Thursday, July 21, 2005

Time constraint

I have not been able to blog recently, due to some pressing commitments related to work. Hopefully, I shall be able to do so after 16th August.

Saturday, July 09, 2005

Adsense and Chitika, a No-No

Last week my blog got approved by Chitika BlogContext beta program. I had seen some blogs that were using both Adsense and Chitika, but I was not sure. So I wrote to Adsense Support to find out whether I could use Chitika BlogContext Ads along with Adsense Ads. Here's their reply -

We kindly ask that you not place Google ads on the same pages as ads that display 'Chitika BlogContext' ads.

To be more specific, we do not permit Google ads to be published on web pages that also contain what could be considered competing ads. This would include all content-targeted ads as well as text-based ads. We do allow affiliate or limited-text links, but we do not allow text-based ads that either directly mimic or attempt to be associated with Google ads.

Our intent with this policy is to be as fair to our advertisers as possible and to maintain the integrity of the AdWords and AdSense programs. This means limiting the other types of ads that AdSense publishers display along with our ads.

Please note that we constantly monitor all of the web pages displaying Google ads. If we find that one of your web pages violates our policies, we will notify you and ask you to remove the AdSense ad code from that page.

James
The Google AdSense Team



Update (1st Oct): Based on the feedback and comments received for this post, I checked out these two articles - Chitika eMiniMalls Review and Chitika eMiniMalls & Google Adsense on Same Webpage : Make More Money and concluded that one could have the Chitika eMiniMalls along with Adsense, provided you take care of certain settings.

(7th Oct.): The revenues coming in from Chitika are far higher than Adsense. However if your clicks are coming from China or India then Chitika would count all these clicks as invalid. That's sad.

(8th Oct.): Chitika replied to my query on clicks from China and India, thus - "Please do not think that India and China is being singled out. The problem is that, at this time, we dont have merchants who are willing to accept leads from India, China and Asia in general. That said, when we do manage to strike partnerships in Asia and build the merchant base who accept clicks from Asia, this program will be expanded to accept clicks from Asia. We have to start somewhere (and as you well know US is the place to start). As this program matures and we add partnership, this program will expand with it. If I remember right, isnt that how Adsense also started ?"
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Friday, July 08, 2005

MITOpenCourseWare

Would you like to study at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), USA? Maybe you had dreamed about it, but circumstances prevented you from studying there. Whatever be your reason, take heart. MITOpenCourseWare is a free and open educational resource for faculty, students, and self-learners around the world. Through MIT OCW, educators and students everywhere can benefit from the academic activities of their faculty and join a global learning community in which knowledge and ideas are shared openly and freely for the benefit of all. Do have a look at the various courses available and take advantage of their knowledge base.
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Saturday, July 02, 2005

Nvu

Nvu (pronounced: "n vue") is an open source, cross-platform, standalone WYSIWYG complete web authoring system. Now anyone can create web pages and manage a website with no technical expertise or knowledge of HTML. It has a standards conformant engine maintained on a daily basis by a wide community of developers and has remarkable support for XML, CSS and JavaScript. Check out it's features and screenshots.
I have decided to use this software for all my blogs. Over the days, I shall be learning how to use this software and shall document my progress/experiences here.
(a) Download Nvu 1.0 for your operating system.
(b) Install Nvu.
(c) Download the Nvu User Guide.
(d) Download the Tutorial for absolute Nvu newbees. The file I downloaded was nvutut-0.3b.xpi Follow the Installation Instructions properly.
(e) I am going to follow the Tutorial mentioned in (d) above.
(f) Start up your Nvu software.
(g) On the menu, click on Tools/Preferences. Click on the Advanced tab. In the Markup section, select XHTML 1 and Strict. Now click on Fonts tab. Select Verdana for Sans-serif. Next click on the New Page Settings tab and enter your name in the Author field. Click on OK.
(h) I plan to use Nvu on my blog posts, first. Some knowledge of HTML and CSS at this stage will definitely be helpful.
(i) Start-up Nvu.
(j) I am creating two css classes - technoratitag and posttoblog. I shall show you how to create the technoratitag class; you can do the same for the posttoblog class. Click on Tools/CSS Editor. Click on Expert Mode (ie. remove the tick on this button). Click on Rule, for the selected names style, enter technoratitag and click on Create Style Rule. Now click on the Text tab. Select predefined (sans-serif). Type #000000 for color. Enter 0.9em for font-size and 1.5em for line-height. Now click on Close. The class technoratitag has been created.
(k) Click on File/Save As. Type BlogPostSample as the title and then type BlogPostSample as the File name and save to your relevant folder. That's it; everytime you need to prepare a blog post, load a copy of this file. Now based on page 23 of the Nvu User Guide create a <div> element. Type in your post. Switch to HTML Tags mode and click on the DIV image, then apply the posttoblog class to this <div> element as per the manual (page 24).
(l) Save your file and then Verify your html by clicking on Tools/Validate HTML.
(m) For Blogger/Blogspot.com you will have to copy the two css classes we have created, to the template before the </style> tag. Also, for posting to your blog, you will have to click on the Source view and copy your post from the <div> to the </div> tag and paste it in your Blogger post.

Comments: I have not tried the (a) Template feature, but I believe it creates the template in Transitional and not in Strict mode (b) Nvu Site Manager. This should be a very useful feature for uploading your site to your server. A feature I would definitely like is a way to directly post from Nvu to Blogger as is possible with QumanaLE.
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Friday, July 01, 2005

About subscribing via email

Now you can get all Appliblog posts in your email inbox as soon as they appear online. Thanks to Google Groups and the BlogSend feature of Blogger, we can set-up an announcement-only Google Group by specifying a name, email address, and short description. A 'Subscribe Via Email' form now appears on my side-bar. For full details on how this can be achieved, check out Inside AdWords.
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