McNicholl Holdings

As a blogger one needs to maximize their exposure as much as possible. One way that I have found a little useful is to time my posts to the times of the work day when people get a little more “internet browsing” friendly. These are times when their minds start to drift of what is needed done at work and towards what they want to do when they get home. As I work full time at the moment I know for sure that when I get into the office in the morning I’ll do a burst of work to clear things up and then around 10:30 - 11am I do a bit of surfing.  This will happen again after lunch as well. I am sure I’m not the only one that does this.

I’ve taken my own “slacker” times and tried to shift them to the American timezone i.e +5 to 7hours (I am GMT so I need to ensure that I cover the Americans in the morning) in and attempt to gain maximum exposure. People have all sorts of ways to get their news these days, whether it be through Reddit/Digg type voting sites, or RSS aggregators, or Technorati / MyBlogLog type community sites as well as browsing their favourite URLs. You can attempt to get in front of more eyes by timing your blog posts to just the right time in the day.

This post is going out at 22:40 GMT - which will effectively mean its EOD for those in America. That means this is badly timed. I could easily set Wordpress to release the post at the correct time tomorrow though - but I won’t.

Do you do this with your posts? If so - do you notice any improvement in your traffic?

• Leave a comment... (4)

Have you ever clicked on your website/blog that has Google Adsense Ads and had your jaw hit the ground? This happened to me today when my music based blog showed gay ads served by Google Adsense. I couldn’t believe my eyes. I didn’t know that Adsense served advertisements like this.

I kept refreshing the page, hoping that the ad was a mistake - but no…. There it was again. Refresh. Same thing. Refresh again. Same.  “Damn! How do I get rid of this?” I thought.

Well - having quickly searched the net, it seemed the best way was to get the destination URL of the ad and then add it into the competitive ad filter in Google Adsense setup. One problem with this is that it can take up to 4 hours for the ad to be blocked. thats pretty poor. I added the URL to the competitive filter over an hour ago now and it is still on the site. Pretty frustrating.

It is all well and good that I have blocked this ad - but the problem comes with the ads that I don’t know are out there. I am sure many other unsuitable ads are in the wild - so how do I restrict them? I cannot sit all day refreshing my webpage to weed out the bad ones only to manually add these to Googles competitve filter.

The problem is - Google does not provide any functionality to do anything like this.

I don’t even know what keywords the Adsense ad server has scanned from my website to determine that a gay ad was the most appropriate to serve.

Do you know a way around this issue?

• Leave a comment... (7)

I started using Entrecard recently to see if the traffic would increase any towards the blog. One gripe I have read many times on various sites is that the Entrecard visits to your site are purely to drop of a card and leave.

This can have a good impact on your traffic statistics as it shows a higher number of page views and unique visitors - which seems to get advertisers all excited. For me, the person interested in having valuable people drop by with their valuable opinions - this isn’t really all that great.

When I check google analytics to determine how much traffic I receive from Entrecard, two URL’s appear:

• entrecard.com
• ec.createlf.com

I can understand that people wanting to drop a card or those who are interested in Advertising on my website would come from entrecard.com. The other URL, as I have determined, is purely for people who want to drop their cards as quickly as possible. It’s this traffic that is useless. I can understand why the guy at createif.com has created this app, but it is “I have fallen to the dark side” kind of functionality. If the makers of Entrecard wanted their users to just drop their cards and run from every site on the network I am sure this is something that couuld easily be arranged in an automated form. I think the idea of Entrecard is to encourage networking, while also enabling the little guys to gain valuable exposure by advertising on larger blogs. As soon as it starts to be gamed, as it is now, it starts to lose its value.

As a small blog owner, I am hoping that the advertisers see something they like and that the small amount of ads I place actually get clicked on and some interested visitors hang about.

Do you have a blog and use Entrecard to promote yourself? Let me know how its going…

• Leave a comment... (7)

Creating a plugin for wordpress can be an extremely simple task, or altogether annoying.

I’ve recently been creating a plugin for “Featured” content on a new site that I’m pushing at the moment. Basically the plugin works like this :

• Featured Posts belong to the “Featured” Category
• Featured content can be controlled by the plugin menu in the Wordpress Admin screen (updated by Editor or Administrator)
  • This is important as you dont want to have to sift through a list of 1000 posts to see which are marked as Featured or not - Even with the filter active this can be annoying
• The Featured content can only be “Featured” if it is part of another category.
  • i.e Lets say the purpose was for books (Fiction and Non-Fiction). The Featured section might only cater for Fiction books. So the posts would be in Featured and Fiction categories. Simple.
• The admin area can state the total amount of Featured posts.

The plugin then provides functions to the template to output the featured content.

One issue I had was using query_posts to select the posts that were not featured but in the chosen category (Fiction). The plugin function :
query_posts('category_name=Fiction&category_name=-Featured')
…just wouldnt work. I tried many variations of the query_post command along with category_name only to discover that wordpress does not facilitate anything more than basic requirements when using category_name. So, I retreat to using ‘cat’ instead. Boo! Now I have to query the database to get the ids of the categories I want to query on first. Not exactly efficient. Not to mention using more memory with additional variables to accommodate this etc.

Any other annoyances that you have encountered?

• Leave a comment... (0)

I have recently been in the process of creating a new site that I want to launch and found that Googles Adsense for Video would be perfect for the readers as it should provide a lot higher return that standard text links. It so simple and seemingly less intrusive for people to click “play” than it is to click on a link that whisks them off to another site where the content isn’t really what they were looking for. I am hoping that the removal of the “another website” barrier will encourage clicks and hence provide a higher return.

One item that I have been having difficulty with is the youtube integration with the Google Adsense platform. A week ago I tried to set up my account only to recieve :

500 Internal Server ErrorSorry, something went wrong.

A team of highly trained monkeys has been dispatched to deal with this situation.

Please report this incident to customer service.

Also, please include the following information in your error report:

HmVVAjnMHQqn6VSUYWKdTiI225odwW8TH6H63i6bPI8G2QyEQqHNDvxXz-zO

7YQJDjYW0XYIig4cYdaRkxmjqZustIgkbFxGmNB4Gl6FaNVlA89RHPsYLOWn

xx7iVJ51YaPUk9oF8XMwrYgB-ORvAB8YNLPUsW3pIR7rFt05SYukbCNSnO6h

zZU1OYoPCo9o4vFcobf-ZqhBzBev2J7-CJ-8s2ThXiD7NbMpmZtp5JvRtY-a

cv1PV48y4EoN-17OGSXB4shRZ6StM8X4otf0M_JNLH7_7KBooi94FAfaZtV4

2LF84wvFxA_0YlxLW1EhJ5uPsBxF5bWNA_vdTqYll6F4cfSmh7k2GyZGS6pa

TR7lue6U6IIwP1CRnMEQiWJFuP74w_9GlwoqsFWmnwFzQe8r8OFsEVnfSLn-

VbU8o0qtmVkVHnwGHP6WZHtMf8z_CltjLpHDrtAzLXRn635P2ktfBLkURnkP

1-yE8JZBJth8fSLCd-L4X-7eq7a6nSFU-RYcRGpzNE5Q3KRooyAPe8nMCwjW

ZgIT98tCF6hKX3kqaw-RHR5jCWcTEAc2tDBpF-Vm3FL4-KAZJ4aPTQlt_GOC

nvwq1Snc6xF5GXsD9nckK_Ty1-ywya6ef1D0K3YrpZI8DcmeSFPqqi55IJBn

abA-InS398ttIn2E2D4ix08W-4dUYwp4Yalj9_w0Z3dhOLoI3vxE1w5rSBaN

FB75sJlE9gSjT-b5Cr6JxnoM22-Yilbmly1yneEVma2I1UlXA2HxBj29SsNH

JuwjGrG-d_KyaQrvdDIwrExni6G7ZaYKHM6OyHCadP22b4D_FdV1tuEZnG83

Xr7aWFu4bZu_ntJKimBBze7ruCZ0nnSPGxX8EnVpVev6tolgqbX0EL31i6HV

YdYjRjkxRrVhiWGvIIlx49OvCPUi0quuCz6iJujYeS0geZ5F3GZIB73T_VHi

FLF9sEjVGI8s7N8ENbcn8mdijdgeJouis3i2-sroUftr_nlqe9V4JrwuztfS

FFpLSqkFpLYqWoJWVjkAm-IHmH5Int3KwQVnauVawode46weMzcf1c9En_Gi

Lqi9jwYcZdBHzTd7ktA2u82Yb_U2ViHl-fM3sxFXxPU0Z_Uc62hZ5iAFsGYZ

ESvrRQX-zi4GDfI1USaZBcrWDRQ1wYslALogELTSaHjimUNGRpxq5iUrYfTE

j6taycCMaO06ShIggLUWHyct3QiPLaxjgmWa5aKlep7ApSE59Xn7ETTG4mRf

bOr2ZBuzITYRs-C8gO174mD93v-X4S98FC3DPz26oqedOuov_jrCjLipjIw_

WfXG_Q8HM6g8vxASVs7H32jpgvZ9UlNhGEmcThxceFsotpBatF7ywbsfUhvt

MEF5A1agwigzZuvMT4qZJrvkAt0H941YuqBH5RmIDltfIuMUbXSjuHDi0WJA

_qZxDzt_3qOD6oMeCk9uAb06Cy-pMjqC2ikHFkhp9JYms9hTKgMAcjI9kv58

3dn190dTuOD6hFD9_AE9-wO0TRlwhamR72HPmG9zqSoZB53JLO7l4RSoQNx_

wWeqic55i-qGRlUaM0e5FUwg9sJxFwSRMr9naDcA7m-3Qrt85sV7_F5GqrPp

_KgSseS2JpJBoFNI5p-aSgo-deSP5rkh8h6E0ke03_HYorlZmjEhlxRKaiRu

QH7d0WdC_JJhVDxspohO0vMeboP_Fs41sKA3DXd7ZNAcGhPKSZEdVFm1Cebm

GhoS1DmYCANmiZGBHwLYxvWccEvmtfcauQTeCBRVeGaWjdEhJ6fIRi-vEgyB

w3uOh0eHC7KLdPjaWkPPkWHV

Unbelievably annoying. Then some notices appeared on the youtube site to indicate that they were “undergoing some servicing - I though “fair enough - I’ll call back later.”. Calling back a few hours later and I was presented with the same error.

So I decided to leave it a few days and have just now tried again to setup the account and player. This time I was able to get in to customize the player and set categories, but as soon as I clicked “Generate Code” - it was back to the same old “500 Internal Server Error“. I don’t know what is going on …

Is anyone else experiencing anything similar?

• Leave a comment... (0)