John Hesch

There is a thread over at Webmaster World about the best advice for being successful with Adsense. Lots of good ideas presented. The best advice I would say is to build your ads into your content and provide good content. I like how this site integrates Adsense into the first post of the page. This makes the ads appear less like ads and more like a part of the content. Notice how they got rid of the borders and colors to make the ads blend in? I have done something similar on this page but within the right side panel. They appear to be part of my content rather then advertising. Getting the ads to appear in the first post of the page is quite tricky but it can be done. I may experiment down the road.

I’ve been using Adsense since Google first introduced the program and it has been very profitable for me.

This IP address was spamming my KZION blog all night and into the morning until I banned his/her IP address.

212.31.45.191

The IP belongs to an ISP in Barcelona, Spain.

I have SPAM controls in place so it was no big deal but these spammers suck up a lot of bandwidth.

Google has a really cool interactive (Flash) presentation of the year in review. It’s an interactive timeline looking back on the past year.

Based on billions of searches conducted by Google users around the world, the 2004 Year-End Zeitgeist offers a unique perspective on the year’s major events and trends. We hope you enjoy this aggregate look at what people wanted to know more about this year.

We heard from the insurance company and the medication that James needs to take for the rest of his life will cost us $165 per month. Can you believe that? Our insurance will only cover 65% of the cost which leaves us with $165. It’s a shame but James is going to have to take into consideration the medical benefits provided by any future employer.

There is a financial aid program for rare diseases that we’re applying for. Hopefully we’ll qualify for some sort of a subsidy.

Google will be featured on 60 Minutes this Sunday. You can view part of the segment here.

I was looking through my raw access logs this morning and noticed a lot of entries similar to this one all from the same IP address.

205.252.49.146 - - [30/Dec/2004:05:22:42 -0700] “HEAD /refer/index.php?start=50&glimpse=1 HTTP/1.1″ 404 - “http://bdsm.net-pic.com” “Mozilla/5.0″

The only difference in the entries is the URL, some are for poker and others are for porn sites. What exactly is this clown trying to do? My guess would be some kind of referrer spoofing but I don’t have any referrer information displayed on my website.

Needless to say I have banned the IP address.

This is an awesome tool for checking to see what position a website lists on Google under specific keywords. For example, I entered LDS Radio and kzion.com and googlerankings returned

Keyword: lds radio
URL Pattern: kzion.com
Position 2.
Welcome to KZION LDS Internet radio
Full url: http://www.kzion.com/

What frustrates me is when I enter LDS music, KZION is ranked 54. I need some serious SEO of my website.

I found this link while reading some entries on Planet Search. If you want to see search results from sponsored links only, use this Google search engine.

Shared bookmarks for del.icio.us user jhesch on December 29, 2004

• bbPress Forum Software »
• My previous del.icio.us links

Shared bookmarks for del.icio.us user jhesch on 2004-12-28

• Cool Free Stuff - Computerworld –
  Here’s a look at the Computerworld staff’s favorite no-cost software Tagged as: win_progs
• SEO for Bloggers –
  How to increase your PageRank and better optimise your blog Tagged as: blogging search_engine

Gigablast released a new tool giving web sites the ability to add a topic specific search engine to their website. Let’s say you have a website about the TV show Alias. Gigablast gives you the ability to add a search tool that will search your website as well as up to 200 other websites that you designate. This provides an additional reason for visitors to return to your website.

I may add this tool to Planet Search, giving visitors the ability to search the websites that Planet Search aggregates.

Shared bookmarks for del.icio.us user jhesch on 2004-12-26

• Calendar: Lightning - Integrating Scheduling and Tasks into Thunderbird –
   Tagged as: mozilla
• Adobe Photoshop Tutorials –
   Tagged as: images tutorials
• How To: Hacking the Linksys NSLU2 –
   Tagged as: server
• Web Style Guide, 2nd Edition –
   Tagged as: html webdev

There have been some rumours over the past month or so that Google may be looking at Flickr. The acquisition makes sense to me and fits nicely in Google’s master plan to take over the world

Shared bookmarks for del.icio.us user jhesch on 2004-12-25

• FavIcon from Pics — how to create a favicon.ico for your website –
   Tagged as: html webdev
• Color Schemer - Online Color Scheme Generator –
   Tagged as: html webdev
• ShieldsUP!! –
  Scan your computer to check if it’s vulnerable to hackers Tagged as: security web_apps