Last week Google released Ad Manager. We’ve been using Adspeed to host all of our inhouse ads on the reeftooutback.com website. Adspeed served us well for a while but I found the administrative interface poorly designed and very difficult to use. I’m a huge fan of intuitive user interfaces and Google provides that for the most part through Ad Manager. Also Adspeed was costing us $20 a month and Ad Manager is free. I will not go over all the features. I’ll focus only on the necessary ones to set up inhouse ads for your company’s website

Inventory

Once you log into Adm Manager you’ll notice four tabs at the top labeled Order, Inventory, Reports, and Admin. First lets focus on the Inventory tab. This is where you’ll set up you actual available ad slots for your website.

Click ‘Inventory’

Click ‘New Ad Slot’

Name your ad slot something descriptive like, RightColumnTop125×125. This name cannot contain any spaces. Select the size of the ads that will be displayed in this slot and fill in an optional description. You can uncheck ‘Allow AdSense ads to compete for remnant inventory’ because these are your own inhouse ads and they aren’t costing you anything, therefore it wouldn’t make sense for adspeed to compete with your own ads. Don’t worry about placements yet. We’ll get to that.

Scroll to the bottom and click Save

Placements

Now lets create a placement. Placements are groups of ad slots put together. Lets say you have one ad slot named RightColumnTop125×125 and another named RightColumnBottom125×125. You could group these two together in a placement called ‘Right Column’. Placements are useful for reporting purposes and for specifying where our creatives (our actual ads) will show up.

Click ‘Placements’

Click ‘New Placement’

Enter a name and again uncheck ‘Allow Google advertisers to target’ since these are for our inhouse ads. Below you’ll see your ad slots. ad the relevant ad slots to the placement.

Scroll to the bottom and click Save

Orders

Lets head over to the Orders section. This is where we’ll actually upload our ads.

Click ‘Orders’

Click ‘New Order’

Fill out all the fields. For Order Name put something like ‘You Company inhouse ads’. Don’t worry about external ID for now. Make sure to set end date to unlimited.

Click the ‘Advertiser’ drop down menu

Create a new advertiser with your company name

Click Save

Orders -> Line Items

Next we’ll create our line items. I like to think of line items like categories for our order. For example if you’re order may be for Toyota Cars, and your line item would be ‘Toyota Corolla’. This is important because you can only apply targeting (which we’ll get into in another article) at the line level. Inside the line we’ll place our actual ads.

Click ‘New line item’

You should be getting good at filling out these forms by now. On this page ‘Delivery Priority’ is the key field. Make sure to set it to ‘House’. This will allow you to set an unlimited end date. Also your start date must be in the future.

Below you’ll see our placements. Select which placement you want this line item to display your ads.

Scroll down and you’ll see targeting. This allows you to target your line item to specific countries, browsers, day and time, or even bandwidth. I’ll get more into the advanced features of targeting in another article.

Below targeting you can set your ‘Delivery Options’. I set Delivery rate and Creative Rotation to ‘even’ and left the other boxes unchecked.

Click Save

Orders -> Line Items -> Upload Creative

You should see a link that says ‘Needs Creatives’ in the status menu. Click this link and now we’ll upload our actual ads.

This next screen is pretty self explanatory. You can name your ad and choose the correct ad slot size. You can use flash or static images. You can even insert your own code under ‘Rich Media’. For most of you you’ll probably have a static image or flash file. If you’ve already uploaded your image/flash to a server choose ‘Standard image redirect’ or ‘Flash media redirect’ and you can put the appropriate link to the actual file. You can also specify where you want the ad to link. Manual weight will be grayed out because we’ve selected even distribution for this ad slot.

Click Save

Generate HTML

Now all we need it the actual HTML to place on our web page. Head back over to ‘Inventory’ and click ‘Generate sample HTML’. Select which ad slots you want to generate code for and click ‘Generate Sample HTML’.

The Generated HTML will show up below and you’ll notice that it’s a complete web page with head and body tags. Just copy and paste the javascript in and your done.

Remember your ads will not show up until they reach the begin date for you line item. Even then it can take 10min to an hour for Google’s cache to update itself so be patient. You’ll know everything is good when you go to your order page and see the status set to ‘Delivering’.

Hope this helps. If you have any questions please feel free to comment below.

So how do I install OS X when the dvd drive is broken?

1. Connect the two Macs by firewire cable. One will be the host for the DVD drive and one will be the target which you will install OS X onto.

2. Start up the target computer you plan to install OS X on in target mode by holding down T when you restart the computer. This will mount the target computer as a hard drive on the host computer.

3. Put the OS X installation disk into the Mac that is your host computer.

4. You can now either open the installer on the DVD which will prompt you to restart the host computer. Or you can simply restart and hold down C which will force the Mac to startup from the DVD.

5. Once you have started up from the installer DVD follow through the normal steps. You will then arrive at the option to choose the destination. Select the hard drive of the target computer. You will probably have to change the options if you are not doing an upgrade.

6. Once you have finished the installation shut down the host computer and disconnect the firewire cable. You can now restart the target computer which will startup with a newly installed OS X.

*Note: If you are installing OS X 10.3 (panther) or earlier you can not use an intel based mac to use as the host computer. Both the target and host computers will need to be powerpc based and vice versa if you are installing on an intel based mac.

1- as root #apt-get install php5-imap (a blue screen will ask if you want to install it without maildir support – if all you need it for is SugarCRM click yes)

2 – restart Apache – #/etc/init.d/apache2 restart

See painless! For other distributions, just search for php imap on your Package Manager like Yast or Synaptic.

With ReFeed and the ReBlog plugin for wordpress it can be easily done. Refeed works as a feed reader/collector and once you’ve subscribed your favourite feeds into it you have the option to publish the desired posts to a compiled RSS feed which you can post into your wordpress with the ReBlog plugin. Being able to tag your feeds you can actually feed different blogs based on the different RSS generated by the different tags.

To get this working just install ReFeed in your hosting and subscribe to your favourite feeds, then download the ReBlog plugin for Wordpress. After installing and enabling the plugin you have to edit the plugin’s main file and add the address of the RSS feed from the ReFeed you want to use. You can find this address by clicking on the option “Published Feed” in your ReFeed admin area. The line you need to look for in the file is like this:

// Complete URL to RSS 2.0 output from reBlog, typically ends with “out/rss.php?v=2″.
define(‘REBLOG_URL’, ‘http://yourhosting.com/refeed/out/rss.php?user=1‘);

The part in bold is to be replaced the address of your ReFeed RSS.

After all this you will see a button called “Fetch Feeds” on the top Right hand corner of your screen. This is actually really annoying as it sits right on top of the logout link, but this can be moved by editing the plugin adding a few more pixels to the styling. To do this, navigate to the Plugin page and click on “Edit” next to the ReBlog plugin, there you will need to edit the following line.

<style type=”text/css”>
#reblog-form
{
position: absolute;
top: 50px; #this is the line you need to add so the button seats right under the logout link. In Wordpress2.5 it looks very nice.
margin: 0;
padding: 0;
right: 3em;
font-size: 20px;
color: #666;
}
</style>

So there you go, happy ReBlogging.

Technorati Tags: ReBlog, ReFeed

 http://www.php-shopping-cart-tutorial.com – Great Tutorial, you can actually download a fully working shopping (free). It also has good insight into security, specially XSS 

 http://www.phpwebcommerce.com – Simple but yet very well explained tutorial

http://www.devshed.com/c/a/PHP/Creating-a-Secure-PHP-Login-Script – well explained secure login

http://www.mredkj.com/tutorials/tutorial007.html – Great tutorial on working with dynamic Select Lists

http://www.thescripts.com/forum/thread447204.html – Forum posts on how to Integrate sage & mysql via XML

 http://www.weberdesignlabs.com/blog/?p=11 – Flash iTunes cover flow in flash (fed by XML)

These sites, demos and freebies did give me a great insight into what I was entering into, and I’m happy with the outcome so far. Most of the Open Source e-commerce I found, although good, they lacked some features I wanted so I’m still coding along.

Some guys out there will laugh and say, “clearly you need a gatekeeper for H323“, well that’s not my experience with the Sony equipment. Anyway, I saw it as an opportunity to learn something new and dove into setting up a simple gatekeeper. After some looking around I found the GNU Gatekeeper and got an old IBM e-server PIII and installed a pure Debian Linux distro which works beatifully on this old machine (FYI – with Gnome). Well without further ado, here are the steps I took:

1 – Downloaded and installed Debian Linux (using the netinstall version 34mb for the boot cd)

2 – Installed GNUGK easily with apt-get install gnugk (installs by default into /var/run/gnugk)

3 – Created the gatekeeper.ini file based on the tutorial on gnugk website (better to save it into folder /etc)

my gatekeeper.ini content

# main configuration

[Gatekeeper::Main]
Fortytwo=42
Name=GNUGK #put here any name you want for your gk

[GkStatus::Auth]
rule=allow

[RoutingPolicy]
h323_ID=dns,internal
002=neighbor,internal
default=explicit,internal,enum,dns,internal,parent,neighbor

GKRouted=1
H245Routed=1

[RewriteCLI] # change this according to your network
in:192.168.1.0/24=any=18001111
in:192.168.2.0/24=any=18002222
in:any=any=0

[LogFile] # creates log files and rotate them – in this case daily @ 23:00
Rotate=Daily
RotateTime=23:00

4 – restart gnugk with the following command (which can later be added to the startup runlevel)

gnugk -ttt -c /etc/gatekeeper.ini (-ttt will output lots of text and is good for finding any faults, but not essential for the functioning of the gk)
All done and I dialed to URL successfuly using my tandberg system.

Extra info: GNUGK Manual | Debian startup | Tandberg

There are 2 ways of doing it (maybe more) I found .

1 – Create your own search plugin.xml as instructed on the Mozilla Developers site (more work)

or

2 – Go to searchplugins.net and follow these steps.

• FIll in all the fields but make sure on the Search URL you add the word TEST as the searched item eg: http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=TEST
• Generate plugin and it’s done, you can then install it from the top of the page or the side bar but you might like to make it available on your own site so….
• copy this code – change 11399 to your plugin id (found on the link for your plugin on searchplugin.net)

<script language=javascript>
function addProvider(url) {
try {
window.external.AddSearchProvider(url);
} catch (e) {
alert(“You need to be using IE7 or Firefox2 to add a search engine!”);
return;
}
}

</script>

<a href=”javascript:addProvider(‘http://www.searchplugins.net/createos.aspx?number=11399′);void(0)”>Install Search Plugin</a>

• save this as a html file or insert into any existing page and your users will be able to install and use yor search plugin.

1 – Make the Excell file into a CSV. To avoid problems I used “;” instead of “,” as MYSQL also uses commas to separate fields on the command line.

2 – Opened the .csv file with a text editor (I used Notepad++) and did a search and replace ‘ = \’ and ” = \” to avoid problems when populating the database.

3 – Used the PHP script and guidelines from this site http://www.modwest.com/help/kb6-253.html , remember to change “\t” to “;” as the field delimiter.

4 – Save the .csv file and script on the same directory.

5 – To avoid messing up my existing database I created an empty table (csvtemp) with just anough fields for the transfer, just in case something went wrong. In my case I only needed 5 fields so f1, f2, f3, f4 , f5 all TEXT.

6 – Run script (I had problems – missed steps 1 & 2, so had to empty the table, fix script and restart)

7 – Create a script to read one table (csvtemp) and pass the information to the final database (as a preacaution I got it to first write the contents of (csvtem) to the screen and checked my script was correct, all fine so I implemented the function to populate the desired table.

This is my script, there’s probably a cleaner way of doing this so feel free to comment.

<?php
$dbConn = mysql_connect (Host, User, Password) or die (‘MySQL connect failed. ‘ . mysql_error());
mysql_select_db(database_name) or die(‘Cannot select database. ‘ . mysql_error());

function db_admin($query) {
global $dbConn;
$result = mysql_query($query) or die(mysql_error());
return $result;
}

$today = date(‘Y-m-d H:m:s’);
$query = “SELECT * FROM csvtemp”;
$result = db_admin($query);

$num=mysql_numrows($result);

$i=0;
while ($i < $num) {
$f1=mysql_result($result,$i,”f1″);
$f2=mysql_result($result,$i,”f2″);
$f3=mysql_result($result,$i,”f3″);
$f4=mysql_result($result,$i,”f4″);
$f5=mysql_result($result,$i,”f5″);
$f6=mysql_result($result,$i,”f6″);
$f7=mysql_result($result,$i,”f7″);
$f8=mysql_result($result,$i,”f8″);
$f9=mysql_result($result,$i,”f9″);

# this could be useful if you have ‘ in your database
$f1 = str_replace(“‘”, “\’”, $f1);
$f2 = str_replace(“‘”, “\’”, $f2);
$f3 = str_replace(“‘”, “\’”, $f3);
$f4 = str_replace(“‘”, “\’”, $f4);
$f5 = str_replace(“‘”, “\’”, $f5);
$f6 = str_replace(“‘”, “\’”, $f6);
$f7 = str_replace(“‘”, “\’”, $f7);
$f8 = str_replace(“‘”, “\’”, $f8);
$f9 = str_replace(“‘”, “\’”, $f9);

#insert into desired table which in this case is called PRODUCTS
$query2 = “INSERT INTO PRODUCT VALUES (‘ ‘, ‘Books’, ‘ ‘, ‘ ‘, ‘$f4′, ‘$f5′, ‘$f2′, ‘$f3′, ‘$f7′, ‘$f1′, ‘$f6′, ‘$f8′, ‘ ‘, ‘$f9′, ‘0′, ‘ ‘, ‘ ‘, ‘$today’, ‘$today’)”;
db_admin($query2);

$i++;

}

?>

Fortunately, the solution is very straightforward. First right click on the Orb and select properties.

Then simply choose ‘Start Menu’ from the tabs (it should have been autoselected) and click on
Customise.

The resulting screen allows you then to choose how several of your start menu items should appear – including the Control Panel. Here I have selected it to appear as a ‘Menu’.

Accept this change (and any others you care to make) and voila! Control Panel as a Menu…