Although I've been experimenting in Swan Bros with Google Adsense for content, Adsense for Search, Chitika, Kontera and Widgetbucks, I've never tried "Competitive Ad Filter" from Adsense at all. I've noticed the function a long time ago, but I thought it was just to block ads from your competitors.
Recently I did some research about avoiding low CPC ads, I found out how "Made For Adsense" sites are stealing traffic & revenues from genuine bloggers with their low CPC ads (too late, you might say :-p). That's how I found out AdsBlackList.com and without any hesitation I joined it, and got the list of black listed sites(MFA and low CPC) for my keywords. Then I activated "Competitive Ad Filter".
It's been only one day, so it's a bit early to say how effective it's. But I'll keep you updated with my success story (hopefully).
How about you? How have you been coping with low CPC ads?
A few weeks ago, I joined Kontera after reading positive feedback from Randy Brown. In-Text advertising was very new for me too so I thought to give it a go. It was quite easy to join although Kontera used to be available to only the sites with minimum 500,000 page views per month. I thought I was quite lucky to be able to join with small traffic.
It was easy to set up too. I just had to copy and paste the script in my template and Kontera did the rest. Within 24 hrs, I could see the in-text links showed up with double lines underneath. I was really happy... at least for a while.
After a few days later I checked the results. They are nowhere near what Adsense or Chitika offers. It's a tiny bit more than 1 cent a click. Considering the visitors "lost" to the ad sites, it's not worth running at all. So I removed the Kontera after two weeks. You might say it's too early to quit.
Kontera worked well for Rany Brown and John Chow and they recommend it a lot. However, Kontera didn't impress me at all. So bye bye, Kontera!!!
What's your experience with Kontera? Please let me know.
Alright now you've either received $900 tax bonus from ATO as part of economic stimulus package or you'll receive soon. The ATO said not to contact them until mid May regarding the payments.
How are you going to spend your $900 tax bonus? Please take the poll below.
Here I've listed some of the things people could do.
- Spend it on groceries, clothes, cosmetics, home entertainment systems or gadgets. If you believe spending on made-in-overseas stuffs will promote our economy, that's alright. That's what our Prime Minister and Treasurer want too.
- Save it for the rainy days. If you do, you should save it in high interest accounts only. But these days the interest rates are too low to motivate people to save.
- Buy shares. The share prices have dropped a lot and there are so much bargain out there. If you pick some strong businesses and invest for a few years, you'll be in a great position. But you must make sure you can sleep well at night.
- Contribute to your super. If you're a low or mid income earner, you can contribute it to your super. You can get the benefit of low share prices and co-contribution from the government. But you can't touch it until you are 65.
- Pay off your debts. If you have any debt or mortgage, I strongly recommend you do that, especially personal loans or credit card debts.
- Donate it to charity. I guess in current economic situation, charities may not be receiving as much donation as they used to. I'm sure they will need it now more than ever.
So what are you going to do with your tax bonus? Please take the poll.
Yesterday I received the following email from Blogger saying that they locked my blog as it has been identified as a potential spam blog!!! It really freaked me out and needless to say I was so upset with the quality of their "Automatic spam detection". When I checked in Google forum, I found out that I wasn't alone with that problem.
I totally understand Google has to fight splogs because one in every five blogs in blogspot is a spam blog. I really appreciate Google's initiative to block those splogs too. However, they should have a better detection system and they should make sure not to penalise wrong people.
Hello,
Your blog at: http://swanbros.blogspot.com/ has been identified as a potential spam blog. To correct this, please request a review by filling out the form at http://www.blogger.com/unlock-blog.g?lockedBlogID=????????
Your blog will be deleted in 20 days if it isn't reviewed, and your readers will see a warning page during this time. After we receive your request, we'll review your blog and unlock it within two business days. Once we have reviewed and determined your blog is not spam, the blog will be unlocked and the message in your Blogger dashboard will no longer be displayed. If this blog doesn't belong to you, you don't have to do anything, and any other blogs you may have won't be affected.
We find spam by using an automated classifier. Automatic spam detection is inherently fuzzy, and occasionally a blog like yours is flagged incorrectly. We sincerely apologize for this error. By using this kind of system, however, we can dedicate more storage, bandwidth, and engineering resources to bloggers like you instead of to spammers. For more information, please see Blogger Help: http://help.blogger.com/bin/answer.py?answer=42577
Thank you for your understanding and for your help with our spam-fighting efforts.
Sincerely,
The Blogger Team
P.S. Just one more reminder: Unless you request a review, your blog will be deleted in 20 days. Click this link to request the review: http://www.blogger.com/unlock-blog.g?lockedBlogID=????????
I've responded and requested a review. So far no reply yet. But I don't see the warning in my Dashboard any more, so I guess it has been fixed now. I hope they fix this problem before they annoy more users.
I have been working on creating a Super Co-contribution Calculator. Superannuation co-contribution is a great way to increase your retirement savings, and it is an Australian Government initiative to help low to middle income earners save for their retirement.
So how much co-contribution can you get from the government?
If you're eligible, you can get $1.5 co-contribution for every $1 you contribute - the maximum co-contribution amount being $1,500. The co-contribution reduces by 5c for every dollar you earn over $30,342 up to $60,342 for the financial year 2008-2009. Use the Super Co-contribution Calculator below to calculate how much you can get.
* You are entitled to a $20 of co-contribution if the calculated co-contribution amount is between $0 and $20.
# This is the amount you should contribute to maximize return on your investment.
What are the eligibility criteria?
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It has been a few weeks since I first installed Searchles related posts widget in my blog. So what is my opinion?
These are some of the features I like about Searchles Related Content Widget.
Ease of setup and configuration: It's so easy to set up. You don't need to worry about java scripts. Choose colors and size of the widget, and it's ready to go. The number of links displayed depends on the size of the widget. In comparison, it's way easier than installing Adsense (not that Adsense is hard to install).
Doesn't rely on tags/labels alone: It will work even if your site doesn't have labels/categories. I guess because Searchles scans all pages to display, it's more accurate than relying on labels.
Last week the Australian government started giving away $900 tax bonuses. Although I don't mind that payout, I never thought this was the best way to spend our taxes to stimulate the economy. After reading some news articles about 340,000 students might end up with $1850 bonus and accountants swamped by tax liars coming clean to get $900, I felt totally disgusted to know how inefficient this stimulus package is going to be.
A good portion of these students might end up spending the bonus outside Australia taking holiday, etc. Some bonus-recipients might save, some might spend wisely while others gamble it. What about me? I'll DEFINITELY save majority of it. I consider this bonus as the money we, tax payers, will have to pay back in the future in the form of higher tax or lower standard of health, transport or education. There is nothing like a free meal.
I believe the government should have spent the money on people who lost jobs, struggling families and building more infrastructures in the country. Especially new infrastructures will create more jobs and stimulate other industries with better roads, etc. I hope the government gets it before it's too late.
Take a poll on how you're going to spend the tax bonus?
Today I downloaded and installed Windows Myanmar Translator (Beta Version) from Myanmar NLP. It's a Windows-based software to translate English phrases to Myanmar (Burmese). It has English-Myanmar dictionary and you can add more vocabularies to the database too.
So what are my thoughts on it? The translation is not accurate. I tried two simple phrases - "I want to have dinner" and "Can you help me?". You can see the translated phrases in the screenshots below.
အောက်ဖော်ပြပါ Feature များ အသုံးပြုနိုင်အောင် ဆက်လက် ဆောင်ရွက်လျက် ရှိပါသည်။
Features of Version 1.0
(1) Complex Sentence Translation
(2) Windows based and Web based
(3) WordNet usage
(4) Parser Model Extending
Features of Version 2.0
(1) Statistical Based Machine Translation
In the mean time, we still can use it as a English-Myanmar dictionary software, which is not a bad thing.
Download Windows Myanmar Translator and Fonts.
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Paypal is a very widely used payment method on the net. Ebay uses it. Other online merchants use it to sell their products. I've used it many times (all for small amounts) and it seems quite secure. However there are a few things to notice with using Paypal. I'll talk about Paypal's "Funding Options".
When you send money to someone using Paypal, the default payment method may be from your debit account. As you can see in the screenshot above "Instant Bank Transfer" from my savings account is the default option, and Paypal states that "Paypal will use Visa xxx xxx to fund this transaction if your bank does not have enough funds."
Well it sounds very easy and simple. Paypal doesn't charge you if it has to use "Backup Source" because you don't have enough funds in your primary source. But the catch is your bank will!!! If you don't have enough funds in your debit account, once Paypal tries to withdraw funds from it, the bank will charge you "dishonor fee", which normally is around $30.
So here are a few tips for how to avoid dishonor fee from your bank while using Paypal
- Make sure the funding source you select has enough funds
- DO NOT ever rely on Paypal's automatic backup source option. Your bank may end up charging you hefty fees
- If you accidentally paid and you realize it doesn't have enough funds, transfer money to that account as soon as possible. Go and deposit it personally. Sometimes Paypal doesn't charge straight away. I got away like that once.
- If you don't have enough funds in default funding source, click "change" and choose another source with enough funds
Once again, Don't rely on Paypal's automatic backup source option.
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It has been a while since Google upgraded its Adsense for Google Search. The new version has improved features such as
- you can add keywords to target particular ads and results,
- you can manage the search box through "Manage Ads" sub-tab and
- you can select where you want your ads to appear on your search results pages.
But I still prefer the classic Google Search for Adsense because visitors can select if they want to search your site or the web. I think it's important to give the visitors that option. Besides, adding keywords might bring up unrelevant ads and search results, which can annoy users. That's why I decided to stick to the classic version.
Unfortunately you can no longer get the classic search box from Adsense. You need to copy the script below and replace codes in red with your details.
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Nokia N73 has been around for a few years but many people are still using them. I've used it too and it's one of the best mobile phones I've ever seen. For N73 lovers, I found a nice list of Nokia N73 Games, Applications and Themes. I hope you enjoy it.
Nokia N73 Games:
Darkest Fear II
Splinter Cell double agent
Skyforce
Sky force Reloaded
Asphalt 2 3-d
Brothers in Arms 3-d
Street fighter Alpha
Christmas Midnight
The Sims 2
K rally
Doom
Krish Cricket
MV cricket
Black Hawk down
Call of duty 3
A Knights tale…
Dig. chocolate Night club
Chocolate TOWER
Medal of honor
fifa 2007
Brothers in Arms 2-d
Mission Impossible
New York Success
War of the worlds
Street Basket BAll
Prince of Persia warrior within
XIII
Sonic
Mid town madness
Player.One.Freddie.Flintoff.All-Round.Cricket
TOPGAM Roland Garros
CAESAR MULTiLANG
Rally evolution 3-d
Asphalt Urban 3
Beach Ping Pong
Need for Speed carbon
Extreme air snowboarding
Final Fight
Fish labs heli strike
Crime city
Lemonade Tycoon
Metal Slug
True Crime New York city
Crash and Trash
Prince of Persia The 2 thrones
Roger Federers Tennis Open
The Crow
Virtual Tennis
V-rally
V sun plus
Wimbledon 2006
Super minners
Today I found Searchles Platform when I was looking for a widget for related posts. As soon as I read about their "related posts" widget or "related content widget", I was hooked.
On the other hand, Searchles' related posts widget doesn't require any tweaking from my side except choosing colours, sizes, etc. Besides they don't use labels or tags. They determine relevancy by spidering your site's content. It works pretty well as you can see in the picture below. The best thing is you can get stats about visits from related post links.
The Searchles Discovery Platform is the culmination of all the Searchles/ Dumbfind technology that has been building over the years. To kick off the platform we have released a related content widget aimed at blogs and content websites looking to make their sites a bit more sticky. Over the coming months, we will be releasing more widgets to build out a suite of products designed to make your users stay put, and hopefully earn you some money along the way!I think this is by far the best related posts widget and the easiest to install too. It's good for Blogger, Wordpress, etc and forums too. Read More......
When was the last time you shop around your car insurance (Comprehensive or Compulsory Third Party Personal (CTP) or Third Party Property)? Are you disappointed because the premium was increased a lot compared to last year?
If you have never shopped around or haven't shopped around for at least a few years, chances are you may be paying more (a lot more) than what you should be paying.
Today I decided to do some research about comprehensive car insurances and it was quite an eye-opening experience. The premiums differ a lot between different insurers and some of the "famous" brands did not live up to their fame.
I used the following information for comparing insurance premiums among AAMI, NRMA, ING, GIO, YOUI, Justcar, Allianz, Commbank and Budget Direct. Please note that I did not consider the quality of customer services and repairs, ease of claims, etc in it.
Location: Sydney City, NSW 2000
Car Type: 2008 TOYOTA COROLLA ASCENT ZRE152R F/INJ 4 DOOR SEDAN 4 CYL 1.8L 4 SPEED AUTOMATIC
Age of Driver: 30
Year first licensed:1998
Car Use: Private (including to or from work)
Any other car: No
Any non-standard accessories or fittings: No
Current mileage:100km
Finance: No finance
Purchas price: $22000
Parking: Garaged
Additional driver: No additional driver specified but the option is set to cover any one who drives this car
| Insurer | Annual Premium | Standard Excess | Extra Excess for This Driver |
| AAMI | $842 | $550 | $0 |
| Budget Direct | $930 | $600 | $0 |
| Allianz | $1115 | $550 | $0 |
| Justcar Insurance | $1133 | $600 | $700!! |
| Commonwealth Bank | $1206.65 | $600 | $0 |
| Youi | $1258.59 | $600 | $0 |
| NRMA | $1306.55 | $600 | $0 |
| ING | $1425 | $500 | $0 |
GIO didn't give me any online quote.
So AAMI offers the best price for this situation, followed by Budget Direct, which has been voted as the best by Cannex Star Ratings across all states. I tried my own situation and Budget Direct gave me the best premium. Justcar doesn't seem to like new cars (at least 2008 TOYOTA COROLLA ASCENT ZRE152R)!!!
My two cents: people should shop around or do research before they buy insurance.
Disclaimer: This is just for educational purpose only. The author is not responsible for any consequences or losses due to actions taken solely based on the examples in this post.
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Whether English is your native language or not, there will be a time you don't know a particular word is but you know the concept. I myself have experienced it so many times and it's very frustrating.
Here is a good "Reverse Dictionary" site called OneLook. You just need to type the concept with a few keywords. Then it will show you a list of possible words you're looking for. For example, let's say you forgot the word for "monkey bars" but you know that it's a bar kids climb in playground. So type something like "kids playground climb bar". Bingo!!! You'll see "Monkey Bars".
Here is a list of Java games for mobile phones of multiscreen (128x128, 128x160, 176x208, 176x220, 240x320). They should be compatible with different brands such as Nokia, Sony Ericsson, etc. Enjoy!!!
Yesterday by a very massive luck, I found a very popular book (ရတနာသံုးပါးကို ယံုႀကည္ကိုးကြယ္ဆည္းကပ္လာသူတစ္ေယာက္အေႀကာင္း (ဆန္းလြင္) or About A Person Who Has Become A True Believer of Yadanar Thone Par)of U Sun Lwin (U San Lwin) on the net. I've been so keen to read it but I couldn't find it in any Myanmar ebook site. Just imagine how happy I was when I first saw it. Please visit here to read it online. You can download it as a PDF file if you want. It's about 76MB. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do.
I've listed some Australian sites that will help you persoanl finance with researching, comparing and choosing superannuation funds, savings, term deposits, loans, credit cards and property prices. Before you do anything with your finances, use relevant links to do some research and it will save you big bucks.
Choose Best Superannuation Funds
Super Ratings
Selecting Super
Invest Smart
Home Loans, Credit Cards, Saving & Transaction Accounts, Term Deposit Comparisons
Info Choice
Property (Houses and Apartments)
For Sale Listings
Real Estate
Domain
Residex FindMeAHome (shows all houses for sale in a suburb, with an estimated fair price)
Suburbview (searches the Suburbs you want from Australia’s Largest Real Estate sites)
I've listed a few good practices for computer users. Many of you might have already known and used them. It's not comprehensive, so depending on situations, some will need more security and configurations than the ones listed below. But I hope it's useful for you. I've divided them into security (things that may protect you from attacks, downtime) and convenience (things that will give you ease of use).
Please share your tips and tricks by adding in comments. Thanks and enjoy :-)
Security
Creat Partitions
I have seen many people who couldn't be bothered with creating partitions. All they have is C:\ drive for the operating system and "My Documents" folder or Desktop to save all files!!! They do not seem to appreciate the benefits of creating partitions. Some of them are
- Reduced risk of losing all their data should the C:\ drive need to be formatted because of a virus, etc.
- Ease of backing up
- More organized
I personally prefer to have at least 3 partitions: System (C:\), one for workspace (where I keep all files that I may need delete later once I'm done with them) and another for archive (for backups and the files I want to keep for a long time). If you're looking for a cool partition tool for free, why don't you try GParted? It's compatible with all versions of Vista too.
Create Image
Anyone who has tried formatting and reinstalling operating system because of viruses or system crashes knows how painful and tidious it is to bring the system back to the original state. I myself spent many hours and even days looking for drivers, downloading updates, tweaking configurations, etc. That's before I found Norton Ghost and Acronis True Image. I use the latter and I've never been happier. The latest version Acronis True Image Home 2009 is by far the best and is compatible with Vista and SATA disks.
Set up your computer the way you want. Install all programs that are ESSENTIAL to you. Then create an image of your system and save it in non-system drive (Eg. not in C:\). Restoring the image will take less than 10 min (which is nothing compared to reinstalling from scratch) and you'll surely have a high confidence because you can recover from viruses easily.
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There are many hard disk partitioning softwares available for Windows XP, Windows 2000, etc - my favourite being Partition Magic. However some of them are not compatible with Vista and some of them do not support Vista 64-bit. Another reason may be software vendors don't want to bother selling it because Vista already has partitioning feature (shrink or expand) as part of disk management. It's quite a nice feature and it will create the partition without the need to reboot your pc.
But as you can see in the above picture, the size of available shrink space is limited and you can't change it at all. Therefore, sometimes it may be 120 GB out of 500 GB hard disk!!! Then you can't touch the remaining 380 GB. That's simply not good enough for me.
Thanks to GNOME, there is a fantastic software to solve all these problems from free. It's called GParted. All you need to do is download the GParted Live bootable image file from here and burn it to a CD. After that boot your pc from the CD. Step by step procedure can be found here.
Once you have tried GParted, you won't go back to Vista's partitioning at all. That's for sure. Happy partitioning!!!
Last week, I ran into trouble while trying to install Windows XP (as a dual boot) to my PC that already has Windows Vista. If you have never done it but are thinking of doing, then BE VERY CAREFUL!!! There are many things you need to be aware with dualbooting with Vista. After copying files from the CD during installation process, it restarted automatically to boot from XP. But it can't boot any more!!! Neither from Vista nor from XP. It says something like operating system is missing.
After googling for a while, I found out that Vista uses a totally different boot process from XP. Therefore, it must have been messed up by XP installation. I couldn't load boot menu to try safe mode or last known configuration either. Because it's OEM version, I didn't get any install DVD or recovery disc.
Finally I found and downloaded Windows Vista Recovery Disc thanks to NeoSmart. You can download the torrents from the following links. You need to have a torrent software to download them. You only need one depending on the version you have.
- Boot from the CD and after a few seconds later you will see the following screen to choose language and time format.
- Click Next and you will see the screen below. DO NOT click on "Install Now" button. Click on the "Repair You Computer" link.
- Then you'll see "System Recovery Options" box listing your Vista. Choose "Next".
- You'll be presented with a list of options you can choose to repair or restore. To repair bootloader, choose "Startup Repair". It will automatically repair the bootloader and at the end there will be a message box showing how many problems found and fixed.
Now take the Recovery CD out of the drive and restart the pc. You should be able to boot from Vista this time.
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I recently found a small ebook called "As a man thinketh" by James Allen. It is such a great book and so short that it takes no time to finish it. But the contents are as precious as gold. I hope you enjoy the book.
As A Man Thinketh
