This can be important, especially for WordPress bloggers. For example, I once wrote on another blog about a dog ebook. For days afterwards, no matter what I wrote about, the Google ads remained for dog-related items!

On other occasions, I’ve received emails from people asking why they get ads for blogging items, although they never write about blogging.

Google filtering can help with this.

Does it work? Yes – but for WordPress blogs, the key is to add them appropriately, to help focus the topic. For example, to place the tags around the articles themselves, you’d want to add code inside the WordPress ‘loop’ (such as found in <strong>index.php</strong>):

<?php while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>
<!-- google_ad_section_start -->
<div id="post-<?php the_ID(); ?>">
...the rest of the code...
</div>
<!-- google_ad_section_start -->
<?php endwhile; ?>

The “<!— google…” lines are the new ones to add. This will emphasize the articles, and deemphasize the rest of the page for Google’s search engines.

One exception arises here – what about the main page, where there can be several articles? In my case, the dog article stayed on the front page for a while, skewing the ads. Ideally, I’d like the topmost article only to stand out. For that, we can just replace those Google lines with a bit of PHP code:

<?php while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>
<?php static $ab_count=0; if (++$ab_count<=1)
echo "<!-- google_ad_section_start -->"; ?>
<div id="post-<?php the_ID(); ?>">
...the rest of the code...
</div>
<?php if ($ab_count++<=1)
echo "<!-- google_ad_section_start -->"; ?>
<?php endwhile; ?>

If you use this code, and look at the source code of your main blog page (use your browser’s ‘View Source’ option), you’ll see these tags are only around the first article – helping Google focus on it.

Google also provide a demphasizing tag, to tell it to view sections as less important. Use

<!-- google_ad_section_start(weight=ignore) -->

to start a section, and

<!-- google_ad_section_end -->

to end it.

Notice I say ‘less important’, not ‘ignore’ – in fact, Google is very careful to say they will still index the whole page, only that they will give greater or lesser weight to certain sections (check Google’s site and blog for more about this topic).

This code can be useful in certain areas – for example, in WordPress blogs:

• If your sidebar is affecting your listing (for example, by showing older article titles) then place the tags at the first and last lines of your sidebar.php file, enclosing them.
• If your footer has text in it, likewise use the tags just before and after any text in the footer.php file (but be careful to place all tags before the ending </body> HTML tag).

If you find yourself asking ‘why do my Google ads never reflect my topics’ consider adding Google Section targeting. It’s simple and free, and can focus your ads. And with more targeted ads, you can expect your click through rates to rise – and profits too.

[This is based on an article from the ActiveBlogging Report of March 2006 - for the article and much more, join ActiveBlogging Platinum today]

The answer – two quick releases, one for ‘regular’ WordPress, and the latter for WP MU.

The first, with several fixes, primarily focuses on security for trackbacks, which can be used for a denial of service attack. You can get it via their regular site.

For WP MU, the 2.8.5.2 version is a quick patchup to account for small bugs that crept into the 2.8.5 version – and that’s found on their MU site.

So while 2.9 is on its way, you have a little something new to bide the time with!

Topics:

• What’s New With ActiveBlogging.
• A New WordPress – And A Time To Change? WordPress 2.8.5 – and my biweekly (it seems) review of the changes and what they mean – and how fast YOU need to switch to it!
• Hacked Blog? Here’s What To Do Before Problems Strike. Security online is big these days – and WordPress users are constantly hearing about problems with that program. So take a deep breath, and find out how to make sure your blog is passed over when hackers come a-calling, and how to clean up the mess if they’ve already hit your site.
• How To Check Out Your Site With A Security Plugin. Not knowing if your site is hacked or not is bad – so for peace of mind use this plugin that checks out your blog for common exploits.
• A Drop-Dead Simple Sales Page. People are willing to take your hard-earned money to add a sales page to your WordPress blog – but that’s money you can keep for yourself with 5 minute’s effort and the tricks in this article…
• Internet Offers And Current Deals

Check the ActiveBlogging Reports Section for this issue.

Unfortunately, WordPress makes it difficult to effortlessly publish by email. Until now, that is. Using a trio of plugins, and some simple writing tips, you now have a variety of ways to use your email to create posts, every bit as good as the ones you can enter directly into WordPress via the Admin Post panel.

The Key To Posting

From the outside, posting by email is rather simple. To break it down, it requires:

• An email account to send your emails to that only you and WordPress know about.
• WordPress being set up to properly handle and post the resulting email to your blog.
• A way of regularly having WordPress check that mailbox.

When set up right, sent emails are quickly converted to posts: the body of the email becomes the body of the post, and the subject line of the email becomes the blog post’s title. Simple and easy.

Step 1: Secret Emails

The first step: set up a secret email account. Generally, I recommend coming up with a random string and getting a gmail account – for example, mirdbasdkilajeq@gmail.com Additionally, you want to create a random password to go with it, and store both somewhere for safekeeping. Then set up the account.

Stuck? Use this to generate a random email name and password to set up a Gmail account – just keep pressing until you’re happy with the results:

Click to get an email/password suggestion

Step 2: Checking The Account

Once you have the email account, you’re ready to set up WordPress to read it. For this, the Admin panel at Settings; Writing; Post via e-mail is where you enter the information to access the account.

While each account has a slightly different way of accessing, in general, you can use port 110 (the default), and a prefix, including the domain name, for the server: smtp.egwebsite.com, pop.egwebsite.com, mail.egwebsite.com, etc. Your account FAQ should give you the settings. As well, the login should be your email user login, sometimes with the domain. Once entered, save these settings.

With WordPress set up to read your secret email account, you can begin testing. Open up your email program and send a test TEXT (not HTML) message to begin.

A brief interjection about email programs – in my testing, I had no problem sending posts via Eudora and Thunderbird, but Outlook Express interjected a great deal of extra code (including <font> tags, <div> tags, and garbage ‘=20′ text). Therefore I recommend NOT using that program.

So you’re sending your emails, and WordPress can read them. But there’s a problem now: since WordPress will publish anything that is sent to that account, how do you test and not mess up your blog?

It turns out that WordPress checks the From: address of emails it reads. If the address matches a User, and that User has permission to publish posts, the posts are immediately published.

But if there is no User with that email, or that User is not permitted to publish, the post goes to ‘Pending Review’ status – like ‘Draft’, it means that it has to be approved before appearing on the blog.

(Note that the From: address also determines who ‘owns’ the post – and if the email doesn’t match an account, it defaults to Admin).

So if you send from an email account that is not set up in your blog (or you temporarily change the User account email addresses so they don’t match), then you can send email after email, and they won’t appear online. However, you can review then from inside Admin (and preview them to see the final result). Once testing is done, set up the proper User email account again, delete the test posts, and you’re ready.

With that out of the way, you can now post a test message, and be ready to actually try email access. To do so, simply view the WordPress page called wp‑mail.php in your blog root. To ease testing, I like to open the page in a new tab in my browser:

http://egwebsite.com/myblog/wp-mail.php

Refreshing this page will repeatedly check your email, and return success, or an error message if something is not set up correctly.

By sending emails to that account and reading them (by refreshing this page manually), you should have your account set up in no time. This is a great way to troubleshoot your account without going crazy, as the error messages wp‑mail.php provide are a real help in explaining problems.

Step 3: WordPress Automatic Checks

Once set up correctly, it’s on to the third part of blogging by email: getting this page automatically checked so WordPress reads the emails.

Note: you don’t have to set up automatic checking – since every time you load wp-mail.php it checks the email, you can simply do that after sending your email off. But of course, if you could do that, you probably could enter your article directly into your blog!

For that, you can download my free plugin to do timing called Utopia Cron at my WordPress plugins page.

This plugin, when activated, uses visitors to your blog to run timed jobs, such as checking your email. To use it, you download, unzip, upload, and activate like any other plugin.

From there, you log into Admin and enter the URL to check (your wp-mail.php file), as well as the time to check. I really don’t think you should check more often than every 30 minutes, or even every hour or two; after all, each check is actually accessing your email system, and some services don’t appreciate you checking too often, or have restrictions.

Putting these three parts together, you now have an account you can send emails to, you’ve tested how to get the emails read and confirmed that they’re being read, and you’ve set up an automatic polling routine to read everything into the blog. All done?

Almost.

There is still one little problem with emails that could drive you crazy – line breaks.

By default, email clients format email text to a certain fixed line length (about 65-75 characters per line). For this reason, if you were to do a post at this point, you’d have problems:

• Line breaks inserted by the email program would be read by WordPress as paragraph breaks – so each LINE would be a PARAGRAPH on the blog.
• Because of this, HTML code tags could be split across lines, and broken – the result would be bizarre looking blog posts, and ruined HTML code, with broken links and other issues.

For that reason, you need one more piece – a custom plugin I wrote to manage the line breaks. Again, install and activate to remove these extra line breaks. It still keeps double line breaks, so just make sure you add a blank line between paragraphs to keep them separate. But it ignores the single ones the email program adds. The result is the email as you expected, including working HTML codes.

Just download the plugin from the Plugins section of ActiveBlogging (Email Line Fix/Utopia41), and install on your blog. The plugin requires no settings or configuration – just activation.

There is an additional option the plugin provides: if you have text that you don’t want published (for instance your signature at the bottom of the email), you can surround the actual article with two tags – this tells the plugin to ignore everything outside of this section. The tags are :start and :end and are used like this:

My email post - this part is NOT used/published.
:start
This is part of my <b>blog post</b>.

Image:<img src="http://egwebsite.com/img.gif" />.

A third paragraph - notice extra empty lines.
:end
This part is NOT published either.

As you can see, your email can include HTML code, including images. However, if you use an image, the file must already be online, with a valid URL.

Combining all this, you end up with an easy system for publishing email posts, that’s simple to use and worry-free once set up. And your emails will create quality posts every time!

[This is an excerpt of an ActiveBlogging Report Article from May 2008 - for the complete article, join ActiveBlogging Platinum today]

You can edit the theme by hand every year to insert the new date – 2002-2009, 2002-2010, etc – or you can use a little PHP to handle it.

In your theme, find the copyright year, which is probably in footer.php. It often looks something like this:

Copyright © 2007 by Somebody or other...

What you want to do is change it to this:

Copyright &copy; 2007-<?php echo date('Y'); ?> by Somebody or other...

The PHP date() function outputs the current time, formatted the way you want – in this case, the ‘Y’ prints out a 4-digit year.

Of course, if you started your blog (and copyright) in 2009, then you’ll get this displayed:

Copyright © 2009-2009

Which looks twonky – so here’s how you can fix that with a little extra PHP:

Copyright © <?php $a=2009; $z=date('Y'); echo ($a==$z?$a:"$a-$z"); ?> by Somebody or other...

This little bit of code simply checks if the start year matches the current year – if so, just one year is output. If not, a range is displayed. You’ll have to edit the 2009 to point to YOUR start year – but then that’s the last edit you’ll ever have to do for the Copyright on this theme!

Topics:

• What’s New With ActiveBlogging.
• The New Look of ActiveBlogging.com ActiveBlogging is undergoing some radical changes – and here’s how YOU benefit…
• Using The OpenX Ad Sytem With WordPress. An powerful professional-level ad management system, OpenX gives you a way to monetize your sites by selling ads directly. Here’s how to use it without problems.
• How To ‘Lock Out’ The World When Working On Your Site. When you want to work on your site, you sometimes need to keep it hidden away from the world – and the best way to do that is by locking it down. Here’s a few ways to get that protection.
• How YOU Can Overhaul Your Website Easily. Considering a site makeover? Using ActiveBlogging this month as the example, I’ll explain how YOU can get your site retrofitted quickly and easily – and how to make the switchover with a minimum of fuss.
• More Plugins – With Dave’s Auto Post Mixer Plugin! This plugin update allows you to rearrange dates and time on drafts posts, publishing them automatically. It’s invaluable for niche bloggers using article content – or anyone else working with large numbers of articles.
• This Month’s “Best of ActiveBlogging.com” The past month in writing: a summary of some of the best posts from the ActiveBlogging.com site.
• Internet Offers And Current Deals

Check the ActiveBlogging Reports Section for this issue.