Something new from Google Webmaster tools – Now you can set your website geographical location within the webmaster account.

Just logged in today and saw the new feature.
I think this is going to be very helpful for website that are targeting (e.g. Ireland) a certain location but the website is hosted in a different country like USA.

The new feature can be found under the Tools menu:

Quote from Google:

Some sites target users for a particular geographic location.    

For example, a site may target all users within a specific country,or it may target only those users who reside within a very small    

geographic area within that country.    

If your site is targeting users within a particular geographic area,please provide us with the relevant information below,using only the fields that apply to your target audience.

So how will that help and improve your website ranking?

Simple: If you have a .com or any other TLD’s website and is hosted outside Ireland, but your intentions is to target the Irish audience, then by just telling Google that, your website should come up in the Ireland results, but of course that will also depend on how well your website is optimised for that search phrase.

Will keep an eye on things to see how this is going to work out for us in Ireland.

In the last few days, Google AdSense channels doesn’t seem to get tracked any-longer.

I mean, today they just vanished, while yesterday and the day before, I was still showing some of them, but had many clicks that didn’t look like they were part of any channels.

I haven’t made any changes to the code in the last few weeks, but I did verify the pages where AdSense code is inserted and everything looks OK to me, so that must be changes done on the Google side of things.

The AdSense for Search channel is still tracking away but the AdSense for content today stopped completely while yesterday as the picture below shows, less then half of clicks got tracked:

We all know what WordPress is, but if you don’t  – is a very well put together blogging system.
Very easy to install and you can get up and running in minutes. The latest version seems very stable, but while it is good there seem to be an issue when you insert an image into the post.
Ajax based system, works very well and after inserting the image, all looks grand and perfect, but if you try to edit it (lets say you want to add some text to the alt tag as you forgot), after “Update” it actually duplicates the previous image, so now you have two instead of one.

Today I tried to add a new image to a post, so I scroll down to the bottom of the page, browse the computer, choose the image and uploaded to the server, then clicked on “insert into post” and voila the image is added to the  text, but hang-on a second, instead of an image I get “404 page not found” message.

OK…, lets click on “Save and Continue Editing” button, just in case I lost the Internet connection, but nothing works, not even the top links.

To get the post back I just refreshed the page (F5) and everything is back to normal.

Is it just my browser that is showing this problems or any other WordPress users have the same issues?

Once a day, the least, I log into Google analytics to see how things are going.
The program shows a lot of interesting information and is put together very well, but there is one thing that bugs me.
After I log into my account, i choose which website statistics I want to look at and after a while I am choosing the next one from the select menu that is available at the top of the page:

So I select the next website, check it out for a while, then I want to go to the next one, but anytime I select a new website, Google Analytics brings me back to the previous one again and again.
So what the hack is going on?
Is there a bug that they haven’t noticed yet?

The only way I could check the third website out is to navigate away from the Analytics part, then come back to it from another page like AdWords.

This is happening to me  in the last few weeks, so it really start to bug me now.
Anyone having the same issue?

The other day I was looking for a solution to help me create a form without the hassle to check it again and again for missing arguments or miss-typing.
Because i couldn’t find any ready made solutions I created this little function that made my life less miserable.

I hope it could be useful to you too.

/*
$ewd_type - could be text, password, submit, hidden, textarea or select
$ewd_name - the name and id of the input filed
$ewd_value - input value default or returned by post
$ewd_size - the size of the input type text
$ewd_cols - number of colums for the textarea type field - default = 30
$ewd_rows -  number of rows for the textarea type field - default = 6
*/    

function ewd_make_form_field($ewd_type,$ewd_name,$ewd_value='',$ewd_size='',$ewd_cols='',$ewd_rows=''){    

 global $_POST;
 $ewd_size = $ewd_size != "" ? $ewd_size : 30;
 $ewd_cols = $ewd_cols != "" ? $ewd_cols : 30;
 $ewd_rows = $ewd_rows != "" ? $ewd_rows : 6;
     

 switch ($ewd_type) {
  case "text":
   echo "<input type='$ewd_type' name='$ewd_name' id='$ewd_name' size='$ewd_size' value='$ewd_value' onfocus='this.style.borderColor=\"#0072BC\";' onblur='this.style.borderColor=\"silver\";' />";
   break;
  case "password":
   echo "<input type='$ewd_type' name='$ewd_name' id='$ewd_name' size='$ewd_size' value='$ewd_value' />";
   break;
  case "textarea":
   echo "<textarea name='$ewd_name' id='$ewd_name' cols='$ewd_cols' rows='ewd_rows'>$ewd_value</textarea>";
   break;
  case "submit":
   echo "<input type='$ewd_type' name='$ewd_name' id='$ewd_name' value='$ewd_value' />";
   break;
  case "hidden":
   echo "<input type='$ewd_type' name='$ewd_name' id='$ewd_name' value='$ewd_value' />";
   break;
  case "select":
   echo "<select name='$ewd_name' id='$ewd_name'> 
     <option value=''>Please Select</option>";
     $ewd_y_value = explode(" ",$ewd_value);
     foreach ($ewd_y_value as $ewd_word) {
     echo "<option value='$ewd_word'";
      if($ewd_word == trim($_POST[$ewd_name])){
       echo " selected='selected'";
      }
     echo ">".$ewd_word."</option>";
     }    

   echo "</select>";
   break;
  default:
   echo "<input type='text' name='$ewd_name' id='$ewd_name' size='$ewd_size' value='$ewd_value' />";
 }
}

Method for using the above function:

<form method="post" action="<?php $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'];?>" name="x_form" id="x_form">
 <table summary="some form">
  <tr>
   <td colspan="2" style="background-color:#f5f5f5; padding:3px;">
    <b>About yourself</b>
   </td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
   <td>Name:</td>
   <td><?php ewd_make_form_field('text','name',isset($_POST['name']) ? $_POST['name'] : '');?></td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
   <td>Surname:</td>
   <td><?php ewd_make_form_field('text','surname',isset($_POST['surname']) ? $_POST['surname'] : '');?></td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
   <td>Email:</td>
   <td><?php ewd_make_form_field('text','email',isset($_POST['email']) ? $_POST['email'] : '');?></td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
   <td>Phone:</td>
   <td><?php ewd_make_form_field('text','phone',isset($_POST['phone']) ? $_POST['phone'] : '');?></td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
   <td>Type of Sale:</td>
   <td><?php ewd_make_form_field('select','sale_type','Private Garage Both');?></td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
   <td valign="top">Extra details:</td>
   <td><?php ewd_make_form_field('textarea','additional',isset($_POST['additional']) ? $_POST['additional'] : '');?>(eg. Engine cc: 1.1 to 1.4)</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
   <td colspan="2" align="center">
    <?php ewd_make_form_field('submit','submit','Send');?>
    <?php ewd_make_form_field('hidden','country','Ireland');?>
   </td>   
  </tr>
</table>
</form>