Archives for October 2007

Malaysian WordPress community

31 October 2007 5 Comments

If you are Malaysian and use WordPress as your blog engine, I want to invite you to join our community at www.wpmalaysia.com/forum/. There you can ask for supports, give opinions and help other members to solve their WordPress problems.

I know many of Malaysian WordPress users are afraid to ask at WordPress support forum because they need to use English to communicate. But here at WP Malaysia, you no need to afraid because we use Malay language to communicate to each others.

But, if you prefer to speak in English, you are still being invited. We, the community members still will give you supports and entertain you with our helps as long as we could.

What are you waiting for? Let’s register and keep posting! 🙂

Is PR and Alexa rank important?

30 October 2007 17 Comments

After my site was removed from Google SERP (only index page effected), everything has changed. The recent Google PR update gives me PR0. I heard that many of other bloggers facing the same problem because they sell link ads on their website. Google has changed their PR algorithm and the changes have effect many blog sand websites who do the link selling. It is kind of a penalty for those who use the advantages of their high PR.

PR drop will affect my website revenue. Link selling is my second incomes after Adsense. But because Google has dropped my PR, so my earning will decrease too. That’s mean, I need to find other way to increase back my earnings. But the question is how?

Not only PR, my Alexa ranking also dropped. Before this, my site was around 50K but now it is 90K. Maybe because I removed the Alexa ranking code from my new theme but does Alexa rank is important for your site? If your main money income is from Text Link Ads, for sure it is important. Because Text Link Ads use many criteria to set the prices for each links sold on your website. Some of it is, Alexa rank.

Servers in Malaysia and Sweden hosted virus

29 October 2007 2 Comments

There is a report saying that recent virus attacks regarding the email containing malicious PDF files are coming from servers in Malaysia and Sweden.

“The emails, sent in bulk, looked like credit-card statements, and contained an attachment called ‘report.pdf’,” chief research officer Mikko Hypponen said in a statement.

When such PDF files are viewed on vulnerable machines, they start downloading software from servers in Malaysia or Sweden, which are now being cleaned, he said. “There will be more such attacks.”

-Mikko Hypponen (F-Secure Chief Research Officer)

To prevent your PC from being infected, a new security update for Adobe Acrobat Reader has been released a few days ago. But there is a question that I want to ask, what should we do to the company who hosted the server in Malaysia? Maybe we might need to ban the provider. Because of them, Malaysia get bad reputation in security and IT field.

PDF files used to attack computers [via Colbert Low]

WordPress 2.3.1 Released

27 October 2007 1 Comment

It is time for you to upgrade your WordPress to the latest version, WordPress 2.3.1. This new version has over twenty bug fixes. Some of the fixes are:

Tagging support for Windows Live Writer
Fixes for a login bug that affected those with a Blog Address different than their WordPress Address
Faster taxonomy database queries, especially tag intersection queries
Link importer fixes

You can see all the changed files at the WordPress Trac. Get the latest version from WordPress download page or you can use my compiled version which only has the changed files.

Download WordPress 2.3.1 (changed files only) – open until 27th November 2007.

5 tips to increase Adsense earnings

27 October 2007 14 Comments

I’m not the expert in Adsense but I would like to share my experience and knowledge about how you can increase your Adsense earnings. I’m sure many of you already know what is Adsense. Adsense is a way for you as the publishers to earn money from your site. As for the advertisers, you can get more traffics to your website by using the advertising programme from Adsense. It is a win-win situation. Ok, let’s go to the main point of this article, 5 tips to increase Adsense earnings .

The first time I got accepted into Google Adsense programme, I was so excited because I know that I can start making big money from it. But I was wrong. By get accepted into Adsense does not mean you can earn the money easily. The money that I got for the first five months were very low. It was about $2 or $3 per month. But after I read articles, do some experiments, asked opinions from Adsense experts other Adsense users, I end with these tips. And these tips have increase my Adsense earnings.

1. Use large ad size – First what I did to my site was, I use large ad size. The theory is simple. The bigger the size, the higher chances the visitors will click the ads. Large ad size serves more ads (3 or 4 ads per ad unit) and it gives more choices for visitors to click.

2. Place above the article – Next, put the ad unit above the article. As you can see on my website, the ad is placed above the article, below the title. So far, this is the best place if you want to place your Adsense ad. My CTR has increased since I put the large rectangle ad on that place.

3. Choose same colour – Third, make sure that your ad scheme colour is same with your website scheme. The ad background colour should be the same with your website background colour. This implies to the link and the text. Some readers might thought that they are links from your site and not ads. So your chance to earn more money will increase.