AdSense Problem Fixed
This post ends up being the end of an impromptu three-parter. Parts one and two for your perusal. Last time I said AdSense diagnostics showed that my robots.txt file was blocking their web crawler.
I think this problem stems from when I first created this WordPress install and set it to private while I was customizing the theme. During this “private time” I was writing some draft posts and also getting the look and feel just right before I unleashed the Google search hounds. When I finally decided to publicly post I stil had the private option checked and didn’t realize it until later. The date I went public (the 21st) also corresponds to the date the site was last crawled as evidenced by the diagnostics.
Usually when you make a new post in WordPress the Ping-O-Matic tool will notify all the relevant engines that you have a new post. I’m not sure why this system wasn’t working. The solution I came up with is a little different. I created a Google sitemap and submitted it to Webmaster Central. Webmaster Central is a place where you can monitor how often your site is crawled by the Googlebot and also submit your sitemap. I can go into how to generate a sitemap in a later post if the need arises but just to wrap up, I am now seeing relevant ads on my Xterra filter post. Ahhh, much better. Even with no visitors.
AdSense Problem Identified
As I said in the last post, I thought something fishy was going on with my ads since they were so narrowly focused on one single topic (b l o g s) even though I have written about other things. It has been my experience through other sites that even though ads may not be properly targeted to the specific topic you write about, they vary when you write about a different subject.
I’m not sure why this didn’t occur to me sooner, but I finally decided to check the Google AdSense diagnostics and lo and behold I found a problem. As you can see below it says that the Robots.txt file is blocking attempts to crawl the site and hence this place hasn’t been crawled since the 21st. So, that’s why I’m since such narrow ad focus.
The thing is, I don’t actually HAVE a robots.txt file. Not one that I can see anyway. It’s not a hidden file, I checked for that also. Hrmph. I’ll do some more research on this and report back tomorrow. No new visitors today by the way.
Quick Update
No other visitors have shown up, so the first one was a fluke. This isn’t a surprise since there isn’t a lot of content yet. I’m still sticking to my experiment and not commenting or listing the site anywhere else. This is starting to be more and more difficult since I’m getting impatient, but I’ll hang in there a little while longer. And really I would rather make the site “public” with as much content as possible. That’s what I keep telling myself anyway.
I do still have the Google ads up on the site but something unusual is happening. Almost all the ads are b l o g related even though I wrote the Xterra piece. I expected to see the ads diversify more than they have. I’ll check into this to see if I can figure out why.
The TV Shows I Watch
Prepare to be shocked. Seriously. To some of you the following entry will be unbelievable. I swear that all of it is true. It’s really quite astonishing when you see it all written down. Here we go. These are all (that I can think of right now) the TV that I watch.
- American Hot Rod
- American Chopper
- Survivor
- ER
- Heroes
- Curb Your Enthusiasm
- Attack of the Show!
- The Sopranos
- Big Love
- The Wire
- 24
- The Daily Show
- The Colbert Report
- This Old House
- The This Old House Hour
- This Old House Classics
- Inside This Old House
- Ask This Old House
- The New Yankee Workshop
- Bob Vila
- Dirty Jobs
- Myth Busters
- Pardon The Interruption
- Grey’s Anatomy
- The Office
- Lost
- American Idol
- Real Time
- My Name Is Earl
- Monk
- Psych
- Nip/Tuck
- Reno 911
- South Park
- 30 Days
- Family Guy
- Driving Force
- Studio 60
Wow. Those aren’t in any order because I just wrote it as I thought of them. I’m sure that’s also not a complete list. How you may ask is it possible to consume that much crap on television. To state it simply, Tivo. Or for those less fortunate, DVR. It’s not as simple as just saying Tivo though. It’s actually two Tivo’s and a cable company provided DVR box.
There is one modded 360GB Series II Tivo in the living room hooked up to the big screen (*link dead), another Series II Tivo in the bedroom that mainly records the wifes “soaps”, and there is the dual-tuner DVR in the living room that also delivers the HD content. If you’re keeping score at home it’s possible to record four tuners worth of shows at a time. Also, as a backup, you know in case a live game runs long and I happen to miss part of a show there is always EZTV *updated EZTV.
Cheap Nissan Xterra In-Cabin Microfilter
I suppose a post like this doesn’t really belong on this site, but what the hell, it wouldn’t really be a blog if we didn’t go on a tangent now and again would it. So I’ll call this category “In Other News”.
First I’ll set this up with a little backstory. I drive a Nissan Xterra. That pretty much wraps up the backstory. Anyway, I take the car to the dealer to get the oil changed and it also happens to be time for the 30,000 mile maintenance. I know, I could take it somewhere else besides the Nissan dealer and get this done much cheaper. Actually the oil change price is relatively competetive with the other places that I would consider taking it if you don’t consider the 7 Minute E-Z-Quik Lube’s that charge 12.95. But I don’t always trust those places since I’ve had some bad experiences with them before (looks like yer’ oll pans got a dent in it).
So the Nissan service department quotes me a price of around $709 to do the whole 30,000 mile maintenance. I hurriedly tell them “thatsok, I think I’ll just have the oil changed this time around”. The service manager tells me that they will go ahead and inspect all the usual 30,000 mile stuff for free just to see if anything is in need of immediate repair. I begin hearkening back to experiences with the Jim Bob’s Auto Repair’s of the world that I used to deal with and expect them to try to screw me. Oddly enough, they do the inspection and it doesn’t happen. “We changed the oil and everything looked fine except (here we go) your In-Cabin Microfilter needs to be replaced,” he says.
I ask him how much it is and he tells me it will be $89. I tell him I think I’ll do that next time I’m in. I pay for the oil change and head home where I promptly start checking online for this filter. I check out the excellent Xterra Owner’s Club forums and bingo, the first search I do there brings up a link to XterraParts.com. I find the filter there for $27 plus shipping which will bring the total to about $37. No tax. Just like that I saved myself 50 bucks.
Not content to just take the first deal I see, I search around and find MyNissanParts.com and they have it for 21.99 plus shipping. No tax :). I order this one for a grand total of $30.49. I got it via FedEx today and I’ll probably install it tomorrow. You can’t beat saving $60 with about 10 minutes of searching.
First Visitor
Just as I finished the AdSense and Visitor Update post where I said there had not yet been any visitors to the site, I happen to go check the stats one last time and the first visitor has arrived. They were from Jacksonville, New Brunswick, Canada. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. They weren’t referred from a search engine so I’m guessing the first visitor was actually a misspelling of some type. One last tidbit of information from this visitor is that they were using Internet Explorer 5.5. That is quite outdated.
One down, many to go.
AdSense and Visitor Update
I thought I would take time to give an update on the visitor stats for this little experiment. The site was started on April 20th and I have managed to make at least one post per day. There have been no visitors yet which is to be expected since I have not promoted the site in any way whatsoever. No comments on other sites, word of mouth advertising, or forum posts. I’ll admit that I’m getting the “itch” to start putting the word out about the site to just see the numbers start clicking but I’ll try to be patient. At least until the first visitor shows up. 
AdSense update. As you can see in the sidebar, I have turned the small AdSense vertical banner back on so that I can see what ads are showing up on the site. Both of the ads currently showing on the site are blog related so either I’m saying that word too much or the site hasn’t been thoroughly crawled. I should probably stop using that word so much I suppose. That’s all for now.
The Software I Use
I’ve seen other people do this before but I’ve been wanting to put this list up on a site for a while now. I can remember many times that I’ve had tried searching Google to find a tool to, for example, edit mp3 files. Actually go ahead, search for “mp3 editor” in Google. It’s a mess right? Who the hell knows if any of those programs are any good or not. I’m sure a lot of them are legit, but most of the links will take you to crippled shareware that just won’t get the job done.
This stuff should be simple. This is one instance where Google really does come up short. I remember back several years ago (pre- digg, pre- fark, pre- web 2.0) when I would check download.com every day. The top 10 most downloaded and later top 50 was where a lot of people (me included) found some of the coolest new stuff on the internet. After the original napster went away I remember seeing Gnutella on the list for the first time. That picture isn’t an advertisement, it’s actually the Download.com logo from around 1997. Cool Stuff. Maybe in some way this list can be a more editorialized, waaaaay more simplified list of the tools around today.
I make no guarantees about this being the “best” software, it’s simply what I use. I will probably change some of the items from time to time as they come and go from my regular usage. I think for right now I will just list the name and a link to where you can find the software. Later on I may include an explanation as to why I use it. So where to start? In no particular order for now. Just as I think of them.
On the Desktop
Web browser: Firefox
Email Client: Thunderbird
PDF Viewer: Foxit Reader
Media Player: iTunes | Windows Media Player 11
Audio / MP3 Editor: Audacity
Photo Editing: Adobe Photoshop
Photo Organization: Windows Explorer | Picasa2
FTP Client: Filezilla
SSH Client: Putty
Text Editor: Notepad++
Online Apps and Services
eMail: Gmail
Backup: Mozy
Feed Reader: Google Reader
Fix Drudge Report Font in Opera
I’m sure there are a multitude of ways to do this, but here’s a really simple quick solution.
- Open the window (or tab) containing www.drudgereport.com.
- Hold down Ctrl on your keyboard and at the same time use your mouse scroll wheel to scroll downward (towards you) one click.
That should do it. The page should look exactly the same in Opera as it does in Firefox and Internet Explorer. All we did there is make the font on the page one size smaller. I know this is a really minor problem on the grand scale of things but it’s just one less annoyance when experimenting with alternative web browsers.
click to enlarge
Now that the solution is out of the way, lets wildly speculate as to the reason this is necessary.
The Drudge Report has been around forever and as far as I can tell the only real change I’ve seen on the site is the addition of advertising. I would say that when the site was originally designed it looked perfectly fine in whatever version of Internet Explorer was out at the time and that is all that was needed. Since then no standards compatibility or browser interoperability has been attempted as other browsers gain in popularity. Hope that helped you out.
How I Plan to Make Money with AdSense
This very well could have made its way into the Intro series but I felt I needed move on before it turned into a never ending sequence of events where every post title began with “I’m New Here…”. In this article I want to describe in a little more detail how I (as the title says) plan to make money with AdSense on this site. The trick to getting the almighty click with AdSense (besides ad placement) is having effective keywords on your site. To that end, one theory of mine that I want to test actually involves Google search. I use Google all day every day for looking up anything from the lyrics to a song I just heard, using it as a dictionary, and to help solve problems.
The “help solve problems” part is what I will be focusing on occasionally. I find myself searching for answers to what I would consider rather simple questions and not finding a simple answer in the search results. Either this is a result of me asking a badly formed question or the answer hasn’t been written yet. Either way, I’m guessing I’m not the only person asking these questions.
The solution will be as short and to the point as I can possible make them. What I hope to attain with the howto posts is what I call “a Google Top 10″. This would be when the keywords in the title of the post appear in the top 10 search results on Google. For instance a search for ‘techky’ on Google right now shows that this site is the 61st result on the 7th page for that word. Of course I hope that improves quickly.
Here is my first attempt with the quick howto.
Almost forgot, there have been zero visitors since this blog launched.
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