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Posts Tagged Tips

Burnout Paradise Tips

Feb 26

Posted by gothi in games | No Comments

Burnout Paradise boxartI’ve been working at getting all the street times nailed recently and found that you can make things much easier for yourself by following some simple rules. Some of these can also be applied to racing and the burning Routes although your mileage may vary:

  • Take it online! Find yourself repeatedly crashing during your run? Traffic is severly reduced with extra players on the map. Get yourself into an online game (the more the merrier) where people aren’t doing challenges or races. You’ll find the road a lot easier to navigate now.
  • Use Boost wisely. The temptation is to boost all the time but this can lead to a crash. Use boost when the road is clear, you’ll get a faster time by careful boosting than holding the button down and crashing. Lay off the boost when approaching taffic, corners and hills.
  • Use a fast stunt car. Speed cars may be faster but they are also twitchy and you can’t use boost as and when you need it. Stunt cars build a lot of boost from drifting, oncoming and jumps so you’re unlikely to run out on your run and if you do it doesn’t take much to get some back.
  • Don’t crash. Pretty obvious but remember, the clock still runs during the crash-cam scenes so more than 1 crash and you may as well restart. If you do crash before you make it half way down the road consider restarting, it’s likely you’ll crash again further up the road and won’t beat the time.
  • One way is faster than the other. A lot of roads have shortcuts and jumps you can take which make travelling in one direction along the road a lot faster than the other. If you’re having difficulty beating a road time try approaching it from the other direction, you might just find it a whole lot easier.

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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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