• View and Edit CSS – You can test CSS changes without having to touch CSS file. Once you are satisfied with changes, copy the changes to CSS file. (CSS -> Edit CSS)
• Measure Objects – Want to know size and position of objects, you can use toolbar Ruler. (Miscellaneous -> Display Ruler)
• Display Block Size – This option allows you to see size of different blocks on a webpage.
• Validate External Links – If you have had your website for some time, some of the external links may not be working. Find out broken links. (Tools -> Validate Links)
• Display Individual Styles - You can display CSS for an element (CSS -> View Style Information)
• Test Screen Sizes - View website in different screen sizes and make sure it looks good. (Resize -> Resize Window)
• Image Information - You can find out information about images such as dimension, size, path etc. (Images -> Display functions)
• Broken Images – Discover broken images. (Image -> Find Broken Images)
• Disable Options – Test website with certain options disabled such as java, java script etc. This will help you understand behavior of your website if user has disabled these options. (Disable -> various functions)
• Display Colors – View colors and hex codes a website is using (Information -> View Color Information)
• Meta Tags - View Meta tags (Information -> View Meta tags Information)
• Validations – You can validate HTML, Feed, CSS etc using W3C Validation tools (Tools -> Validate functions)

The plugin is easy to use. Choose how many banners, you want to display at a time, add ad codes to the plugin settings, and you are done. The plugin shows a preview of the ad code. You can also choose to display ads in one column or two columns layout.

To display banner simply add the widget to sidebar or paste following code in your template.

<?php if (function_exists(’affiliate_code_link’)) { affiliate_code_link(); } ?>

Gmail was down recently and it is Google Finance today.Hopefully, these are temporary problems with Google apps.

Update - Finance Portal is up again.

AdPro tab from Chitika account is also not working. Clicking on AdPro tab simply opens account homepage.

Linkification is very customizable. You can enable or disable Auto-Linkification and customize other options. You can click on the linkification icon in bottom right corner to switch between auto enable and disable function. When links are not enabled, simply double click on the text link to open it in browser.

If you placed AdBrite ad code on your site but ad zone is not loading, read on. I placed code on my site but got the following message.

“Gathering data…
Please allow up to 3 hours for this zone to activate. Contact customer service with any questions.
Your ad here”

Even after waiting for long time, I continued to get same message and no ads.

The fact was that ad was not loading at all. You can check this in your AdBrite account Ad zone Statistics -> Daily Stats. My stats were showing zero. That means Ad zone was loading.

Issue and resolution
The issue in this case was that I was placing the code inside plugin for WordPress. Once, I placed the code directly in theme php file, the ads started showing up immediately. Stats in my account also started showing up immediately. If you are facing same issue, try placing the ad code in theme file directly.

Adsense is down today. This is a scheduled maintenance that was reported yesterday evening on AdSense Blog. Even though it is good to know that AdSense is down due to scheduled maintenance, the notice is hardly enough.

Google typically provide the notice for such scheduled maintenance on AdSense Blog night before (Here, here, here, here, here). They should typically provide the notice at least few days in advance. AdSense team should also look at providing such critical notices with in AdSense account, where these notices will have better visibility. Email notification of such scheduled down time will also be better way to inform publishers.

The tool works well and reports broken links and redirect warnings. If you are trying to check links for website, make sure ‘Check linked documents recursively’ is checked. There is a limit on number of documents the tool will search, so it may not be the right tool for big websites.

Here are key features of the extension

• You can hide the Googlepedia anytime by clicking on hide button.
• You can expand the Googlepedia to full page by clicking on expand link.
• The add-on converts Wikipedia internal links into Google searches. So, if you click on any Wikipedia link from Googlepedia, the link will show Wikipedia article and Google search results for the topic.
• You can click on ‘View on Wikipedia’ link anytime if you prefer to read the article in Wikipedia.
• The extension removes AdWords from Google Search results.

Note – Many publishers are calling Google’s online Content creation platform “Knol” with the same name “Googlepedia”. These two have no connection except for the fact that Knol is considered Wikpedia competitor and Googlepedia merges Google search results and Wikipedia articles.

There are few examples shared. Search Engine Land test picked 30 knols from homepage and 10 out of these showed up on first page. Let’s compare these on Yahoo. I am going to check Google again as Search rankings in Google might have changed since the time, article was written.

The results are mostly similar. Is Google artificially increasing rankings for Knol Articles? The answer is No. Are Knol results showing up high in search results (in all search engines, not just Google)? The answer is yes. This may be a result of Google having access to Search algorithm or simply the point that Knol got huge PR coverage and many backlinks from trusted sources, which increased the trust of domain in Search Engines. I think it is bit of both.