Adding Adsense to Google Sites is very easy and if you have a site on Google Sites then you probably already know how to do this. But for those who are curious I have explained how to add Adsense to a Google Site below.

Save your page, and then next to the Create Page and Edit page buttons you will see More Actions button. Clicking on it opens a menu, now select Manage Site.

In the left sidebar of the Site Manage page click on Monetize.

Now click on Montize this site button.

You will be asked whether you would like to create a new adsense account or Use an existing adsense account. If you do not have an adsense account you can create one now.

If you already have an adsense account provide your adsense account email address and pin/postal code or last five digits of the phone number that you have on your adsense account. Press next and you are done. now your adsense account will be used to display ads on your Google Sites pages. But first you will have to put the ads on.

Back to the Monetize page, you can select to display Adsense ads in the sidebar of all your pages. Doing this Adsense ads will appear in your sidebar after all your existing widgets like navigational links and recent activity. You can then edit your sidebar and move the Adsense to the top or between widgets.

You can also place your Adsense ads on individual pages by editing them and choosing AdSense from the Insert menu.

Google Sites will now ask you to choose the format and style of your ad and then you are done. Google Sites Help has a section on using Adsense on Google Sites, refer to it for information or use the comment form below to ask me I am not an expert but I will try to help.

If you ask me they are all useless since Wordpress has built in functionality to fetch, cache and display external rss feeds. The function to do that is Fetch_Feed. It uses SimplePie and FeedCache to do the job and it is very effecient. However, the Wordpress Codex for this function shows only one usage example for this function which is fine if you are not a person who has good knowledge of PHP, Wordpress tags and HTML. But there is a lot more you can do with this function. To learn what else you can do with it you need to read the SimplePie documentation. Using Simplepie and Wordpress template tags you can display RSS feeds in many different ways.

I love Wordpress, but each day it is becoming more and more complicated for me. For example if I need to choose a plugin to do some job and I search for it on Google, the results will show me many plugins that do the same thing. Now the problem is that how do I choose the best one? I want to use things that do not cause heavy server load. I prefer plugins with caching abilities, better code and effecient resource usage. But believe me not many plugins out there are that good. They are ok for small blogs but on busy websites with lots of visitors they create problems. So the solution to this problem is to first look at the Wordpress it self and use it’s own functions to do the job.

We need a solution that could help us get all the information from our friends and family in an easy and quick manner.

Some smart developers realized our need, accepted the challenge and took it seriously to develop a new web application called “friendfeed“.

FriendFeed describes itself as:

Sign up for FriendFeed, invite some friends, and get a customized feed made up of the content that your friends shared — from news articles to family photos to interesting links and videos. FriendFeed automatically imports shared stuff from sites across the web, so if your friend favorites a video on YouTube, you get a link and a thumbnail of the video in your feed. And if your friend likes a news story on Digg, you get a link in your feed. FriendFeed makes all the sites you already use a little more social.”

In easy words FriendFeed is a feed of all the online activities of your friends that are accessible via RSS feed. Like their facebook, twitter, youtube, blogging, digg, stumbleupon and other activities. Check the list of supported sites.

FriendFeed is supercool, however there is a little difficulty. In order to get all the updates from your friends it is important that your friends have already made an account on FriendFeed and has shared their account information for the websites that they use.

You can add an imaginary friend which means you can add a friend’s RSS feed but adding all those feeds manually for each friend is difficult and not an ideal situation. So it would be better if you just invite your friends to give FriendFeed a try. I have invited my friends already and I am hoping that since they are so addicted to social media they are definitely going to love friendfeed.

People all over the web are talking about FriendFeed and many of them are comparing FriendFeed with Twitter. I think this is a totally wrong comparison. While Twitter is a microblogging site that helps you publish tiny bits of content. FriendFeed is more like a feed aggregator. That merges RSS feeds for a person and publishes a unified feed for that person and then helps sharing this feed with other people. I think FriendFeed is cool and I feel that I will be using it a lot in future. Please feel free to join me on friendfeed.

We often forget that computers need maintenance for better performance. Otherwise after a while they will get slower and you might face some serious issues. Here is a quick list of things you should do at least once a month to keep your computer healthy.

1. Run Disk Clean Up wizard once every month. (Windows XP | Windows Vista)
2. Back up your files.
3. Uninstall programs you don’t need any more.
4. Delete unwanted files and folders.
5. Organize your files and folders.
6. Check your Hard Disks for errors. (Windows XP | Windows Vista)
7. Open disk defragmenter and analyze your disks and then Defragment those who need to be defragmented. (Windows XP | Windows Vista)
8. Run an anti-spyware program to scan your computer for internet threats.
9. Run an anti-virus program to scan your computer for viruses.
10. Make sure automatic updates are turned on.

 
I don’t do all of these things once a month. I clean up disks twice a month and defragmentaion once every three months. How you maintain your windows PC? Please share your tips in the comment box below.

Open Clip Art

Try Open Clip Art for all your clip art needs. It has whole wealth of Clip Art organized in tags and most of these images are in Public Domain which allows you to reuse them anywhere you want. You can even download the entire Open Clip Art collection to your hard disk in svg and png formats. See how you can integrate Open Clip Art with Open Office or use it with Microsoft Office Applications. Some files at Open Clip Art may not be available in png format you can still download the SVG file and convert it using free and open source tools such as Inkscape or the Gimp. You can also use these images on Google Docs and Google Sites too. But please do not link directly to the image file on Open Clip Art’s server. Instead download the png file to your hard disk and then upload it to your document.

Flickr

Try Flickr’s Advanced Search to look for images, pictures, photographs, drawings and other art work that are released under a creative commons license that allows you to redistribute or build your work upon them. This license is called Creative Commons Attribute. You will be surprised to see how much high quality content is available for you to re-use.

Remember using someone else’s work without their permission is not just bad manners but it is also copyright infringement. Most people on the web do not mind sharing their work, after all thats why they publish it on the web in the first place. Instead of stealing someone’s work it would be much better if you ask them politely to use their work on your website or document. Don’t forget to mention that you will give them the credit for the work.

Due to some troubles with a few of my Wordpress blogs. I have recently learned a lot about security and protecting my Wordpress blogs from hacking. There is no way to be 100% sure that your website couldn’t get hacked. However, using the best practices described below, you can make it very hard for someone to crack into your Wordpress installation. Taking these steps does not take much time but it saves you from a lot of trouble, even if your website get’s attacked you can fight back quickly and restore your website easily. Without these security precautions you not only make your Wordpress installtion vulnerable, but you also make it difficult for yourself to recover from horrible accidents. So lets begin securing of your blog:

Back up often

You have heard this many times. Here it is once again, back up your website and database at least once a week if you update your website daily, or atleast once a month if you don’t update that often. But please back up. Do not trust your webhost when they tell you that they have back ups of your website created on a daily basis. It is very smart to have backups on hand just in case something goes terribly wrong with you or your webhost. There are many Wordpress plugins to back up your database. I use Wordpress database manager plugin called wp-dbmanager. Using this plugin you can schedual weekly backups to be sent to you via email.

Stay Updated

Whenever there is a new version of Wordpress, upgrade your installation as soon as possible. Since 2.7 Wordpress has automated the upgrade process or you can manually update to latest version. It only takes about ten minutes but it saves you from a lot of trouble. Older, outdated and upsupported installations often get hacked. Once hacked it is a very lengthy process to clean your blog and upgrade. So protect yourself now upgrade your Wordpress.

Also keep your plugins updated to newest versions. If you notice that a plugin author has not released an updated version since a long time go to plugin’s home page and check its status. If the author has abandoned the plugin then stop using it right away.

Strong Passwords

If no one has ever stolen your password then it does not mean that no one ever will. There are some really bad people out there who randomly pick their victims and crack their passwords to take control of their websites. Wordpress has strong password indicator which you can use to generate a strong password. A strong password contains atleast 8 characters a combination of alphabates and numbers and special characters. Avoid using words that can be found in a dictionary.

You should have strong passwords not only for your blog’s admin interface, but also for your site’s SSH shell and FTP access. Doing so you make it very difficult for hackers to crack your site and access your files via ftp. Try to use SSH or SFTP instead of plain FTP.

But strong passwords are difficult to remember. Well you should then read this wonder post from the blog herald that tells you how to create strong but memorable passwords. You can also generate a strong password using Aautomatic password generator tool.

File Permissions

One drawback of using Wordpress or some of its plugins is that sometimes you need to make a few files writeable on your server. For security it is important that you keep file permissions as strict as possible. It is ideal to have your directories file permission set to 755 and your files 644. See Wordpress Codex Changing File Permissions.

Default Username

At the first installation Wordpress automatically creates a user account with the username admin. Now using the default username means that half of cracking is done without any guessing. Unfortunately it is not possible to change this username from the Wordpress admin interface. However you can change it by running a simple mysql query.
Update tableprefix_users set user_login='newusername' where user_login='admin';

Replace tableprefix with the table prefix in your wp-config file. If you didn’t add a table prefix then it would the default one which is wp_ . You can run this query or manually edit table in phpMyAdmin or you can also run this query using wp-dbmanager plugin.

Other tips:

Remember, no website is 100% secure. But taking these precautions reduces the chances of your blog or website getting compromised easily. The following web pages has more tips on securing your Wordpress even more.

Hardening Wordpress
Wordpress Security Tips and Hacks
Wordpress Security Whitepaper

There are several ways for a webmaster to notify the users about updates on their website. There are even free tools available that can publish an RSS feed for a static webpage (I haven’t used any of these and have no idea if they work with Google Sites or not). But since on this blog we rely heavily on the free tools provided by Google, so I will talk about using Google Groups as the solution.

Go to Google Groups and press the Create a group… button. On the Create a group page fill in the information about your site doing so your group and site will have same title and description. Under the option Choose an Access level, select Announcement-only and press the Create my group button. You will be then asked to verify by writing the letters shown in an image to prevent spam. Again press Create my group button. You will be then asked to add a few members to your new group. If you have the email addresses of people who would like to subscribe your group then paste them here or Skip this step.

Now you will be taken to your new group’s homepage. Copy the link from the address bar of your browser. Now go back to your Google Site. At the bottom of your sidebar you will see a link Edit sidebar, click it. On the next page click on Add a sidebar item. A popup will appear showing a few types of items you can add to your sidebar. Select Text and press ADD button. Now you will see a Text Box in your sidebar. Click on the edit link. In the popup window, Give it a title like “Newsletter” or “Subscribe” or “Mailing list”. Below provide the link to your newly created Google group with text informing visitors about your group.

The picture on your left shows how we have used the textbox on our sample website Bashir’s pet shop and notice how we have provided the link to the newsletter. Running a newsletter is no big deal, you can keep your subscribers updated about the recent changers you made to your web site, you can tell them about new products, share something useful with them and they will love you. See this page for some general email newsletter writing tips.

This is happening with all platforms and web browsers and to every one accessing Google websearch from anywhere in the world. So if you are seeing it, do nothing or start using some other search engine for a while.

This made me realize how much we are relying on Google. May be we should consider other ways to do our work on the web. But honestly, I have tried Yahoo Search and MSN Live search. The results were most of the time absurdly irrelevant.

Anyways, Google Engineers are working to resolve the issue. Meanwhile Google’s support pages, forums and help groups are all down due to heavy traffic. It also makes me wonder what impact this accident is going to have on the Internet, Google and Websites that are getting so much negative branding by this error.

UPDATE: Issue Resolved

Fortunately there are some third party tools and chat clients available that you can use in such situations to protect yourself and to have some extra fun.

YaHaven!

Yahaven is anti-boot, anti-flood third party Yahoo! Chat Client. Yahaven has Chat, IM, Voice and Webcam. All the features of official Yahoo and then some more. Such as flood protection and boot protection. It also has effecient ignore filters. What I personally liked about Yaheven is that it has Custom messages. When pressed these buttons you send a text message to the room. These messages can be edited. For example, when I select a user from user list and press custom message one it says:
%s >> hi how are you today? %s is the nick of the user.

YaHaven is a bit complicated. With all these extra features it could be a little difficult for a new user to get it working right. But once you get it working, you will be amazed by performance.

YahElite

YahElite is a feature rich Yahoo Chat Client. It is around for sometime now and is widely used. It promises better spam, flood and boot protection.

YahElite has an easy to use interface but it is so feature rich that the buttons for all these features may confuse a new user. But don’t worry YahElite has better support and help options available on their website. They have tutorials, forums, FAQs and contact options under the help menu on the official website.

There is something interesting and totally new with YahElite. Its called Personalitys. Loadable personalitys are simple text files that contain patterns that transform your text into another form that can be dramatically different from your normal speech. You can create different personalitys and even share them with others. Read official instructions.

Pidgin

Pidgin, (previously Gaim) is an open source universal chat client that not only supports Yahoo but also MSN, Gtalk, AIM, ICQ, IRC and countless other protocols. The downside is that it does not support voice and webcam. You can join Yahoo Chat rooms but there will be no voice, no audio conferencing and no video chat. It also does not have any extra spam features to protect you from PM floods. But if you just want to text message then Pidgin is a great tool to chat with friends on different protocols at once.

YAM (Yet Another Messenger)

YAM Chat Client is my favorite third party Yahoo Chat Client. It does not support webcam but it fully supports voice and audio in Chat rooms. It also has a very easy to use interface and all the features are easy to understand and easy to use. It also has very nice sound effects and has themes support. It lacks web cam support and while other chat clients open word verification CAPTCHA right there in the chat window YAM opens it in new browser window.

These third party chat clients are fun but if you want to use the official Yahoo Messenger then there are some tips that you can use to protect yourself from abuse, spam, flood and booting. We will discuss these tips in the next post. Meanwhile, please let us know if there is some other yahoo chat clients you have tried and found useful.