Over on the Adwords blog today, Google announced the release of a new Free Adwords Online Classroom.

… (The) AdWords Online Classroom provides free online training, delivered by local AdWords experts, to help you achieve long-term advertising success with AdWords. Whether you’re new to AdWords and wish to learn the basics, or you’ve been with AdWords for a while and want to take your account to the next level, we offer a range of topics to suit your needs.

To participate, all you need is a computer with an internet connection and speakers or headphones.

Yes, its FREE. You know. Why pay “gurus” $197 for an ebook that they released 5 years ago, when you can get it free from the horse mouth?

In fact, when I signed up today, these were the courses already available – suitable for both “newbies” and advanced users! Frankly, even after over 2 years of using Adwords to drive traffic to my own clients’ sites, I feel I can still benefit from these courses!

Getting Started

• Create your account
• Get to know your account
• How to build a successful AdWords account
• Why can’t I see my ad?

Improving Your Account Performance

• Improve your AdWords performance with key tips
• Use AdWords data to strategically improve your account

Controlling Your Costs

• Maximize your advertising ROI with Conversion Optimizer

Analyzing Your AdWords Performance

1. Track your AdWords ROI using Google Analytics
2. Set up your Analytics account to track ROI
3. Track your AdWords ROI using Conversion Tracking
4. Get the most from your website with Website Optimiser

Expanding Your Reach & Focusing On Your Audience

1. Improve your Content Network performance
2. Reach more potential customers through the Google Content Network

Yes, and these are 100% free, and delivered through on demand video streaming! Just like how you watch videos thru YouTube.

In fact, here’s what it looks like.

Looks great isn’t it? What are you waiting for? Head on to the Google Adwords Online Classroom now!

This site looks great to average person, but digging further I “accidentally” found these text “hidden” in the header using H1 tags.

And these don’t only appear in the first page, but on almost every page on their site.

Gosh. I know Singapore Web Hosting is a very competitive industry… but are they trying too hard? Hiding text like that is definitely black hat SEO, isn’t it?

Let me know – would you lose trust in a site when you find sneaky text like that?

Well, stop worrying, stop analysing, stop being stressed.

Go build a link.

Yes, an incoming link.

There are tonnes of ways to do this:

1. Comment on someone’s blog
2. Write an article – submit it to Hubpages.
3. Write another article – submit it to eZineArticles.com
4. Submit a press release.
5. Answer someone’s question in Yahoo! answers.
6. Email webmasters. Ask for a link.
7. Write something interesting on your site. Tweet the URL out to your friends.
8. Participate in forums – change your forum signature to include your link.
9. Submit your site to directories.
10. Guest blog for someone.
11. Get your site listed in one of your local club’s website
12. Submit a WordPress theme / plugin
13. Submit a YouTube video
14. … the list goes on.

Remember, you can have the most beautiful site in the world, best ever sales copy that literally hypnotizes your visitors to empty their wallet with you, or the best email marketing and customer retention program in the world.

But without targeted traffic you will not have any sales. And traffic only comes from 3 places.

1. Referred Traffic – coming from the links to your site
2. Search Engine Traffic – and you get great search rankings largely based on number of links you have to your site.
3. Direct Traffic – either thru an offline campaign, or building (1) and (2) so successfully that people type your URL in right into the browser

Either way, you gotta start with building a link. Then another. And another.

Building valid, relevant and quality incoming links is the online visibility TRUMPCARD. And its going to be for some time.

Enough said.

Go build a link.

As someone who develops websites on a regular basis – I get my images from several online stock photo sources. These were my three main sources.

1. stock.xchng for free images (quality of images not as excellent)
2. StockXpert (where you can get a low resolution photo for USD$1. i.e. 1 credit)
3. iStockPhoto (used to be priced like StockExpert – but has risen their credits prices, so unless you get 2000 credits at a go or use their monthly subscriptions, you can’t find credits less than USD$1)

Well, sometime in early 2006, Getty Images bought over iStockPhoto for 50 million USD, and then in 2009, it acquired JupiterImages, which owned stock.xchng and StockXpert

These acquisitions practically made Getty Images the monopoly for microstock photos, since the only other major competitor Corbis has been selling their photos at prices at well over what most web developers will be willing to pay for (e.g. USD110 for a royalty free sunrise photo!)

Well, today I received a notification from StockXpert, saying they are ceasing operations, and all remaining credits can be ported over to iStockPhoto.

We are sorry to announce that beginning today, StockXpert will no longer sell new credits or accept new members. On February 11, 2010, searching and downloading at StockXpert will cease. This will be the end of image sales at StockXpert.

All SXP members have the opportunity to transfer their remaining credits to iStockphoto. iStock offers the highest quality affordable microstock imagery in the industry. Come and see for yourself. SXP credits will be honored 1 for 1 at iStockphoto.

Its an awesome move. Bad news for web designers though – meaning that we probably won’t be able to get awesome USD$1 images anymore.

Yikes. Its time to be a photographer.

The keyboard is small, but even as I misspell words, the iPhone automatically corrects the word for me. And I know as I hit the publish button on this screen, these words will be automagically be transmitted and transferred from my mini handheld device – halfway round the globe into the database of my web host (out of goodness know how many there are) and appearing on Blogopreneur.com for public consumption.

All these in less than 10 seconds.

Just a mere 20 years ago, how can someone even imagine this is possible?

With end users like me given this power to publish at the speed of thought, companies really need to realize how the “word of mouth” landscape has changed.

Word of mouth today no longer needs mouths. All it requires are two thumbs, an iPhone and a GPRS connection.

If consumers (your customers and prospects!) are publishing more information online than you every single day, how can your brand even escape from being drowned in their opinions?

How is your company coping with the changed landscape?

Rick Lau from Blogger Buzz explains:

FTP remains a significant drain on our ability to improve Blogger: only .5% of active blogs are published via FTP — yet the percentage of our engineering resources devoted to supporting FTP vastly exceeds that.

Its sad and will probably wreck havoc for a lot of bloggers. Even though 0.5% of the active blogs are published via FTP, I feel that this would have been the ones which are MOST active!

This means that the only way to have a blogger powered blog using your domain is via their “custom domain” settings, where you own a domain, but point it to the Google servers.

This also means that blogger affected by this will have to migrate their blogs back into Google’s servers. The Blogger Buzz post mentioned that they are going to provide tools and extensive documentation on how to do it.

But, frankly if I’d had to do that, I’d rather switch to WordPress and maintain control over the hosting. Not that I don’t like Blogger, but because there is so much more you can do when have more control over the files on your site.

Contradictory, I know.

And its frustrating.

No, its frustrating because sometimes, I do have the time to post – but being the perfectionistic me, I am always reluctant to do so before I get my thoughts sorted out and make sure my post REALLY made sense… practically waiting for the perfect blog post to appear before I hit the publish button.

Well, I never got the perfect blog post. In the end, all that waiting and thinking too much really paralyzed me.

Anyway, it time for me to get back to blogging here.

So I’ve learnt a lesson today and I hope this goes out to all “paralyzed bloggers” like me out there: Don’t wait for the perfect blog post. You might want to review your post to make sure it does not cause you to lose your job or destroy your reputation… but don’t stop posting because the post is not perfect. It will never be.

Recycle Bin – “Trash” feature

Have you every accidentally deleted a post, only to find that you clicked on the wrong button? If you’ve not done that before, some day you will! Haha, I’m not trying to be nasty, but frankly, accidents do happen. But WordPress 2.9 brings good news, with the implementation of a “Trash” feature, that works like the recycle bin in Windows. Accidentally deleted something? Now you can undo it.

Built In Image Editor

Now adding images to your blog post is easier than ever! With the new built in image editor, you can scale, crop, rotate and flip your images right from the WordPress admin screen.

Batch plugin update

Got outdated plugins… and lots of them? With WordPress 2.9, you can now update 10 plugins at once. Plus, before you do so, WordPress lets you know whether the plugin update would be compatible for you! Hurray! No more “upgrading then finding the plugin is incompatible” nasty issues.

Easier Video Embedding

Like video? Now you can embed videos in your blog posts easier than ever. Just specify the video URL in one line, and it gets embedded automagically when you publish. Now works with YouTube, Daily Motion, Blip.tv, Flickr, Hulu, Viddler, Qik, Revision3, Scribd, Google Video, Photobucket, PollDaddy, and WordPress.tv… and more to come in the next release!

So what are you waiting for? Read more about the update in the WordPress.org blog, and upgrade to WordPress 2.9 now!

The documentation I could find in the WordPress codec showed the ERD for version 2.5, and it has changed since.

I’ve omitted the columns of the tables – this is just a simple diagram to give you an overview of the relationships between the tables.

If you understand what ERDs are at all, most of the tables names should be descriptive enough for you to understand what is stored in them, and why they are related to other tables… but I thought the wp_terms_taxonomy and wp_terms_relationships stuff need a little bit more explaination.

So here is what I observed. (I shall go thru all the tables anyway)

Let’s start with the simplest.

• wp_options – WordPress options (blog name, description, permalink settings etc)
• wp_users – For each user you have in the database, you have one row here. Simple yeah? This table stores only the very commonly used fields
• wp_usermeta – To store other information about the user, like your name details, settings, and preferences. These are stored in a meta_key and meta_value pair
• wp_comments – One comment, one row. Each row is linked to one post.
• wp_posts – Stores the bulk of your WordPress data – your posts and pages content
• wp_postmeta – Like usermeta, this table stores additional information for each post, like your custom fields for each post.
• wp_links – Information on the links you have defined in WordPress admin -> Links section
• wp_terms – Stores a list of terms used in the database. A term can be a tag, a link category, or a post category
• wp_terms_taxonomy – Each row here is references a row in wp_terms, and basically it provides information about what this term is used for. In the case, say where you have a link category and a post category with the same phrase, you could have two rows in this table pointing to the same row in wp_terms.
• wp_terms_relationship – This table just links up the wp_posts and wp_links tables to the wp_terms_taxonomy table. Technically, things can go wrong here if you link up the wrong things, e.g. linking up a wp_posts row to a wp_terms_taxonomy row that defines a link category, so beware.

With this database design, the WordPress admin module does a lot of work to make sure the terms, taxonomy and relationships tables do not get messed up. The “three way relationship” you see between wp_terms_relationship, wp_links, and wp_posts is intentional – each wp_terms_relationship references to only EITHER a wp_posts record OR a wp_links record.

For example, it edits and appends a “-2″ to the slug for the term when you edit an existing link category to match an existing post category. However, when you create a new link category with the same name an existing post category, no new terms are created, only new taxonomy. There are still some small bugs in the way this is managed, but I must say the implementation has been fantastic so far!

If you are just starting out developing functionality for WordPress or doing heavy tweaking of codes, I hope this has given you a better overview of how things work in the backend!

They’ve really taken a notch up with their new web form generator – allow you not only to choose color schemes and background designs for your forms, but also customize your thank you pages with smart videos that teach your subscriber how to confirm your subscription.

Amazing.

Go read about it and have a video walkthrough on their blog post, and read what people have to say too!