ZanFa Network

If you are a web developer like me, you prob have some bots that are trying to misuse your website(s) to their advantages. Of course I am not taking about a bot such as a search engine bot like Google or Yahoo. I am talking about bots like ones from a film download site such as FilmIsNow.it. Why are they bad? Well, if you Google the word “filmisnow.it” you will see what I mean. For example this site sends it bots out to upload images of itself to other Image Hosting sites to try to promote itself with links back to itself.

Here are a few examples:

• http://pets.webshots.com/album/575664818XiiDzr
• http://www.flickr.com/photos/44283077@N03/4134452753/

They have actually tried to upload over 300 Images to my Image Hosting site, SimIMG.com. Which equals to about150 MB of data being wasted on the site. Of course this is not a lot, but certainly does waste space and bandwidth. But instead of getting mad or freak out. It becomes best to just block them and move on.

Of course, I am not talking about IP banning them. As for a bot, they can just change their IP address easily. Thus you will of blocked innocent visitors and they will continue to misuse your services. I am talking about some creativity and hard work in programming to try and make their attempts futile.

I have done two things to help block them from trying to misuse my Image Hosting site:

1. Are Images that have a url in the Title inputted will not be allowed through. Why is this a good idea or even worth it? Well, even though the title will never have an actual link to their site, the Image is still tweeted on Twitter. Thus giving them an advantage with at least one more link to their site.
2. Blacklist certain values from being used. For example, I made a simple MAE (Manage, Add, Edit cluster) for tags that should be blacklisted and not let through. I added “filmisnow” to the list, so any time a bot or visitor from their site tries to add an Image with a tag containing that or any other blacklisted Tag, it will return false and not allow them to upload that Image with those tags. Of course I made it in a regex type of manner so I can catch more easily. Use this idea not just for Image Tags, but for any other input fields.

Of course, this doesn’t ban them from trying again and again or even just plain adding an Image, but it certainly is a start and will make it harder for them to actually get anything back in return.

Before I leave, one last thing that is always helpful is a Captcha and Email Validations. Both can be very handy for handling bots and their Bot Overseers.

A new web development blog by a co-worker of mine is now officially up. Called “SureFireSource“, it is run by Ramsez Stamper a PHP/Javascript Web Development Programmer. While the main site is still being worked on as we speak, he as officially started working on his blog to give you weekly advice and interesting articles to read. Check him out sometime.

Google Adsense can easily help your site, blog, forum, or whatever make money easily! If you have not done so already, Google Adsense is one of the best Ad Networks out there, if not the best. But that is a opinion, so I will leave it to “one of the best.” Below are some helpful tips and notes.

You control your Ads

Yes, that is correct. You can easily control which type of Ads appear on your sites. As well as block individual ones and allow or disallow other Ad Networks from appearing. This is easily done through the “AdSense Setup” tab. The “Competitive Ad Filter” is a great resource to allow you to block other competing sites from taking away your customers, as well as get rid of some of the more annoying ads out there. It is also a very good idea to block your own sites that may have Google AdWords. This is to help ensure your visitors do not click on your own ads which can cause you to lose money.

Focus Google Adsense Bot on select areas of a page

You may be wondering what I mean by the above. Well, Google gives you an easy way to help focus their Ad algorithm on your pages. By placing content within two specific tags that Google uses, you can help make sure the Ads on your site are relative to the content and tone. The tags are “<!– google_ad_section_start –>” and “<!– google_ad_section_end –>”.

If Google Adsense bot sees those tags, they will look more closely at the content within to help display which Ads should appear on your site. But did you know you can also do the opposite? You can actually modify the two tags above to have Google completely ignore an area. These tags are “<!–– google_ad_section_start(weight=ignore) ––>” and “<!–– google_ad_section_end(weight=ignore) ––>”. These are very helpful if you wish to have certain areas ignored and not be factored into it’s algorithm.

Flatlink your Links

Why would you consider flat-linking your links? Well, they can actually help your site out as well. Besides SEO helpful, they help Ads as well. Google Adsense seems to look at the url as well as the content to help determine your ads. This actually makes sense if you think about it. For example, I will take an example from one of my sites: ZeNfA.net. This is mainly a forum for gamers. One of the urls that used to be used before I used flatlinks was “forums_thread.php?sid=3241″, but after I added flatlinks the same url could become “thread/nintendo-games-rule/3241″. As you can see, the thread most likely is about Nintendo Games, so when Google Adsense sees that it will display ads more relevant to gaming in general, and more specifically Nintendo.

Why am I not making any money?

This is one of the biggest questions I see from others regarding Google Adsense and them. It seems to be a common mistake to assume just because you have a website and ads that you will make lots of money. Don’t get me wrong, that can still be easily true. But it all depends on how big your website is. If your website only gets like 100 visitors a day, most likely you will not be making much. Sadly most people do not know that and go on to blame Google as for the reason for their site not generating money. If you have lots of visitors, like more then 10,000 or so a day, most likely you will start to see some daily revenue from ads.

How do you get visitors? Well, a good idea and a fundamental one is to have good content that keeps visitors coming back to your site. I won’t write on how to write good content and such, but feel free to Google “Writing good content” or something similar to help you out.

How do you determine how popular your site is? There are several ways to determine this, I will list two excellent ways. Google Analytics is a excellent one and a great resource for determining advance stats on your site. This can give you very detailed stats such as amount of visitors for today, yesterday, or any time frame. This can help you determine if your site is going up or down in viewers. Feel free to go and set an account up if you have not done so, its very easy to do so. Another method is done by monitoring your website rank through Alexa. They determine your site rank by comparing your visitors and clicks per day against millions of other sites. This is done by millions of users, including myself, who use the Alexa Toolbar with Firefox or other browsers. Because not everyone does so, they only consider those within the top 100,000 to be accurate. I mainly check a few of my sites rank each day and watch them increase.
I hope some of these tips help you out.

If anyone is looking for a simple function to easily index variables in a column like manner. I have made a simple function that takes in an array and outputs a newly sorted array that can be used with some tables or divs evenly with the results going downwards each column. Here is an example of it using the Alphabet.

This function is quite simple actually.  It begins by taking in 3 input variables. The array first var is an array containing any values you may which to have indexed. The 2nd which is optional is the amount of columns, and the last is the Sorting function that you may use before the indexing begins. The last one is also optional and not needed, you may input an array in whatever order you may which.

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Today I created a very simple PHP script to view a directory. This also has the ability to go up and down folders. All you have to do is place this script below in a php file somewhere on your web site. Once it is on there, you are all done! Yep that simple, as it works automatically once you view it. The first time you view the page, you will be presented with a list of Folders and Files found in your current Directory. From there you can go upwards or downwards(if available) to view more directories. Every file listed will also show its total file size.

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I have recently launched a new forum for the Dollhouse TV Series. It is called We Love Dollhouse. It is using the same forum technology as my main gaming forum site. Be sure to check it out if you like Dollhouse

I have recently updated two things with the Uncompress Mode over at CompressJS.com.

1. When Uncompressing a script, sometimes there will be some extra new lines in between the output based on if there were any to begin with in the script. They are now stripped out making the entire new script easy to read.
2. The characters } and ; are no longer split from each other and are kept together.

As many can prob tell, I have not updated my CompressJS.com site in a little while. Even so, I do have plans for it. The biggest being the Vars-Min feature, this will attempt to turn long named vars into short ones. The other change is a small forum. The forum will be used to help indicate updates and changes, as well as feedback and bugs.

I will be begining to work on the changes this week, and hopefully over the weekend get the forums up.

With my work, I tend to deal with serialized data all the time with my code. As thus, I would sometimes need to quickly see what was held within the data itself. I found it a little annoying/inconvenient to go and update the page and insert a print_r onto the page to see what I had and then just remove it. This and possibly doing this all over again.

So, last night I decided to spend $10.00 and just buy a domain titled “PHPUnserialize.com“. This is a simple application that turns any serialized data and outputs what it really is. Feel free to use it anytime. I hope others find it useful as I sure I will in the future.