I’m not exactly sure when it became cool to abandon the use of your operating system’s desktop, but a growing number of people these days prefer the “clean” look. Recent releases of Microsoft Windows seem to encourage this. By default, Windows Vista and 7 strip the desktop of all icons but the Recycle Bin.

Try as you may, ignoring this lone icon is impossible. Sure, you can hide it in just a few seconds, but at the cost of losing quick access to deleted files. You could also drag the Recycle Bin icon to the task bar, but then it will appear pinned under Windows Explorer — requiring an extra click to open and offering half the functionality.

In this tip, we will show you one method of bringing a fully functional Recycle Bin to your Windows 7 Task bar, so you can clear off your desktop once and for all with little to no compromise.

To get started, we’ll have to bring out the Quick Launch bar. Rest assured, it will not replace the new Windows 7 Superbar — in fact you won’t even know Quick Launch is there. Right click on the Windows 7 Taskbar, hover over Toolbars and click New toolbar.

When prompted to provide a folder directory, enter the following string of text: %userprofile%\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Quick Launch

After doing so, a labeled Quick Launch bar should appear near the clock. Odds are it will have several icons onboard, but since we won’t be using this bar for anything apart from hosting the Recycle Bin I would just delete all of the shortcuts.

Right click on the Taskbar and uncheck Lock the taskbar if it isn’t already. Now, right click on your Quick Launch bar and uncheck Show text, as well as Show title. Finally, right click and hover on View to select the size that your Recycle Bin icon will be — I chose large to match my Superbar icons.

With the Quick Launch bar configured, all you have to do is drag and drop the Recycle Bin onto it. Feel free to grab the dotted lines and drag the Quick Launch bar to your preferred location. I would recommend either pulling it all the way to the left near the Start menu, or all the way right near the clock.

When you are satisfied with the position of your Quick Launch bar, relock the Taskbar and hide the Recycle Bin on your desktop by right-clicking an empty space and selecting Personalize, then clicking Change desktop icons in the left column of the Personalization window and un-checking the appropriate box.

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If your like me, you read your posts and check them out through your actual post page on your website. The curiosity gets the best of you and you want to see what kind of ads are showing up and making sure all of your formatting is correct. You noticed a spelling or punctuation error, or maybe the formatting is off on the page. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could just have a edit this post option as long as you were longed in, show up on  your website?

If you would like to have this function just add this line of code to your single.php file, in the loop and before your comments.

<?php edit_post_link('Edit this entry.','',''); ?>

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Miro used to be called democracy player and DTV1, an internet television app designed by the Participatory Culture Foundation. If you would like to install it via the GUI or the Command line, please read on.

Using the GUI

System -> Administration -> Synaptic Package Manager. You will need to input your password when you open synaptic. When Synaptic opens, go to Settings -> Repositories menu and then click on third party software tab in the pop up window. Click on the add button and copy the appropriate line of code from below.

For Jaunty (9.04) Users

deb http://ftp.osuosl.org/pub/pculture.org/miro/linux/repositories/ubuntu jaunty/

For Intrepid (8.10) Users

deb http://ftp.osuosl.org/pub/pculture.org/miro/linux/repositories/ubuntu intrepid/

For Hardy (8.04) users

deb http://ftp.osuosl.org/pub/pculture.org/miro/linux/repositories/ubuntu hardy/

Hit the Reload button, search for “Miro” and mark the packages for installation and click Apply.

Using the COMMAND LINE

Open terminal Applications -> Accessories -> Terminal

Open /etc/apt/sources.list file

sudo gedit /etc/apt/sources.list

add one of the following lines of code appropriate for your version

For Jaunty Users

deb http://ftp.osuosl.org/pub/pculture.org/miro/linux/repositories/ubuntu jaunty/

For Intrepid Users

deb http://ftp.osuosl.org/pub/pculture.org/miro/linux/repositories/ubuntu intrepid/

For Hardy users

deb http://ftp.osuosl.org/pub/pculture.org/miro/linux/repositories/ubuntu hardy/

Save and exit the file

Update the sorcelist package using the following command

sudo apt-get update

Install miro

sudo apt-get install miro

Remove miro using the following command

sudo apt-get remove --purge miro

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There are a ton of articles and site’s dedicated to search engine optimization out there on the internet right now. The majority of them have no clue what there even talking about, and their pages were created for adsense. What’s sad, is that some of these pages out of sheer luck, are ranking fairly well, and not because of their SEO practices. I emailed 30 various blogger’s who ranked on the top 10 pages of Google asking to explain a little bit more in depth on what they discussed or just asked some general questions about the topics that brought me to the page. A little over half of the people responded, and I never heard from the other half. The one’s who were responded were nice, yet seemed to give dictionary responses. What I mean by this is if I asked a question, they answered with bare general information that can be found anywhere. When I asked an advanced question in a chat with a few of these blogger’s, all of them had no idea what I was talking about. Now I’m sorry, but if your going to rank at the top of Google, let alone for a term like SEO, wouldn’t you think you would know your stuff just in case someone called you out on it? I know I would want to. I really love how people can pump out hundreds or thousands of pages a year of mostly either irrelevant or useless information and still rank high in the search engines. In any case, I am by no means saying I am an SEO master, but below I have included 8 tips for people who are just beginning blogging. And as I said before I am no master or “guru” just stating some things that I noticed, hoping it will help someone.

1. Content should be your number one priority: Let’s be honest, you go to a web site and there are a ton of useless articles, or articles that are poorly written. Chances are that if this is the case, you will never go back to that site. This changes though if you head to a site that looks like the owner or the authors put a lot of time and research into the article your reading. No matter what you do, your first priority should be your content. Not how pretty your page is, or how everything is laid out, or what most people do is figure out how there content is going to fit around there ads. This is never going to work, and your site will probably never go anywhere. Now I am not saying that it won’t because I guess anyone cause make a site with 100,000  articles and claim tens of millions of page views and probably make a killing with adsense out of sheer numbers. But honestly, what’s that point if all your doing is throwing down some gibberish that’s not going to help anyone? Quality content that helps people will quite often draw a reader to want to share whats been written. They tend to do this by linking to your blog from their own site or blog, and look, there goes another link to your site. Number 1 in Google here we come.
2. Make logical assumptions about what people will be searching for: We all know hundreds of millions if not a billion people use search engines every day. If you hope to even get a fraction of that traffic, you need to be able to make a best possible guess as to what they will be looking for. It takes a better understanding of how people search and what words they use so you can use those words and words like that in your post. Could you ever hope to see any traffic if you have an automotive site and have a ton of keywords about milking cows?
3. Titles are your selling point: Major search engines pay particular attention to titles of articles, so this means you should too. It’s always important to have relevant keywords in your titles, as well as what you think your user may be searching for. Both of these methods should help bump up your actual rankings for their searches significantly. Also, make sure your blog put’s the title of your post into the pages title tag, most platforms, this can be done automatically. From an SEO standpoint, don’t put your site’s name into your title tag, it dilutes your keywords.
4. Keywords in your post: Make sure after you figured out your best guess to what people are going to be searching for and what your article is about that you use appropriate keywords. If you use more non-relevant keywords in your articles, you’ll be more apt to get hit’s from unrelated searches than what your article is actually about. Yes it’s a hit and another visitor, but people tend to get upset when there searching through Google to find one thing and end up clicking on another. You want people to find your blog useful and informative and link to it, not to just click off and 10 seconds and never see it again.
5. Link to your own posts: I don’t know how many sites I have visited where there’s like 40 or 50 articles in the side bar. Some are listed as popular posts and some as favorite articles. This is all well and good but it makes your pages look cluttered. Personally, I set my limit at 5 which one day I may decide to increase, but at that point, I will never let myself get above 10 articles. Try and pick your ten highest viewed articles. Why would you want to do that? Well think of it this way, if you are choosing your high view articles, people are already reading them from the search engines. Seeing that article on the list, and if they like it, they may click on one of your other popular articles. And also, if a visitor happens to come onto your site via a less popular article, they would be more inclined to read one of your other posts. Getting them to stay on your site longer and also increasing your average page views. Please, I can not stress enough, do not over do linking to your own posts.
6. Links from other websites to your blog: Links from other sites to your own blog are key in SEO, and more than likely you will never get anywhere without some of these links. If you write good content, people will link to your blog, this is an inevitable fact. In the meantime though, try using social media networks like twitter, myspace, and facebook, and use them to advertise via your profile and your friends list. Don’t become obsessed with getting links – what you need to do is become obsessed about writing great content and the links will eventually come to you.
7. Plugins I really hate all the back end work that needs done to keep a blog maintained and updated. I suggest doing some research and finding plugins you like and easy to use that will be valuable to yourself and to your viewers by reducing the time spent just doing back end work. This will enable you to spend more time writing and researching your content articles.
8. Let your blog speak for itself: With quality content, and a small starting viewership, your blog will literally promote itself. Once you have a few regular readers and viewers, those that like your posts, will link to your site and articles on their blog. And people will add you to there social network accounts and talk about your site and articles there. Most of the time, this generates even more link juice for your site. Think of it like a chain reaction, after the start, nothing can stop you except not posting regularly and writing horrible articles.

All in all, from the time I have spent on the internet, search engines seem to be doing a remarkable job finding useful and relevant content on various websites across the net for any given keyword. As such, all SEO work aside, if you would just consistently write useful and informative articles, there should be no need for much of anything else. Just like the chain reaction I mentioned above, eventually, the traffic would come.

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1. Get a Sitemap on your WordPress Blog

A few years back, sitemaps were the buzz and there were a ton of tools available to create online sitemaps for your blogs. Fast forward to today, and most search engines are advanced enough to crawl your entire site as it is. When you think about it, do you really want to trust the spiders to search the way they should? Especially when you can create a sitemap and ensure that all or at the very least most of your pages get indexed instead of relying on someone or something else.

The sitemaps in use today are link based and an xml based site map. A link based sitemap can still be very handy for your blog because it displays all the links of your site on one page, some even break the links down by categories. This is a great feature because it allows users to just click on your site map, and literally browse what you have available instead of having to search for something. When people browse, they tend to click on titles that catch there eye, and secondly on what there actually looking for. Another reason a linked based sitemap is nice is because it interlinks all your sites pages to one another.

XML site maps, I’ve never seen a click able one, are typically intended for use by the search engine spiders. There are a ton of plug ins available for WordPress to do just that for you and I’m sure your aware of those already. If you happen to be looking for a link based sitemap plug in, I think I may have found just what your looking for. It’s called Sitemap Generator Plug in for Wordpress, Dagon Design makes it and I believe it IS still available through the plug in menu. This plug in offers a lot of options to build your sitemap on one settings page and is also extremely easy to install. Any questions just feel free to ask.

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1. Get your Wordpress Blog Traffic Statistics with WP Stats

There is no doubt that If you have a website, Google Analytics is the absolute best way to track all sorts of information about your website and it’s visitors. This however, is a lot more than what most people want or need. This would not be the case if there were the proverbial “easy” button in analytics but since this isn’t the case, we can always resort to using a plugin.

Google Analytics however shows way too many graphs and data which is probably not required by most bloggers. Most of the people only look for 3 things -

1. How many unique visitors have come to the blog as well as how many page views it’s recieved.
2. Amount of traffic to pages.
3. The combined daily, weekly and monthly traffic on the blog.
4. Who referred who and where.

Now if you are one of those who find google analytics to be too advanced and with way too much information, you can use a plugin called WP Stats.

WordPress.com stats plugins gives you your basic blog stats and it shows you on your dashboard. It’s very simple, basic, and easy to use. What also is nice about the plugin is if you are logged into the WordPress admin panel, it will not log your visits to your site or any of it’s pages. This is great if your always checking on your page and do not want to show your own page views. Oh and I almost forgot, you will need to register on the WordPress site and get an API key to be able to use it since it’s published by WordPress.

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1. Stop Self Pings in Wordpress Blog

I’m not sure how my readers feel about spam, but I know I hate it. I woke up this morning, checked my admin panel here in WordPress. Low and behold 196 spam comments. All of these comment’s were promoting other sites, and contained absolutely no meaningful reply or advice.

I could tell these were spam because I wrote a few of the URL’s down and went to the library (in case they were infected sites) and looked up a few. Mostly adult content and various other things but that’s not the point. I use askimet and it works wonders let me tell you. But spammers are changing there methods now, if a site doesn’t use captcha, automated bot’s are able to post comments to your site. If it happens to be a site or using an email that your spam guard doesn’t recognize it won’t catch it and you’ll have to manually delete it. I found a number of things help to cut back on the number of spam comments I see coming through here.

1. Use Askimet
2. Use Captcha
3. I don’t like to do it and I haven’t quite made up my mind if I will, but requiring users to sign up to your site to leave a comment may reduce spam by 99%
4. Lower your URL threshold to 1 that way if there is more than just the user’s home page in the url field and in the body of the comment, it will get marked as spam.Some people set this to 2 like I do, in case one of your user’s wants to leave a meaningful link.
5. Lastly, add in some filter words. I have a list of like 60 or 70 words that triggers WordPress to automatically mark a comment as spam. This is a techie site, I should have nothing on here talking about Adlt things or Pharmaceuticals, or animals.

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Sometimes it’s nice to be able to control who sees your ad or when they actually see your ad. You may want to only show your ads to the repeat visitors and not to the new ones. Or you may want to show your Google Adsense ads on all of your pages that are over a certain age. Thats where:

Ozh’ Who Sees Ads, come’s into play. It allows you to choose who see’s your ads and under what conditions. It can be configured with various parameters like whether the user is a first time or a regular user, whether they have come from a Google search or from some other website, or whether they are looking at new posts of the blog or old posts. Here is a screenshot from the plugin.

Ozh' Who Sees Ads

WARNING: showing different content to users and search engines is cloaking and is not liked by Google and they can penalize your website. As long as you are treating search engine bots as a regular user, you will be fine. I haven’t used the plugin on this blog so its difficult for me to comment on it’s  functionality but as long as your users are using cookies and referrers instead of user agents, you can safely use this plugin.

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1. Stop Self Pings in Wordpress Blog

I’m not sure about everyone else, but I know as a WordPress user, it really frustrates me when I link to another post on my blog when I write a new article and it show’s up as a ping back and or a comment in my admin panel. I don’t see a need or a reason for it, so why have it? Self pings are good and bad in a way, and as such some webmaster like and dislike them for reasons too numerous to mention. One bonus about them is that it can increase page views, which is something I am sure every website owner wants. But in the case of WordPress if you use a plugin like Yet Another Related Post, it will help cut down or completely eliminate your ping backs. If you would like to completely disable them, please read on:

1. While linking to posts in your own blog, do not use http://. Instead, use relative paths. If I want to link to http://geekdout.net/whatever-link/ then I should use /whatever-link/ and no self pings will show up. If you automatically get the http inserted, just go into the html editor and remove it manually.
2. Another method is to use the no self pings plugin. Please be aware that I have not used this plugin or as of yet even tested it so don’t hold me responsible if it doesn’t work correctly or is not easy to install. I typically use method one when doing internal linking and between that and YARP, I never get any ping backs.

I hope that helps everyone, anyone that has any questions about this or anything else feel free to leave a comment or just message me through my about page.

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If you have a site with a fair amount of traffic, you may get a decent amount of page views. This is great, especially if you have adsense on your blog because the more people coming to your site, the higher the chance you’ll have someone click on your ads and you’ll make some money. A lot of people have always wondered and asked if there was an easy way, in WordPress to add adsense to your images. Why would you want to do that?

Well say for example, if you make all the images on your site thumbnail size, people will click on them, or even if you have a lot of click able images already on your site. If you have adsense on your images page, that is that much higher of a chance someone will click on your ad. It’s a great concept, the image will load and adsense ads will be in various spots around the image. And no I AM NOT talking about embedding ads into your image so that when they click on the image it’s actually an ad. That is against the TOS and will get you banned so please do not try it.

And now fortunately, there is an extremely easy way to incorporate adsense ads on your image pages. The plugin is called Adsense Attachment Page. It is really easy to install like most plugins, and very user friendly. I myself did not like the idea of having ads on my image pages so I didn’t keep it, but I did try it out. It worked great as of WordPress release 2.7 I believe it was. Hopefully this answers some of your questions.

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