Google Adsense Allowed Sites

The allowed sites feature is great. As someone who's been through the process of having his Adsense account disabled due to ads appearing on sites I don't control (basically vandalism on the part of another webmaster) it's great to be able to sleep at night in the knowledge my publisher ID isn't being served on any pages that could get my account banned.

However, having just switched to using Analytics, I had a quick look at it this morning, then a look at Adsense. Adsense is recording more than double the number of page impressions that Analytics is. Luckily, within your Adsense account there's a list of the sites that are attempting to display your ADs. Guess what? They are all Google pages, so this is people viewing my page in Google's cache rather than actually visiting my site.

The answer to this is simple - add google.com to your allowed sites list. It also make sense to add your "local" Google, so I added all the English language Googles I could think of.

Bounce Rate - seems to work

Bizarrely, a post I put up a while ago about press ups in Taekwondo started to appear on page one of Google.co.uk for the keyphrase "press ups". If you're doing TKD hopefully it was a useful, inspired and interesting read, but if you don't, the odds are it wasn't exactly what you were looking for based purely on that keyphrase search.

Looking at Analytics, the bounce rate for that keyphrase is 100%, and gradually Google is dropping my position for it accordingly.

It's always seemed logical for me that Google's algorithm should pay close attention to bounce rate to help it guage the relevance of it's results, but this is the first time I've actually been able to see it actually working in a real scenario. Hopefully they'll drop me altogether for that keyphrase as it's dragging my total bounce rate up - most pages on the site, when they are reached through an appropriate keyphrase have bounce rates beneath 40% which is much more like it.

CSS & Blogger Template

Finally got around to merging the stylesheets for my TKD site - now Blogger is calling the same stylesheet as the rest of the site, and all the same include files.

I thought this would be easy, but as always once you get started all manner of little quirks manifest themselves! Had to write in 4 or 5 extra hacks to get Internet Explorer 6 & 7 to work with the single stylesheet. What I thought would take an hours or so took more like 4 hours to do. Never again!

C902 debrand from Vodafone - for free

Got a little tired of the Vodafone branding on my C902, and a little digging around found out how to 1) debrand it and 2) have future firmware updates from the Sony Ericsson Update Service (SEUS). I debranded a phone once before (paying for the priviledge) and as a result couldn't get any new firmware - I would have had to keep on paying each time I wanted to update whch wasn't really a great solution.

Debranding a C902 from Vodafone turns out to be easy and free.

Firstly, you'll need a piece of software call A2Uploader, and an XML file to fool Ericsson's update service into thinking your phone is unbranded. Click here for the copy I made and used. Then you simply use SEUS to flash your firmware to the latest version, saying yes to all the warning about possible data loss.

I was a bit put off by the fact that my AVG anti-virus warned me that A2Upoader contined a Trojan. It didn't, so to get it to run I had to turn off the residnt shield within AVG. Then you just follow the prompts like this:

1. Turn off your phone, take out the battery, re-insert the battery (don't turn the phone back on)
2. Fire up A2Upoader, click "File System Tool" on the right, hold the "C" button on your phone and plug in the USB cable. A2Uploader should then recognise your handset.
3. Use A2Uploader to browse your phone to "tpa/preset/custom" and copy the XML file onto your phone.
4. Shut down A2Uploader, disconeect the USB cable from the phone, and switch it back on.

You can now use the Sony Ericsson Update Service and get the latest firmware. The Sony Ericsson firmware, not the Vodafone stuff.

Having done this, my phone is:

1) running much faster
2) has a decent battery indicator
3) much nicer icons in the main menu
4) hasn't got 50 shortcuts to Vodafone Live! that I can't change (I hate that)

You can also use A2Uploader to get rid of the awful pre-installed games, and any media files (ringtones, pictures etc) that you can't normally remove using the phone. Great!

I thought it might be an idea to show a couple of pictures of the debranded c902. A bit tricky to get the phone to take a picture of itself, so I asked Tony if he could take a picture using his iPhone. And here it is:
Turns out the iPhone camera is, to be frank, absolute rubbish so you probably can't read what's on the phone. Even funnier, I asked Tony to bluetooth the image over to me once he'd taken it, and he told me he couldn't - the iPhone can't transmit files via Bluetooth. Pathetic eh?

Just for the sake of fairness, I took a quick shot of his iPhone with my c902, see if you can spot the differences in image quality:Both images were taken indoors, with poor lighting and no setting camera options to anything other than default. I'm horrified the iPhone has such a crap camera, and is incapable of sending files via Bluetooth particularly as it's so incredibly expensive.

Cool It - The Skeptical Environmentalist's Guide to Global Warming

Right now I'm reading Cool It by Bjorn Lomborg (recommended to me by my uncle) and before I've even finished it I have to recommend this as a book everybody who has even a slight concern over the future welfare of humanity should read.

The book is totally engaging, and totally strips away the propaganda around the whole man made global warming issue, and just what we should do about it. I don't want to spoil what should be a great and eye opening read, but can't stop myself mention the central theme that the Kyoto agreement (signed by multiple nations agreeing to reduce carbon emissions) is going to cost billions of Dollars, yet have minimal impact on the climate and negligible (sometimes even negative) impact on the welfare of the people of this planet. Bjorn argues that these Dollars can be far more usefully spent, and huge numbers of lives saved and improved.

The question we need to ask ourselves is do we want to reduce the amount of Carbon Dioxide in the atmosphere, or is our goal a better environment. The two are not the same.