Google Adsense has added an image ad at the bottom of the Link Unit page. As you know when a user clicks a link in the Link Unit he is shown a full page of related ads. That page will have an image ad at the bottom from now on. This image ad will also be contextually targeted. If Google doesn’t find a suitable image ad on the same topic, it will show only the original text ads. So there is no chance of the link page looking bad with some extra blank space or irrelevant PSA. Advertisers can bid on the image ads on CPM or CPC basis meaning extra revenue for you. Have a look at the below screenshot to get a feel how it looks:
Particularly, I don’t like Link Units. A bunch of links seems odd to me. And as a reader I never bother to have a look at those units in a site. But I know many of you are using it. And obviously Google has implemented this new feature after quite a bit of testing. Their testing has shown revenue improvement for many publishers. So good luck with this new feature if you are using Link Units 
Recently I posted on a forum about a site of mine. It’s brand new & pagerank is n/a. But I mentioned it as PR0. A member was quite precise & he corrected that 
Then I thought I should write a post about the difference between PR 0 & n/a. It may look same but there is a subtle difference between them.
What PR0 means: PR0 means that your site has been indexed. But due to the lack of quality of backlinks it is somewhere between PR0 to 1. If you have quite a few backlinks & your PR is still 0, then your backlinks are not relevant & quality enough.
What PR n/a means: It can mean two things. Either your site is fairly new & haven’t been online between two public PR updates (usually 3 months), or your site has been penalized by Google. So if you have a old site that had PR before but now showing a gray bar in pagerank, you should check your site address in Google search. If your site is still there in search, you can relax that you are not banned.
By the way, PR n/a can be shown in case of slow connection where the server fails to connect. So, don’t forget to check again.
Wordpress by default is not protected from Brute Force or Dictionary attacks. It is because there is no limit how many times a user can try invalid passwords before finding the correct one. So a Brute Force attacker can easily launch successive login requests with large pool of words. I was doing a bit of search to find a solution to it. As usual, Wordpress plugins came to my rescue. And interestingly, I have found a few plugins that can do the work for you, but using a bit of different mechanism.
Login LockDown is such a one. It records IP address of the login request. If a certain number of failed attempts are made from same IP range, it disables login function for that range. The default is set to 1 hour block for an IP, after 3 failed attempts are made within 5 minutes. But you can always change it & save your own preference via Options panel. Even as an administrator, you can manually release locked out IP ranges from the panel.
Another is User Locker. It lets you specify the maximum number of invalid login attempts. If the user exceeds it, his account gets locked. It can only be unlocked by requesting new password from Lost Password option or by asking admin to help. It also lets you disable selected user accounts. Users can’t log in then, even if they know correct password. This is very effective if you want to ban spam users in a community blog.
Today when I entered Google Webmaster Tools, I saw a message like “We’re changing! Check out our new look!“ And there was a link to activate the new interface. Wow! when I checked it, it looked simpler & easier to navigate. Here is the new dashboard screenshot:
Features are now grouped together into three main categories:
- Site configuration – You provide your site information to Google here
- Your site on the web -You can find Google data about your site
- Diagnostics -You can find any reports about crawling your site
Look at the below screenshot to get a clear idea what options are grouped under those categories:
This interface has really impressed me. By the way if you have any problem finding a feature in the new design, Google support has created a page to help you out. Every feature has its new navigation path listed. It will be quite easy for you.
So what are you waiting for? Click here to go the new interface directly.
Are you a big fan of Twitter? Do you like to add a group-messaging system in your blog? Wordpress can help you with that. Just install P2 Wordpress theme. And it will transform traditional blogging to a multi-user conversation system automatically. Look at the demo blog. It almost looks like a Twitter update page. I would rather say a Twitter without a dashboard because you seldom have to go there. Almost everything can be maintained from front page. You can post updates or reply directly from front page. Even there is option for inline editing for posts & comments.
The front page shows threaded comments to give the Twitter like look. There is a tidy feature about it. You can show or hide comments just by clicking a button to keep it clean. To interact better you will get real-time notification when a update or comment is posted.
You can find everything you need to collaborate with your fellow users. It can be quite useful to share updates among members of a project or a class community. Or you can use it as a support forum for your site. It is quite small in size & super fast to load. I like minimalist templates & it is just like that.
Do you know where to suggest new ideas and features to Google Blogger team? There is a separate page to do so. Go there & you can suggest a new feature, a new blog for note or a new gadget. You can vote for other people’s ideas if you like them. If you don’t like a suggestion you can cast negative votes too.
There are currently 1,625 ideas listed. The current series will end on 14th May, 2009. A week is left to show your thoughts on the current questions. Then a new set of questions will start. So you better hurry to cast your votes.
In one of my previous posts I have told you how to show HTML code in Wordpress post easily using a plugin. But what about Blogger blogs? If you are using blogspot blog then you might have face the problem of HTML parsing error like “Your HTML cannot be accepted:“. Or even if your post have been published successfully, only partial code is showing or showing inappropriately.
Here is a easy solution. Go to CENTRICLE & put the HTML code in the box. Now click “Encode“. It will properly format your code so that you can add it directly to your blog. Just copy and paste it in your Blogger post body. You are done. The HTML code will be visible to the readers properly.
