Website Development

I have a centos 4.5 powered VPS that was running out of memory at peak times and so I decided to take a look at using squid to reverse proxy apache. When squid is used as a reverse proxy all http requests are proxied through squid to apache. The advantage of this setup is:

Back in late September Google announced that they would give publishers in Pakistan and other mostly south and south east Asian countries the option to receive adsense payments via Western Union (WU). This announcement created a lot of buzz in the blogosphere and most publishers were very excited about this new and easy payment method. I was among the publishers who elected to receive their payouts via WU and so here is my review of it.

I am using google adsense on a few of my sites and I have learned a thing or two about how to make a decent amount from it:

• Blending in is key: This is a widely cited tip but it is worth repeating. It is important that your adsense ads blend in with the rest of your site. Among the things you can do are:
  • Make the ad border colour the same as the page background colour. This way the ad doesn't appear as a separate block but as part of your content.
  • The links in the ad should have the same colour as the links on your site.
  • Similarly the ad background and text colour should match those of your site
• Less is more: Google allows you to place multiple ad units on a single page but it is best if you stick to just one. This is because if there is just one ad unit Google will place the highest paying ads in it. This will improve your earnings per click or CPC.
• Location, Location, Location: Since you have just one ad unit to work with you should place it very carefully. The best way to do this is to wrap your content around your ad unit. I also find that positioning your ads in the middle of your webpage draws the most eyeballs and clicks.

I had a few unused domain names so I decided to put them to use as URL shortening websites.

In case your unfamiliar with the concept, a URL shortening website takes your long website addresses or URLs and shortens them into short and search engine friendly URLs. A URL shortening site saves you from having to use long URLs that can break in your emails, forum posts and IM messages.

So here are my newly formed URL shortening sites. Use anyone of them to shrink your URLs:

TC7 URL shortening

TE9 URL shortening

SI9 URL shortening

BS2 URL shortening

FI9.org URL Shortening service

Every site has the same web 2.0 design but in different colours. So if you like blue visit bs2.org or if you prefer red then go to te9.org .

I use my own script for all these sites. The programming logic is simple. The site accepts a long URL and INSERTs it into a database. A short URL is made by appending the primary key of the newly inserted row to the short url site's domain. When a user visits a short URL the primary key is received by the script as a query string and it simply looks up the relevant URL in the database and redirects the user. Throw in a bit of mod_rewrite goodness to get rid of the query string and you have yourself a URL shortening site.

I'll be adding more sites soon as I have a number of unused domains!

Most websites on the Internet can be accessed using both just their domain name and the www subdomain and domain name. For ex: www.example.com and example.com may lead to the same website. Some search engines consider the www version and the non-www version to be seperate websites and assign different Search Engine Results Page (SERP) positions and or page rank to them. This often results in a split page rank where the non-www and www versions of a site have different page rank. To prevent something like this from happening it helps to canonicalize your website URL. This means that you should select one version as a standard and redirect from the other to it.