Niche: There are certain niches which pay more for advertisements and others that pay less. As a blogger or a webmaster, if your sole purpose is to monetize your site, creating a niche site is the answer. Do your research and create content that is useful for the visitors and advertisers.
Relevancy: Additionally Google AdSense manually allows you to review the site ads and block ads of certain categories which do not perform as well or are not relevant to your site content. Use this feature under AdSense Setup > Ad Review Center > Category Filters. Additionally review the placement targeted ads periodically.

Additionally use the Competitive Ad Filter to block ads that advertise competing products and services.

How to Get Traffic

Ads will earn you nothing if you do not get visitors to your site. Thus the first step is to get your site indexed by the search engines. Once your site starts showing up in relevant search results you’re more likely to start getting visitors. Until then spreading the word of mouth or links to your blog in forums etc. is the way to go. But most importantly the actual concern for you would be to get more traffic than just getting the usual visitors. Here are some of the sources which can get you good traffic. Read our article on 11 Surefire tips to increase blog traffic.

Guest posts on popular blogs
Mentions and links to your site on other sites
Useful information on your site that visitors are search and seek.
Useful downloads or applications
Useful online tools or web application that visitors can find handy
Popular social media sites which rank your content well.
Regularly updated content
Advertising and promotion
Announcing events or awards
Breaking the news

Improving Earnings

We mean learning and refining through experimentation. After all this entire post is dedicated to improving earnings already. Here are certain tools you can use to understand the advertising dynamics and site performance.

Google Analytics allows you to see the site overlay under the “Content” section in addition to providing site analytics.
Click Heat allows you to create a heatmap and a click map of your site.
Crazy Egg is a paid service which allows you more comphrensive data like Click Heat.
Use Section Targeting.
A/B Split Method of testing allows you to alternatively display two ad units and compare their results. This method has been suggested and approved by AdSense.
Track performance through AdSense channels.
Use Google Webmaster tools for effective site management.
Keep updated with the Inside AdSense Blog — the official blog of the AdSense team.
Review and practice Google’s suggestions for improving performance.

Premium Publishers

Premium publishers have a premium AdSense account which provides them additional benefits like designing their own ad sizes, negotiation their own share of earning through ads etc. While they have better control on the ads and earnings, there still is opportunity to squeeze out better performance than counting on revenue-sharing-negotiations.

Reference and Resources

Google Webmaster Tools
Inside AdSense Blog
Google AdSense Help

© Binary Turf. Also learn photography tips, get technical support or provide your feedback.

How to disable pingbacks and trackbacks on your wordpress blog

Shivanand Sharma — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 05:22:13 +0000

Are you bothered by the pingbacks and trackbacks some spam sites post on one of your blog entries? It’s good as far as they are not being posted by spam sites and is a legitimate way to quote mentions of your post by other sources. However now-a-days it’s mostly the spam sites trying to steal your visitors by posting pingbacks and trackbacks. Here are two things you need to do to disable trackbacks and pingbacks on your wordpress blog.

Disable pingbacks and trackbacks for new posts:

In your wordpress Admin panel go to Settings > Discussions and uncheck the box for “Allow link notifications from other blogs (pingbacks and trackbacks.)”. This will make sure that all newer posts have the pingbacks and trackbacks disabled. Remember this is only for the posts that you’ll publish going forward. The next step disables them for the past posts.
Use SQL to close the pingbacks and trackbacks:

If you are just starting out you can skip this step. All your wordpress data resides in a database. You’ll need to open the database using phpMyAdmin etc. (refere to your webhosting documentation) and run the following SQL query —
```
UPDATE wp_posts SET ping_status='closed' WHERE post_status = 'publish' AND post_type = 'post';
UPDATE wp_posts SET ping_status='closed' WHERE post_status = 'publish' AND post_type = 'page';
```
The first one disables them for all published posts and the second one disables them for all pages.

To disable or enable pingbacks for specific pages or posts, go to the post editor and under the post check or uncheck the box for “Allow trackbacks and pingbacks on this page” under Discussion.

Notice: Contributions for ColorfulTabs and other software currently on hold

Shivanand Sharma — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 10:41:18 +0000

Contributions towards ColorfulTabs and our other popular software has been put on hold due to a recent change in PayPal policy. If you have made a contribution after 1st Feb, 2010 it will be refunded back to your account. We appreciate your decision to contribute however currently we are not able to accept any contributions till the existing issues are fixed at PayPal’s end. We request you to please bear with us.

We’ll keep you notified of any related events as they occur. Thanks for using our software.

Advisory: Paypal reverses personal payments to and from Indian accounts

Shivanand Sharma — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 10:33:01 +0000

PayPal has chosen to reverse all personal payments to and from Indian paypal accounts. The following is the standard email notification that the receiving parties are getting:


Hello ,

Your payment of   has been sent back to the sender of the payment.

We reversed this payment because we have stopped allowing personal payments to be sent to or from India.

If this was a payment for a purchase of goods or services, and not a personal payment, then you may contact the buyer and have him or her resend the payment as follows:  (a) click the Send Money tab, (b) select "Goods," and (c) provide a shipping address.

If this payment was a personal payment such as a gift, then we have requested that the sender find another payment method until we restore personal payments to and from India.

We are trying to resolve this issue as quickly as possible and we're sorry for any inconvenience.

Thank you,
PayPal

The known date for the earliest transaction reversed is 1st Feb 2010. DigitalPoint thread “India: Paypal Returning payments?” and several others are actively discussing this topic. We tried to reach the Singapore PayPal customer service and inquired if there was any policy change, documentation, notification published or sent to the user. However they referred us to the US customer support which currently is offline till the regular business hours resume. Several paypal users who received these payments report their account balance going into negative.

Update 1 —

Dear ,

Thank you for contacting PayPal.

I understand that you want to know why the payment you received for
$ USD from is reversed. This payment was sent as
Personal. We have stopped allowing Personal Payments to be sent to and
from India. We are aware of this issue and I sincerely regret the
inconvenience it has caused you. We are trying to resolve this as soon
as possible. Below are the details:

Personal Payment - Send Money for India Accounts

· India customers are no longer able to see the option to send a
Personal payment on the Send Money page
· They can continue to use other payment options, such as eBay checkout.

If this was a payment for a purchase of goods or services, and not a
personal payment, then you may contact the buyer and have him or her
resend the payment as follows: (a) click the Send Money tab, (b) select
‘Goods’, and (c) provide a shipping address.

If this payment was a personal payment, such as a gift to a friend or
family member, then we request that you find another payment method
until we restore personal payments to and from India.

Although India customers are unable to send Personal payments, they are
still receiving Personal payments from Non India customers.

· In order to stop ALL Personal payments TO and FROM India accounts, we
have started reversing Personal payments sent by Non India customers
starting today. (the only exception will be in cases where the buyer has
included a shipping address – we don’t want to delay any shipment of
goods)
· Emails will be sent to both sender and recipient to let them know why
the money was returned and what options they have to proceed forward.
(see attached for examples)
· We are also in the process of implementing a change on the website to
automatically stop the payment from processing, rather than waiting to
reverse the payment. We will send you additional updates as soon as we
have more details.

The Personal payment option on the International Send Money page has
been updated and India has been removed from the ‘select a country’ drop
down list.

· If the payment was for a purchase of goods or services, and not a
personal payment, then the buyer may resend the payment to the seller by
following these steps on the PayPal website: (a) click the Send Money
tab, (b) select ‘Goods’, and (c) provide a shipping address.

I'll be glad to hear from you if you need clarification, please email us
again and we will try our best to give you immediate answers. Thank you
for choosing PayPal for your online payment needs. We appreciate your
business.

Sincerely,
Dayna
PayPal, an eBay Company

Consumer advisory: PayPal Pte Ltd, the Holder of the PayPal™ payment
service stored value facility, does not require the approval of the
Monetary Authority of Singapore. Consumers (users) are advised to read
the terms and conditions carefully.

Got more questions? You'll find answers at our improved help center.
Click "Help" on the top right corner of any PayPal page to get started
or you can visit www.PayPal.com/101.

Original Message Follows:
------------------------
Form Message
customer subject: Clarification on personal payments being reversed.
customer message: Transaction ID: 'xxxxxxxxx'
Additional Information: 'The payments we receive are being reversed. Can
you please clarify your stand on "personal payments" to and from India?
What is a personal payment? We accept donations for our free software.
What is the solution/workaround for this issue?'

We’ll keep this post updated with the latest so keep watching this post for more information. You may want to digg this story and spread the news. Also read PayPal Debacle: 15 Lessons Learnt.

Normalize Audio Compilations and Music Albums with MP3Gain

Shivanand Sharma — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 20:42:03 +0000

Let’s say you are creating a compilation of your favorite music tracks for a party or to play while you go jogging. There are good chances that the volume of each track will be different and some tracks may sound dull and others may startle you as they start. Good music CD burning programs come with this feature built in. For other MP3Gain comes to rescue. MP3Gain ensures that all your music tracks have a normal volume and it will increase or decrease the volumes of all tracks to bring them to a common volume level. This is best for parties where you want a constant volume of music tracks etc. Grab MP3Gain and normalize your music compilations. MP3Gain is freeware.

ColorfulTabs 4.2

Shivanand Sharma — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 04:05:49 +0000

Please submit requests and technical issues in the forums. ColorfulTabs has been updated to version 4.2. We’ve implemented recoloring of tabs. This comes real handy when using the random coloring scheme because there are times when you don’t like the default color that is generated by ColorfulTabs. Power to you — right-click on the tab > ColorfulTabs > Re-Color. But we weren’t satisfied with that. Wouldn’t it be awesome if you could hold down a particular shortcut key and have the tab cycle through randomly generated colors instead of reaching the tab’s context menu again and again? The shortcut Alt+Shift+R comes in handy for that.

Additionally we’ve reimplemented the algorithm that generates random colors. Earlier, to get a unique color we use the unique “linkedpanel” attribute of the tab to generate a color from it. It so happens that the linkedpanel attribute of the tabs is only different by a trivial number and what we really needed was a wildly random value. Thus instead of relying on that attribute we chose to generate a real random value to give us colors that are wide-apart. Now there’s a catch.

When it comes to colors there are millions. But your eyes can only differentiate as many. Additionally not all of them are pretty you’ll agree. The power of ColorfulTabs is in beauty and simplicity. Something pleasant yet effective that makes working with Firefox, Seamonkey, Flock fun and easy — that’s what ColorfulTabs has been designed for. So, these colors are still limited by the default values in the Advanced Options of ColorfulTabs (which exist to make sure that the generated colors are pleasant and beautiful). However to get a wider gamut of colors you can change the value of luminance and saturation if the Advanced Options of ColorfulTabs. The bigger the difference between the minimum and maximum values the wider the gamut. However do understand that all those colors may not be as pretty as the default ones generated. But suit your taste.

11 Surefire tips to increase blog traffic

Shivanand Sharma — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 16:26:28 +0000

Traffic means the “daily bread” for bloggers. And most of what we see around is that getting traffic is all about SEO and good content. True but not necessarily. Here are our eleven tips to help you get more traffic from various sources.

Guest Posts:

Offer guest posts for high traffic blogs. In addition to being introduced to a big community you’ll also gain incoming traffic from them.
Offer downloads:

Believe it or not, some of the biggest sites get huge traffic because they offer popular goodies to the regular visitor. Create something unique that everyone can use. Amit from labnol.org offered the Google AdSense Sandbox where AdSense publishers can preview ads which may appear on their site.No doubt it’s one of the most popular tools on the internet.
Offer desktop/sidebar gadgets and toolbars:

Some thing downloadable and usable… something that will tuck your blog on your visitors desktop. They’ll be able to reach to your blog easily. Offer an RSS desktop gadget or a Custom Search Engine or perhaps a toolbar to search your site or something they can add to their Google Personalized Homepage iGoogle.
Pitch subscribers to visit:

Most of the RSS visitors rarely visit your site. Pitch them to comment and visit your site. Or perhaps include only the teasers of your posts in your RSS or email updates.
Regularity strikes a rhythm:

Update your blog daily or at least regularly. If you write everyday make sure you have some extra drafts saved for the day when you’ll miss the show. If you write weekly prepare the post in advance so you don’t miss it. Your visitors are real people with human habits and they expect to get to read regularly.
Retain your visitors:

With the traffic you get on your site make sure you retain it. Avoid pop-ups or poor content or any other thing that may be irritating. Ask them to subscribe or perhaps visit again to read the next part of your upcoming post.
Draw traffic from social media:

If you are into social media, build your profile and tap the networking potential. If you are not into social media we’d guess you are not into blogging yet.
Use the right CMS:

Using the correct CMS takes care of the SEO mechanics. Good site navigation, usability, indexing, SEO etc. come as a promise. Use a popular CMS which has a large user and support base. You’ll also have access to a large plugin-base to extend the functionality and power of your blog.
Practice and promote participation:

Encourage visitors to participate. Start an event or start a competition or ask a question. Encourage commenting and do likewise. If you want visitors to get involved be the one to take the first step.
Spare a good post post for high traffic day:

Just when you get lucky to get Digg traffic or even considerable traffic, make sure you have some excellent content or goodies to offer them Or even say a thankyou and try to retain them. The more the traffic the more exposure and potential to increase it.
Design — KISS:

You didn’t expect this one way down the list. But this is a reminder that worrying about the cosmetics should be high in your priority. Most of the CMS come with a good theme. Keep It Short and Simple. Unless you are into graphics or web design you shouldn’t worry about wooing visitors with fleshy and saturated colors. Make sure you have an excellent website navigation menu and architecture. That will do for now.

Hopefully this is enough work for the weekend. Build your first blog gadget that people can add to their desktop — maybe to be able to search your blog or to get the latest blog updates or just to play a trivial game to kill some time. How did you like these tips?

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Reference and Resources

How to disable pingbacks and trackbacks on your wordpress blog

Disable pingbacks and trackbacks for new posts:

Use SQL to close the pingbacks and trackbacks:

Notice: Contributions for ColorfulTabs and other software currently on hold

Advisory: Paypal reverses personal payments to and from Indian accounts

Update 1 —

Normalize Audio Compilations and Music Albums with MP3Gain

ColorfulTabs 4.2

11 Surefire tips to increase blog traffic

Guest Posts:

Offer downloads:

Offer desktop/sidebar gadgets and toolbars:

Pitch subscribers to visit:

Regularity strikes a rhythm:

Retain your visitors:

Draw traffic from social media:

Use the right CMS:

Practice and promote participation:

Spare a good post post for high traffic day:

Design — KISS: