IPB tips

I’m very glad to see that Google AdSense gave us the opportunity to donate all or some of our earnings to help victims in China and Myanmar (Burma). I donated and I urge any other publisher we helped out on the AdSense Help Forum to do the same. See it as paying forward the help that was rendered to you by volunteers and AdSensePro Staff.

For the AdSense programmers to set this up in less than six months is a great feat and it is laying the ground work for other charities or victims to be helped in the future. One day I may be the one who is in need of aid so by paying it forward I hope someday if the worst happens that it will all come back to me if needed.

Make your AdSense earnings count by donating a portion to another human being who needs it more than you do right now. The Donation form can be found here and there is no greater joy than the feeling you have after helping someone else in need.

The donations are managed by Tides Foundation and you can donate directly to the China and Myanmar Fund if you do not have an AdSense account or if you feel like donating additional to support the victims. (more…)

It opened my eyes after reading the blog post on WebProNews where they have some answers from Matt Cutts and Maile Ohye. Some of the answers can be interpreted in multiple ways and WPN have a good grip on translating the Googlers answers to webmaster talk. The list of questions are the ones answered on WPN, read their article and enjoy.

The question that I had hoped would be answered was:

Does the age of a website/domain affect its ranking?

The answer on WPN is a no answer, I think age counts for a website with good content. We see some domains taken out of parking and they do not start to rank right away so that is an example where age don’t matter. Other sites are brand new with great content and a great consept and they get a following fast and their rank is higher than what the age of the domain should be based on age alone.

On the other hand, go to the write up and answers here WebProNews with: Google Answers Some Tricky Questions to the following questions: (more…)

It took two tries to figure out how to setup IPB up to show banner ad based on the forum. The first try broke because the code was made safe when I called it from the db, a “lf” line feed turned into a <br /> and that was it for try one.

The second attempt worked somewhat better, I have it up and working on my test forum. It displays correctly for what I set it to. Second attempt is my beta version and now I’m working on how to set this up for use with the mod installer. That is a whole different animal so I’m easing into it via baby steps. I checked out a couple of other mods that is already using the mod installer and I was reading up on the instructions there. When I have this mod available for testing I’ll add a copy to Invision Tweaks for testing and I have to see if I’ll add it here. We are very close to the release of IPB v3.0.0 and by then I should be able to convert it to that vesion.

I downloaded and setup Banner Ads Per Forum mod “This Modification Was Created By: -Calypso- at Invision Tweaks for IPB 2.2.x.” Any credit for this mod is due -Calypso- and the tweaks I’m trying to do would not be possible if it was not for his work. I downloaded it because it’s basic performance is to show a specific banner ad per forum. What I am trying to achieve is a way for me to place a target able AdSense Banner ad in each forum. This will give an advertiser a way of targeting just one forum on the site and ignore the rest of the forums. The rest of the forums can still have a banner ad or different channel ad code.

I installed the script and looked at the bits and pieces I installed and because of great documentation I had the banner with a link up and running in 1/2 an hour. Now is where the fun started for me. Could I simplify and break it down to where inserting An AdSense Banner code is possible. First try last night was a failure and it took me a couple of hours tonight reading up on mySQL and figuring out that I forgot an Quote ” at the end of my <if> statement. With that fixed I took a look at the text rendered from the database and comes issue number two.

The code I pasted into the database is rendered useless because <br /> is added after each line and that rendes the script useless. I think I have found a way around this, it should make this work and render the code legal and unaltered.

This is part one and when I’m done I’ll show it to -Calypso- and if he don’t have any issues with it I’ll write up the changes I am doing.

This weekend I did not do anything for my forum or the mods there. I took some time to play around with WordPress. I read a great tutorial from “Small Potato”: “So you want to create WordPress themes huh?” and it took me two days to finish the tutorial and validate all the code.

The complete lesson is 16 steps and the way it is laid out it made me understand the basics behind WordPress and the reasoning behind the files and some of the basic structuring used with WordPress. To modify this blog I need to know some of the basics and “Small Potato” explained it in an easy way and by following his advice of typing the instructions instead of “Copy and Paste” them makes sense now.

I setup another blog to test, that way this blog would stay alive and be readable. The final Theme is very simple, no images and minimal styling. I am making a copy of it so I can tweak it to see what I can break. In the end I hope to have a unique skin that will be only here on IPB Tips. Next step will be creating a nice three column fluid layout that is XHTML compliant and validate.

Talking about validate, I still have an [Validation Issue] v263 - WordPress Default 1.6 theme and I’m adding a link to my entry there so I can find it. The validation issue is with the “aria-required=’true’” statement in comments.php and my search on Google and WordPress did not turn up anything similar. I found and entry with “aria-required=’true’” as an issue when using reCAPTCHA. I do not think that issue was with reCAPTCHA, that sounds like the same issue I have.

So the IPB Tip theme or skin as I think of it is in production. My first try is plugin ready and with some tweaking I should be ready to add it here soon. Don’t forget to visit “Small Potato” if you are looking for some great tutorials or even some custom work for your blog.