g o t h i

A badly chosen byte

Posts Tagged Adsense

New save sharing communities arise, how do they fare?

Feb 11

Posted by gothi in Uncategorized | No Comments

With the advent of the Playstation 3 and the Nintendo Wii there’s been a couple of new sites pop up to support the save trading community.
I’ve been checking on two sites in particular and have the following opinions.

First up there’s PS3GameSaves.net

Missing out on the elusive .com domain hasn’t deterred these guys one bit and they’ve started to make decent inroads into building a community for sharing Playstation 3 and Playstation 2 saves, in the suitable PS3 format of course.
The site has a blossoming community forum and whilst there doesn’t appear to be much technical talk there’s a good vibe and a decent amount of trading going on with helpful users.

Unfortunately I can’t be as kind about the main site. The design and content smack of “my first website”. I’m sorry to be harsh guys but the site looks poor and the content is sparse and not organised efficiently. Top marks for putting a forum up to encourage the community but please, enlist the services of a designer and sort your main site out. At worst use a portal system to keep the site tidy and organised.
I also had some difficulty finding the site in Google as it doesn’t rank well for Playstation 3 game saves, something that should be worked upon if possible. But not all is lost as it ranks quite well for PS3 game saves.

Overall the site has a lot of potential, the forum is something that will keep the users coming back but the main site needs some serious work and was off-putting on my first visit.

Next up we have Wii Save.

In contrast to PS3 saves, Wiisave has a beautiful front end and ranks well for the obvious search query. I’ve not come across the RW::Download script before but it does it’s job perfectly here. Having the content on the front page makes it easy for users to see new additions and keeps the site looking fresh and alive.
Information seems easy to reach but I’m not a fan of the javascript drop-down menu for each system supported by the Wii. It appears that for each save on the site there is a corresponding entry in the menu for the game. Once more saves are uploaded this is going to become unworkable, can you imagine a menu with 200+ entries on it?

Whilst I really like the clarity of the front page and the easy access to information, the site isn’t without problems.
The only way to communicate with other users of the site appears to be via a comments system which allows you to add comments to each save uploaded.
This simply isn’t enough to foster a community and eventually the users will move elsewhere. At the very least the admin should install a free message board such as phpBB and hack/edit it to accept the current user base and make future signups exist on both the main site and the forum.
I’ve also noticed the use of images directly next to Google ads, this is against the Ad-Sense Terms and Conditions and a shady technique at best.

In conclusion, the content of the site and it’s simple layout are a winner here but the lack of community features will result in the site loosing out long term.

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Adsense in Blogger Beta templates

Nov 21

Posted by gothi in Uncategorized | No Comments

The Inside AdSense team have just released an Activation Demo showing you how to add AdSense code to your Blogger/Blogspot template however they insist you revert to a classic template to do this.

This isn’t practical or desirable for some, including myself, so I’ll show you how to do it in the new and funky Beta templates, as seen on this very blog.

Although the beta tools allow you to add a block of AdSense Ads to the template in a nice web 2.0 style, you cannot add them to certain sections, for example between the post header and body text, as seen on this blog. For that level of control you need to manually edit the template itself and that’s what I’m going to demonstrate today.

First you need to generate your AdSense code, for this example I’m going to add a banner to the top of my blog, just underneath the page header/title.

First go to the settings screen of your blog and hit the template tab. We want to be editing the html, so hit the link. For ease of use you might want to download the template to your PC but in this example we’ll use the online editor.
Expand the widget templates (this allows you to put the AdSense anywhere on your blog) code and locate the header section like so:

Now scroll down to the last </div> and paste your AdSense code:

Now here comes the magic! (So to speak.) If you try to use the template like this most of the AdSense code will be stripped away and your ads will not show at all!
This is because AdSense makes use of the html comment marker and html comments are stripped out in the beta templates, taking the majority of our AdSense code with it!
To get round this (and so we don’t have to revert our template) we change the < and > of the AdSense code that uses the html comment marker into their respective HTML entities: &lt; and &gt; as seen highlighted in red in the picture:

Now hit the preview button to check on the brand new ads you’ve just installed:

Ok, so the positioning could do with a tweak, as could the colour scheme, but now you know the hardest part, getting the ads to show, you can tweak it til your hearts content! Don’t forget to save your template once you have positioned the ads to your liking.

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