Testing an image posting in WordPress

October 8, 2006 | 1 Comment

Well-worn fence

This was a fun shot in the back yard early last year. This section of older fence spent the mornings in the shade of a large oak tree and only got direct sun for two or three hours a day.

Eye of the Storm

This is one of a photo series that is posted on my general topics and photo blog The Next Window. The 22 photos displayed are all sky and light, from a single storm on April 1, 2005, from 7:05pm-7:25pm. Take a look at them — you’ll be amazed — no Photoshopping, no filters, just resizing of the photos for posting in the blog.

The Photography category includes links to other photo sites as well as some of my own photos.

The relationship to web design is simply that this is a test of actually putting a photo into a WordPress blog — and I found that 512×384 images could cause lineup problems in IE (they threw the navigation bar to the bottom of the long window - in one Theme that i tried) and could cause a bad-aspect-ratio display (again, in a specific Template) of the photos in Firefox and Opera.

Posted by Terry Stockdale | Filed Under Visitor Experience 

XAMPP followup

October 7, 2006 | Leave a Comment

In a followup to my earlier post, my XAMPP installation on my notebook is working quite well, at least the Apache and PHP portions. I haven’t yet configured MySQL, but there’s a walk-through on setting it up.

You can get the XAMPP web server package — for free — from ApacheFriends.org. It provides the Apache Web Server, the MySQL database and the Perl and PHP scripting languages — all in one easy-to-install package.

While the package probably could be used for a real Internet-accessable web site, I find that I’m most interested in it as a development tool. This way, I can prepare my sites or pages and then just pull them up from the server on my own computer — no uploading necessary.

Posted by Terry Stockdale | Filed Under Apache Web Server, PHP Scripting, Web Hosting 

A Package With It All

October 4, 2006 | 1 Comment

I recently installed XAMPP on my notebook computer, which is my main web development platform. In the Linux world, the term LAMP or LAMPP means “Linux, Apache, MySQL, Perl and PHP” — in other words, the main web server, database and scripting packages used in the web development world.

XAMPP, then is Apache, MySQL, Perl and PHP for “X” — multiple operating systems. XAMPP is a single downloadable package that installs all of these. Of course, you can configure them individually once they’re installed.
Previously, I had installed Apache and PHP on the notebook. But, after a hard drive failure with no image backup (that’s resolved now), I remembered reading about XAMPP.

The installation went very smoothly. The challenge was some of the customizations that I wanted to do, mainly not storing my “htdocs” folder in the place XAMPP had configured. It turned out to be easily solvable, once I realized what was happening (more on that later in another post).
The other thing that was non-obvious was that one of the relatively normal Apache modules was “commented out” by default in the httpd.conf file. Since I use the mod-rewrite.so module, I needed to delete the “#” sign from the beginning of the line

#LoadModule rewrite_module modules/mod_rewrite.so

in httpd.conf, stop and start Apache — and all was well. I use this module and the httpd-vhosts.conf file to be able to handle multiple “hosts” in my installation — my own “shared web hosting.”

By the way, the earlier versions of XAMPP mentioned that it was set up insecurely by default and that it should not be used for servers on the Internet. Based on my quick look, they’ve added a bunch of optional security tests. I haven’t spotted the same warning, but be sure to check carefully before using it for real-world web serving. It makes a great way to test web pages before making them available to the public.

Posted by Terry Stockdale | Filed Under Apache Web Server, HTML, Web Hosting 

Recent Changes to Google’s Adsense

October 2, 2006 | Leave a Comment

Google has been working hard to make its Adwords program more effective for advertisers. First, it offered them a choice of whether to put their ads on search results, on related web pages, or both.

Advertisers also got the option (turned off by default) to bid different maximum amounts for clicks on search results than clicks on web sites.

Recently, Google put a couple more nails in the coffin of the “Adsense site.”

First, they’ve been working diligently to identify the sites that it doesn’t believe are appropriate for its search results — by examining both electronically and personal examination, especially sites with high-income key words. Another thing for which they are looking are sites that display different results to the search engines than they do to visitors.

When Google finds what it considers to be junk, that is, sites that are there for income generation rather than providing real information to visitors, Google has a tendency to de-index the site. It does the same thing with sites that use “black hat” techniques like displaying different results to search engines than real visitors. Google justs remove the site and all its pages from their indexes. And the site owner’s income plumets.

Recently, they applied a couple of slaps against Internet marketers of different types.

The most prominent of these, at least the one that has been mentioned the most, has been the use of Google’s evaluation of the ad’s landing page in order to set the minimum bids for the ads. This means that, if you submit an Adwords ad, Google will look at the target web page — and use it to decide what minimum you’ll have to pay to have it show in search results.

The second was related. If the target page was a squeeze page, the price skyrocketed. What’s a squeeze page? It’s one of the latest marketing techniques — you have to give your email address in order to get to the real content. Then, the marketer can use it for emails to you.

The change that has been almost ignored was another major hit to many of their Adwords customers. These customers paid for ads to send visitors to web sites that sold products.

In this case, these customers were “affiliate marketers” — that is, they would receive a commission on the sale, if one occurred. Google now requires that advertisers have their own landing page. Google prohibited the use of redirected URLs in Adwords advertising.

Before this step, you didn’t even have to have your own web site to make money with Google ads. Now, your ad has to feed the visitor to your landing page, and then you hope they’ll click on the link to go to the retail site. Of course, this was combined with the examination of the landing page for price purposes.

This last hit, this real hit against affiliate marketing, is a problem for both small adverrtisers and small businesses who exist through having affiliates pay to market their products. After all, the small businesses get free advertising (paid by the affiliates) and only have to pay a commission for actual sales.

Posted by Terry Stockdale | Filed Under Adsense, Affiliate Marketing, Blogs, Internet Marketing, Monetizing Your Site, Traffic & Linking, Visitor Experience 

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