TechCounter - TechNews, Money & SEO

Google AdSense remains the most popular and the best options for web admins or blog owners to display advertisements on their blog or website. However, if you are not a United States resident, you can still sign up for Google AdSense and

Three Main Categories of Google AdSense Publishers

1. U.S Business: If you are based in and pay taxes in the United States

2. Non- U.S Business: If your operations are based entirely outside of the U.S and you do not pay taxes in the United States.

Note: If you own a web server or use a hosting service based in the U.S such as using a hosting service such as 1&1 or GoDaddy, then you do NOT come under this category. Even if you have employees in the U.S who are involved in either setting up a web server, hosting service or website or developing content for your website, or provide marketing for your site, maintaining your site or providing telephone support for your site, then also you do NOT qualify for this category.

3. Non U.S Business with U.S Activities: If you or your business is located outside of the United States, but have U.S activities which may involve some as mentioned above, then you come under this category.

Note: Utilizing an unrelated third-part U.S web hosting service to host your website, rent web servers that are located in the U.S from an unrelated third party, having your payments sent to a U.S Post Office Box or Mail forwarding address, do not constitute U.S Activities.

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Popularity: 11% [?]

At TechCounter, the WordPress files are installed to a Subdirectory? So you ask the question, how can I access your blog at http://www.techcounter.com and not at techcounter <dot> com/subdirectory.

Many people like you want to WordPress to run of their site’s root directory ( e.x http://yoursite.com ) but don’t want all of the WordPress files cluttering up their root directory. In this article, I will tell you how to Install WordPress files to a subdirectory, but run your blog off your site’s root directory.

1.  Create the new location for the core WordPress files to be stored (we will use /myblog in our examples).

2. Go to the Options panel in your WordPress Dashboard. Go to General tab

3. In the box for WordPress address (URL): change the address to the new location of your main WordPress core files. Example: http://yoursite.com/myblog

4. In the box for Blog address (URL): change the address to the root directory’s URL. Example: http://yoursite.com

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Popularity: 13% [?]

To find the URL of an Ad being served on your website, you can either use the Google AdSense Preview Tool or use the method as shown below. The Google AdSense Preview Tool is a better option as it prevents you from accidentally clicking on the ads. Another reason is that the method shown below does not work on Flash based Ads.

Find the URL of an Advertisement

Step # 1: Right click on the title of the ad for which you wish to view the URL and then select Copy Shortcut(for Internet Explorer) or Copy Link Location (for Firefox).

CAUTION: Please make sure you don’t left click. If you are not sure, please use the Google AdSense Preview Tool

Step # 2: Open notepad or any text editor and paste your selection. You can either right click and select Paste or select Paste from your text editor’s edit menu

Step # 3: The destination URL of the ad is the text between ‘adurl=’ and ‘&’.

For example

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Popularity: 21% [?]

What is the Google Adsense Preview Tool?

The Google AdSense preview tool allows you to preview the ads that may show up on your webpage. This is a very useful tool for website admins who are displaying Google Adsense ads on their website. You can even click on the ads being shown here as the ads are in a test state, so you don’t have to worry about Google penalizing you by banning your Adsense account. You can preview ad formats and colors where you can select a new border or background or text colors. You can also view ads which visitors to your site say from Australia or U.K or India or China or from any other country might be seeing when they visit your website.

You can download the AdSense Preview Tool which is part of the Google Toolbar. The Google Toolbar comes bundled with Mozilla Firefox, an excellent and the most secure browser allowing you to  . You can also  which includes the Google Toolbar 

Find the URL of an Advertisement using Google AdSense Preview Tool

Step # 1: Browse to the page containing the Ads or Ad for which you wish to view the URL

Step # 2: Right click anywhere on that page. From the right click menu that appears, choose Google AdSense Preview Tool. You can set up the Google AdSense Preview Tool for both Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox.

Step # 3: Select the checkbox beside the ad for which you wish to view the URL and click Show Selected URL. The destination URL of the selected Ad or Ads will appear.

Popularity: 15% [?]

Google AdSense gives publishers and blog administrators the option to block specific ads from appearing on your website by using the Competitive Ad Filter. Why would you want to block certain ads from showing up on your website? Although Google Ads are highly targeted to the content of the page on which you are serving ads, there are situations where you don’t want a particular advertisement from showing up. An example could be that you wish to block ads from your competitors.

Important TIP: The Competitive Ad Filter works by blocking ads that link to specific URLs. When you plug in a website you wish to block, leave of the ‘www’ off of URLs in your filter list as this allows for broader filtering. For example, entering www.blockthis.com will block ads to www.blockthis.com but not to ads.blockthis.com or blockthis.com.

Set up your AdSense Competitive Ad Filter

Step # 1: Log into your AdSense account at https://www.google.com/adsense. If you are new to Google AdSense, you can sign up to

Step # 2: Click the AdSense Setup tab. Beneath the tabs that appear, click Competitive Ad Filter. If you are setting up the filter for the first time, the text box will be empty.

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Popularity: 12% [?]

Subscribe to Comments is a WordPress plugin that allows commenters on your blog to sign up to receive email notifications of any subsequent comments after their comment on a particular article.  This plugin is very popular because it helps you foster a community around a blog by encouraging people who comment on your posts to come back and stay engaged.

Also, this is very useful for the commenters themselves. Say a particular post is talking about moving from Blogger to Wordpress and he or she has a problem with the migration. When they leave a comment on that post and elect to receive follow up comments, these follow up comments might contain a solution to their problem where it could be the author himself responding back or a fellow commentor posting a solution or a suggestion.

The plugin also includes a full-featured subscription manager that your commenters can use to unsubscribe to certain posts, block all notifications, or even change their notification e-mail address!

Name of the Plugin: Subscribe to Comments

Author: Mark Jaquith

Subscribe to Comments Plugin Home Page:

http://txfx.net/code/wordpress/subscribe-to-comments/

Download Subscribe to Comments Wordpress Plugin:

http://downloads.wordpress.org/plugin/subscribe-to-comments.zip

When you activate the plugin, you don’t need to make any further changes. When you go into any of your posts, visitors to your site will see something like this at the end of the comments section. When they check “Notify me of followup comments via email” they will then be subscibed.

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Popularity: 22% [?]

For a lot of blogs, as they age in time, some very good posts get pushed into the depths of your blog into your archives with the only visitors if any to that post come via organic or search engine traffic.

So, how do you do you bring your old posts to the front page and give them exposure. You can change the published date on that post and bring it to your front page. But that is not the best way to do it especially if you have lots of posts and it can get hard to sift through your articles. It is in such a situation where this handly WordPress plugin Archivist comes in.

Plugin Name: Archivist

Plugin Author: Malyfred

Archivist Plugin URL:

http://fredfred.net/skriker/index.php/archivist/

Download Archivist Plugin:

http://fredfred.net/logger/dlcount.php?id=skriker&url=http://fredfred.net/skriker/download/wordpress/archivist.zip

How to Install the Archivist Plugin for your WordPress Blog

Copy archivist.php file to your wp-content/plugins directory and activate it.

Changes to be made to the Archivist Plugin

Once you active the Archivist plugin, go to “Plugin Editor” and choose “Archivist.php” to edit

‘number_of_posts’ : Number of posts from the archive that should be shown on the front page. Keep this as the default 1.

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Popularity: 8% [?]

The Government of India is proposing to offer all Indian Citizens, a nationwide free broadband service and it plans to implement this high speed broadband connectivity by the year 2009. The good part is it has the financial capability to implement such a measure. Unknown is if it has the technological capability.

The Government according to Union Telecom Minister Dayanidhi Maran has set a target of 9 million broadband subscribers by the end of this year of which 7 million are expected to come from the State owned Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd and Mahanagar Telephone Nigam Limited. According to the Telecom Minister

Key Points:

1. Broadband connections in India posted a growth of 70% to touch 2.3 million at the end of March as compared to 1.35 million last year. Broadband subscribers were 2.21 million in February’07 to 2.30 million by March’07 thus adding 0.09 million new subscribers in the month of March

2. The government plans to achieve free broadband connectivity at a speed of 2MB per second across the country

3. The idea is to boost economic activity in general

4. Project can be financed by spending only a portion of the burgeoning corpus of the Universal Service Obligation Fund

5. While consumers would cheer, the move holds the potential to kill the telecom business handling the broadband sector in India.

We in the United States have seen such offers of free high speed broadband being offfered by a lot of cities. Many Municipal corporations across the United States have in general complained about the lack of affordable and reliable broadband options for their citizes. When there was a lack of a major initiative coming out of Washington, these cities have taken matters into their own hands. These cities in the US have blanketed themselves with wireless broadband connectivity and offering this to the city residents for free. Many cities, concerned about their ability to respond to terrorist attacks or natural disasters, also hope to beef up their sometimes unreliable emergency communications systems using Wi-Fi technology.

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Popularity: 13% [?]

A lot of people who enter the world of blogging start out using free hosts with the three most popular hosts being Blogger, Wordpress and TypePad. Using such hosts, you can start a blog, your easy-to-use web site, where you can quickly post thoughts, interact with people, and more. All for FREE.

So what happens once your blog becomes very popular because of your original creative and useful content. You can still stay on Blogger, but most publishers want to move to their own website where they have total control.

Google’s Blogger service contines to hold the lion’s share among free blog hosting services. So, you have your blog hosted by Blogger and you decided to move to your own website using WordPress as your publishing platform. So you go to WordPress, and download the exec and upload it to your site. Finally, you decide to import your valuable posts and comments from Blogger to WordPress. Guess what you will see.

In the import options you will see

Old Blogger — Import posts, comments, and users from an Old Blogger blog
Blogware — Import posts from Blogware
DotClear — Import categories, users, posts, comments, and links from a DotClear blog
GreyMatter — Import users, posts, and comments from a Greymatter blog
LiveJournal — Import posts from a LiveJournal XML export file
Movable Type and TypePad — Import posts and comments from a Movable Type or Typepad blog
RSS — Import posts from an RSS feed
Textpattern — Import categories, users, posts, comments, and links from a Textpattern blog
WordPress — Import posts, comments, custom fields, pages, and categories from a WordPress export file

If you are using a @gmail.com email address to sign in into your Blogger account, you cannot use the import feature in WordPress. So, how do you move your posts from Blogger Beta or the New Blogger to Wordpress. You have three options

Method # 1: Copy and paste your posts

This is the worst method where you log into your blogger and wordpress account and manually copy and paste your post content from your blogger post to the wordpress post. This can easily become very tedious if you have a large blog. Also, how do you import the valuable comments? You can’t.

Method # 2: Use a Wordpress plugin to import from Blogger Beta to Wordpress

You can use Ady Romantica’s Blogger RSS Import plugin to import from Blogger beta to wordpress. However, this method is not a simple plug and play. There are a lot of issues using this plugin. The author himself provides a link to WordPress suicide to mass delete your wordpress posts in case the import fails and you have to try again. However, if you are looking at the plugin option, this is the best and only option right now.

Method # 3:

Import Blogger Beta Posts to WordPress

This is the best and the easiest method to migrate from Blogger to Wordpress.

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Popularity: 100% [?]

WordPress default Blogger Import does NOT work with New Blogger account.

Help: I want to move from my Blogger account to my own personal website hosted by WordPress. However, since I moved to the new blogger, I am unable to do so… please help?

This was one of the emails I received yesterday. Digging around, turns out that this is true. If you are using a @gmail.com to sign into your blogger account, it means that you are using the new Blogger.

It seems that for a lot of people, Google almost forced its blogger users to upgrade from the old blogger to the new blogger. So are you stuck with your blogger account? Actually no.

There is an excellent WordPress plugin called Romantika’s Blogger RSS Import.

Author: Ady Romantika

Plugin Name: Blogger RSS Import

Plugin Page:

http://www.romantika.name/v2/2007/01/31/import-new-blogger-to-wordpress/

Download Blogger RSS Import:

http://www.romantika.name/v2/scripts/blogger-rss-import-1.2.1.zip 

Installation:

Installation

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Popularity: 16% [?]