Semoga blogger Indonesia semakin bersemangat!.

If you already have Disqus API Key. You need to download Disqus Comment System plugin from WordPress plugin repository or direct download from your WordPress Admin interface. After installation, you’ll find Disqus Plugin menu under Comments section then you can start exporting existing comments to Disqus by pressing Export Comments. You could manage comments on Disqus inside WordPress Admin, they give an iframe interface to their site.

The good thing from Disqus Plugin is Sync Comments feature which allowing you to sync between Disqus and WordPress built-in comment system. So, in next feature you’re able to retrieve comments for a post. Another point that makes me want to use Disqus is their system could help me in combating spam comments.

This site was extremely optimized and slump in several year because of inactivity. I am bit understand how SEO works before Google Panda applied and make the crowd screams. What the heck is google Panda? is Google has panda on its engine? Not really, it’s new search algorithm introduced by Google by February 2011. It makes low quality content pushed down from the SERP. Hold on, man. What is SERP?. Well, I guess we need be more detail about that awesome jargon, right?

Before we get lost, We may agree that search engine dominated by Google and this post will narrowing the search engine provider to Google. Now, what is SERP? SERP stands for Search Engine Result Page. In general talks, it can be express like this “I want my site is visible on the first page”. So, when a user typing their keyword on search box, Google will response with search result, right? and it will come with pages. When your web site are visible in the first page then you got SERP #1 which is awesome and you will likely get clicked by visitor. A myth tell me that visitor will voluntary clicking result until SERP #10 and they will bounce out and refining their keywords.

We should understand that there’s two “ways” to make our site visible to the mass based on keyword they put in the mighty search box on any search engine. In Google there’s two ways, as long as I know, there are Paid Search and Organic Search.

Paid Search vs Organic Search on Google SERP

You can use Adwords to add your site on Paid Search, as long as you have plan to market by advertising your website, you can go with it. Organic search are the opposite, your site visibility are based on organic reason and its free listing. SEO takes place on organic search, because it’s more robust than Paid Search. Your site can take place on SERP in certain amount of time, well, quite a long time.

There’s two kind of SEO, White Hat and Black Hat. Black Hat using techniques that violate Search Engine best practice and may lead your website vanish from SERP. Hidden text is one of black hat techniques. There’s a lot of black hat techniques, for education purpose, you can read about black hat seo. Again, don’t ever try to do this to your awesome site.

White Hat SEO techniques has same complexity like black hat but you’re assure to get long-standing result on SERP. What you can do on White Hat? here’s you can do:

Internal Optimization

1. Quality Content and Good Title
2. Treat your content as your write in word processor.
3. Add description on your meta tags
4. Put good keyword on your content
5. Avoid Duplicate Content and same page title
6. Clear navigation
7. Friendly URL preferable than hazardous URL such as http://www.mysite.com/index.php?p=article&c=seo-tip&id=1&year=2012
8. Submit your site map to Search Engine
9. Check your grammar, Google Panda sees this aspect.

External Optimization

1. Link building such as post your URL or other related content to social media service like Twitter, YouTube
2. Actively engage with related community and introduce your website organically.
3. Post sincere and truthful comment on websites but don’t spam.
4. Submit your website to famous search engine.

External optimization are more human than internal optimization. Internal Optimization needs geek or SEO Consultant to help you  or you may use the famous website application such as WordPress with additional plugins which very easy to install. Remember, WordPress is not suitable for every website and not the one and only solution.

We all know that IE 6, IE 7, and IE 8 has different implementation. There’s known hacks know as conditional comment, but I prefer say conditional comments are not hacking because the condition located inside HTML comments which will successfully validated by W3C Validation tool.

IE 9 has different story. This browser is the first browser implementing hardware acceleration using GPU on browser’s canvas. You will find smooth transition between scroll and animation on good GPU. Internet Explorer 9 not supporting HTML 5 and CSS 3 widely for good reason, both specification are still in draft until this article written.

Internet Explorer are easy to use for beginner despite the browser it self is automatically installed on every Windows. We often meet the same situation, Firefox preinstalled on most Linux OS based distribution such as Ubuntu or Fedora Core. Debian are using rebranding version of Firefox called Iceweasel.  For me, it’s same analogy to open source software, why not major distribution using Chromium or Midori for example. Why apple includes safari on their operating system instead of other browser?

If we say that our code broken in IE 9, then it’s broken to some extend. Remember when we talking about semantic, we don’t need to hack our HTML document. We should play with CSS that’s why conditional comment on IE quite handy without breaking the validation process. If you want all browser have same appearance as we intended then we just need one browser, regardless what is the best on the market.

Just dump IE 6 and we don’t need to over optimize to that browser. Leave PNG as is, don’t need to load htc or PNG hack. IE 6 was born more than decade a go, in computer world it could be specified as a dinosaurs browser. Microsoft it self want to dump IE 6 but the resistance of  most offices to change are another challenge. Why? because it will cost huge money to upgrade massive number of computers into new operating system.

If we talking about website then we shouldn’t have problem to push our user to use Firefox, Opera, Chrome, etc. But in many cases for intranet application, most of them was made to specific browser which is Internet Explorer. Using other browsers will lead to unexpected behavior which lead major business problem. This is one of many factor where management didn’t want to change their de facto browser. Remember, it’s not easy as we thought to change a browser in big organization.

The best bet is still use XHTML doctype if we want our website accessible for wide audience. There’s nothing wrong not to use HTML 5 doctype, HTML 5 still  working draft. Don’t take on pressure about validation when in some case we need to hack our code. HTML is HTML, it’s not special format for electronic data interchange. That’s why XML or even JSON takes place.

Love Internet Explorer like we love other browser. We still need Internet Explorer to grow and flourish our online business. Sadly, I use Google Chrome to write this article.

There’s many way to edit your template but I want to give an example using simple template. The template will contains index.php and style.css which is the basic requirement for creating wordpress theme. If you get the idea, you may applying this technique in any theme.

Start your engine

Get a dummy ad image either 728 or 480 in pixels width. if you didn’t have any dummy image then you could download  ads from IAB Ad Unit Guidelines. Choose one and right click to save the image in your computer. This is an easy task and now you have image file.

You also need to download your posts from your live blog, you could export from your host, You need wordpress export plugin to exporting to WXR, then import downloaded WXR file to your wordpress in localhost.

Create template structures

We need to create new template folder inside wp-content/themes. Let’s name it middleads. Now we have a new directory to put files on it. The file structure will like this

• wp-content
• themes
• middleads
• images
• ads.png
• style.css
• index.php

Now we need to create images sub directory and copy your dummy ads inside images directory. You could rename your dummy ads to ads.png if the file is in PNG format, if you have dummy file in JPG or GIF you should use the extension. For example ads.jpg or ads.gif. I will use ads.png in this tutorial, so you can adjust / substitute with your own file.

Create style.css

Now we need to create the basic of style.css. WordPress could recognize your template from this file. Open your favorite text editor and copy following code to your style.css file

/*
Theme Name: Ads in The Middle
Theme URI: http://www.nurasto.com/
Author: Dityo Nurasto
Author URI: http://www.nurasto.com/
Description: Put ads in the middle of archive posts list
Version: 1.0
License: GNU General Public License
License URI: license.txt
Tags: dummy
*/

Now, save style.css into our new template directory . If you use notepad, please don’t forget to put ” (double quotes) around the filename. For example : “style.css”. Notepad always put TXT extension in the end of filename if you don’t use double quotes.

Create index.php

Now we need to create index.php to implement the idea.

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
	<title>Middle Ads Example</title>
	<meta charset="utf-8">
</head>
<body>
<?php if(have_posts()): ?>
<?php $post_index = 0;  ?>
<?php $ads_location = ceil(get_option('posts_per_page') / 2); ?>
<?php while(have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>

<?php if($post_index == $ads_location): ?>
	<img src="<?php echo get_template_directory_uri(); ?>/images/ads.png" />
<?php endif; ?>

<div <?php post_class(); ?>>
	<h1><a href="<?php the_permalink(); ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a></h1>
	<div>
		Written by <a href="<?php get_author_posts_url(the_author_meta('ID')); ?>"><?php the_author(); ?></a>
	</div>
	<?php the_content(__('Read More ...')); ?>
</div>

<?php $post_index++; ?>
<?php endwhile; ?>
<?php else: ?>
<p>Sorry, you need dummy post to test this template script</p>
<?php endif; ?>
</body>
</html>

Save those lines to index.php. So, what’s the code doing? I’ll try to explain how it works

1. $post_index variable store how many loop occurring when posts are being read, so in every loop $post_index will be added by one. You can see $post_index++, this is when the incremental of $post_index happen.
2. $ads_location store maximum post per page and then divided by two. For example, you have 10 post in a page then the location will be 5. ceil will round decimal number into whole number, such 1.5 into 2.
3. $post_index is zero based. It will start from zero. Simply when loop #6 happen, actual $post_index value is 5. If you change to 1, then the ads will pulled up. If you change to -1, then the ads will pulled down.

Last step

Activate your new template and access your wordpress blog. I hope you could understand the concept and could implement this code to your favorite themes.

I am bit worried since this is my first time transferring a domain. Most of time I was using move service on Directi panel and telling to my new domain provider that I push my domain into my domain panel.

I want to share my experience during pre domain transfer process. Maybe could be useful for people who never transfer domain before, just like me.

You need to get EPP Code

In GoDaddy domain panel, you will get confused where you could get your EPP code. GoDaddy Authorization Code is your EPP. You could find it under Domain Information, then you will need to press Send by Email link.

Make sure you have white list for support at godaddy.com and wait for moment to receive your EPP code. If you didn’t get the email after 1 day you may doing alternative action.

Go to tools at the main menu and select Exportable Lists, you can create list of your domains there and check Authorization Code. Make sure you select none for format if you want plain CSV file since GZ needs to decompress using 7ZIP or equivalent software. Give reasonable time for GoDaddy system to process your request and will send you notification when its done. Now, you can download CSV file which will contains your domains EPP code.

You need to unlock your domain

Take a look on Domain Information whether your domain still locked, you need to release that lock before you could transfer domain to another registrar. In my case will be NameCheap.

Transfer your domain to Namecheap

Visit NameCheap website and find domain transfer. You will be provided with large text box and type your domain there. You could add EPP code along with your domain, separated by comma. Another way, just put your domain only, you will need to fill your EPP Code when check out.

The next window, namecheap will show you about availability for domain transfer. Domain transfer has some rules to follow such as:

1. Your domain must be 60 days
2. Your domain must be unlocked
3. Your domain administrative must have same address as you transfer. Just don’t change your whois information right before you want to transfer your domain.

Maybe there’s others rules applied. That’s what I know so far.

The payment process will held, I was charged for transfer domain which included the one year domain fee. Well, that’s make a peace of mind.

Next step, new registrar will send you a confirmation and approval email, then you will need 5 days to wait. Some condition may happen during transfer such as old registrar denied the transfer.

The last thing, we wait until transfer process is done.

I want to use latest version of LAMP LNMP pack. As we all know, Centos is an enterprise grade linux based operating system which means the updates will not as fast as bleeding edge distro such as Fedora Core. The situation is quite same like Debian vs Ubuntu*. We will use use third party repository to install software we need, so we don’t need to compile every software on production server. I will use EPEL and Remi’s repository in this article.

Disclaimer: I am not responsible for anything happen with your production server/VPS, you may test this article on your VirtualBox before applying into your VPS.

Before we start, you need to login as root or escalate to be root using su -

Get RPM from EPEL & Remi

Run this command one by one in your root home.

wget http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/epel/beta/6/i386/epel-release-6-5.noarch.rpm
wget http://rpms.famillecollet.com/enterprise/remi-release-6.rpm
rpm -Uvh remi-release-6*.rpm epel-release-6*.rpm

Update

yum update

Installing MySQL

yum install mysql mysql-server

Configuring MySQL

We need to make sure that mysql runs without innodb engine, so we need to adjust my.cnf. This step would be tricky and we will use default small configuration. Run this command one by one.

cp /etc/my.cnf /etc/my.cnf.bak
cp /usr/share/mysql/my-small.cnf /etc/my.cnf

There you go, we have copied the small configuration for mysql. Now, we need to tweak our my.cnf configuration because we need to skip innodb. You could use vi to edit the file.

vi /etc/my.cnf

We need to add these two following line under [mysqld]

default-storage-engine = myisam
skip-innodb

After you done just press : (double colon) and x, it will save your changes and exit from vi editor. Now you can start the mysql server

/etc/init.d/mysqld start

The initial start will create mysql table. Hopefully, it will create smoothly. You can run this command to makes mysql start on your VPS.

chkconfig mysqld on

It’s recommended to run mysql_secure_installation after mysql server installation.

Installing PHP and PHP-FPM

yum install php-fpm php-cli php-mysql php-pear php-apc

Now we need to make PHP-FPM running in our VPS. Run these command one by one.

/etc/init.d/php-fpm start
chkconfig php-fpm on

Installing Nginx

yum install nginx

Now, we need to adjust our nginx to be able to run php in our VPS.  Run this command

vi /etc/nginx/nginx.conf

Find these line in comment. Uncomment it then change as follows

 location ~ \.php$ {
            root           /usr/share/nginx/html;
           fastcgi_pass   127.0.0.1:9000;
            fastcgi_index  index.php;
            fastcgi_param  SCRIPT_FILENAME  $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
            include        fastcgi_params;
        }

index.php is not yet set as root document. So, we need to add index.php in same config file.

  location / {
            root   /usr/share/nginx/html;
            index  index.html index.htm index.php;
        }

You see, I am adding index.php in the end of the index configuration. Now the last step is restarting nginx and make it run at the start up.

/etc/init.d/nginx start
chkconfig nginx on

When server start, nginx will have delay for about a minute then it will run. We need to make sure that our configuration to LNMP is good. Run this command

echo '<?php phpinfo();' > /usr/share/nginx/html/info.php

Try to connect to your IP, in this case I will use localhost ip, http://127.0.0.1/info.php. If you see php information then your configuration to Nginx and PHP are good.

One last thing before I forgot to write, if you have permission problem with wordpress when updating or installing plugin you need to change default php-fpm user from apache to nginx.

vi /etc/php-fpm.d/www.conf

Find user and group whose own the php-fpm there then change to nginx. That’s it.

So far, I have problem with MySQL and have nightmare tweaking MySQL in such low end box, because 128MB VPS will hit swap for database driven website. In the end, I decided to upgrade my VPS to 256MB plan and the tension is gone. Booyah.

Thank you for reading. Please don’t hesitate to give feedback, suggestions or comment.

*If you have output from cat /etc/debian_version it’s mean that you are using Debian derivatives.

Dari apa yang saya alami dalam waktu sekitar dua tahun mencoba aplikasi ke Google Adsense ternyata banyak sekali faktor yang mempengaruhi tim Google Adsense untuk menerima aplikasi dan mengijinkannya suatu situs untuk menampilkan iklan. Dengan penuh kesadaran saya memahami maksudnya dan memang mencari konten yang orisinal sesuai standar. Saat ini saya mendengar adanya banned massal terhadap publisher yang kontennya tidak orisinil, saya tidak tahu rumor ini betul atau tidak.

Aplikasi GA saya diterima dengan akun email  Yahoo!, saya terheran – heran dan apa yang saya baca selama ini harus gmail namun yang saya alami lain dari apa yang saya baca. Terus terang, Saya senang sekali aplikasi saya diterima, tentu saja dengan beberapa kali penolakan juga.

Sewaktu diterima pun GA menerapkan dua kali approval, yang pertama adalah tahap approval untuk aplikasi kemudian pada saat setelah di approve, kita menaruh kode adsense di website, maka akan muncul pada panel adsense bahwa website sedang di review. Ketika saya sudah bisa melihat panel adsense saja senangnya minta ampun karena memang baru pertama kali. Di tahap ini banyak orang khawatir, ya memang khawatir setengah mati sepertinya.

Tidak selang berapa lama, saya mencoba untuk menerapkan kode ke situs saya yang ada sekarang ini, saya ikuti petunjuk yang ada pada halaman bantuan di sana. Nah, disinilah saya mengenal kosa kata baru ad unit. Terus terang, saya garuk – garuk kepala mengenai tujuannya, bolak – balik ke lamanan bantuan untu mencari tahu apa itu ad unit. Yang saya pelajari, GA hanya membatasi tiga ad unit dalam satu halaman. Ada lagi namanya Custom Channel di dalam Ad Unit dan saya belum eksplorasi apa gunanya. Saya mendapatkan ilmu baru bahwa peletakan banner bisa mempengaruhi pengunjung untuk mengklik suatu banner, sebelumnya saya sudah mengenal kata Above The Fold. GA tidak tanggung – tanggung memberi informasi letak yang baik untuk banner. Wah, makin seru nih.

Tidak lupa saya mencoba Adsense for Domain. Kebetulan saya punya domain berbahasa inggris yang tidak saya gunakan karena Februari 2012 juga sudah jatuh tempo, jadi saya coba domain tersebut untuk diparking. Proses parking domain akan memakan waktu jika mengubah DNS sekitar 48 jam baru bisa tampil dan jika belum verified maka akan muncul 404. Kita bisa mengubah Nameserver, dihosting kita mengenal ns1.hosting.com dan ns2.hosting.com, atau mengubahnya di domain control dengan menembakan domain ke server GA dengan menggunakan A record.

Selain itu, saya pengguna aktif webmaster tool dan analytics untuk klien dan ingin tahu bagaimana adsense dan analytics bisa diintegrasikan. Akun saya berbeda untuk kedua layanan tersebut dan ternyata akun adsense saya harus menjadi administrator di akun analytics, jadi baru bisa diintegrasikan.

Yang luar biasa lagi, saya belum pernah tahu mengenai Google Custom Search dan bagi saya hal ini sangat menarik untuk dipelajari, saya mencoba terapkan di situs yang sedang  saya garap saat ini tapi saya copot karena saya tidak tahu apakah sesuai dengan kebijakannya GA.

Ada beberapa fitur lain seperti mobile content, games, feed dan video. Hanya saja saya belum berpikir ke arah sana, memang sudah punya konten orisinal di youtube tapi nanti dulu, untuk feed juga nanti dulu.

Fokus utamanya selesaikan kerjaan sama template wordpress pribadi saya dulu, saya tidak tahu kapan selesainya template untuk situs pribadi saya ini.

Saya juga menemukan twitter AdSense untuk publisher Indonesia, bisa di follow di http://twitter.com/idadsense agar mendapatkan update. Saya melihat ditimelinenya bahwa konten Indonesia masih dalam proses, untuk search sudah bisa. Saat ini di website ini, banner GA akan otomatis warna background jika bahasa konten tidak didukung oleh GA, ini bisa diubah pada panelnya GA, karena warnanya tidak sesuai saya ubah menjadi putih atau dalam HTML color #FFFFFF.

Pengalaman yang berharga dan menarik akhirnya saya petik dari Google Adsense. Thanks Google Adsense for giving me a chance to be involved in your publisher program.

I was tried to check everything out and found my several latest post get HUGE ID, like this one 4.162.708.458. I never post 4 millions article to my website even combine with my revisions. I don’t remember what the exact error but will cause error as like “You don’t have permission to edit” or some kind like that when trying to edit content. In Linux based machine this won’t lead to any problem anyway.

So, I drill down the data and found out interesting auto increment jump from 210 suddenly jump to that number. I don’t want my next post will have ID in 4.162.708.459. Problematic post ID around 14 posts. So, I need a solution to make my next post will be 225. I am using store procedure to achieve my purpose, I know I can use PHP but mysql SP doesn’t need mysql_connect or mysqli_connect. Let’s see the code.

DELIMITER $$

CREATE PROCEDURE `wp_fix`(IN start_id BIGINT)
BEGIN
DECLARE done INT DEFAULT FALSE;
    DECLARE post_id BIGINT;
    DECLARE fix BIGINT;
    DECLARE posts CURSOR FOR SELECT id FROM wp_posts WHERE id > start_id;
    DECLARE CONTINUE HANDLER FOR NOT FOUND SET done = TRUE;

    SET fix = start_id;

    OPEN posts;

    post_loop: LOOP
        FETCH posts INTO post_id;
        IF done THEN
            LEAVE post_loop;
        END IF;
        SET fix = fix + 1;
        UPDATE wp_posts SET ID = fix WHERE ID = post_id;
        UPDATE wp_comments SET comment_post_ID = fix WHERE comment_post_ID = post_id;
        UPDATE wp_postmeta SET post_id = fix  WHERE post_id = post_id;
        UPDATE wp_term_relationships SET object_id = fix WHERE object_id = post_id;
    END LOOP;

    CLOSE posts;
    set fix = fix + 1;    

    set @qry = concat('ALTER TABLE wp_posts AUTO_INCREMENT = ',fix);
    PREPARE stmt from @qry;
    EXECUTE stmt;
END$$

Delimiter used to ignore semicolon from being parsed by mysql server, maybe it’s like CDATA in XML.

wp_fix procedure have one parameter, start_id, which is the last “good and proper” id. The procedure will read each post id and updating related tables to reflect the changes. So, any comments, meta, and category will still preserved.

The last thing, the procedure will set the auto_increment for wp_posts table to plus one of the last generated id. For example, if the generated id ends with 410 then the auto_increment will be set to 411.

To use this stored procedure is easy. Just open your phpmyadmin or mysql workbench and type

CALL wp_fix(210);

In this example, start_id parameter filled with 210. Hopes this will help you to regenerate post_id for wordpress post table.

I try to use Kannel 1.4.3 which I get it from EPEL repository and successfully installed, when I try to fire up bearer box I got this

DEBUG: AT2[modem1]: detecting modem type
INFO: AT2[modem1]: opening device
ERROR: AT2[modem1]: open failed! ERRNO=13
ERROR: System error 13: Permission denied
INFO: AT2[modem1]: Closing device

As usual, googling the solution and most of resource I found was getting hardcore modification and adding user to a group. Specifically, adding regular user in uucp groups, still it doesn’t work.

I remember when I was tried to connect to the network on Debian i got same problem and the solution is

usermod -a -G dialout nurasto

Now, my regular user can use usb modem as sms gateway without problem.