Recently I got hold of an empty Rackspace server in which we have installed Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal version. My next step was to setup the LAMP stack in that server to run our PHP site.

First I tried to install XAMPP for Linux. But unfortunately, it failed because XAMPP only supports 32 bit operating system and ours was 64. I didn’t want to spend much time on fixing that issue, so I moved to setup the LAMP stack by other means.

Here’s what I did (after googling/referring a lot):

1.Install lamp-server

1. sudo apt-get install tasksel [installs the tasksel that helps you to install multiple packages as a single task]
2. sudo tasksel install lamp-server [it will install the lamp stack in location /etc/]
3. http://yourdomain.com should work now.

2. Configure PHP Curl module

1. sudo apt-get install php5-curl [downloads and installs curl module]
2. sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart [restarts server for the changes to take effect]

3. Install phpmyadmin

1. sudo apt-get update [updates the packages repository. When I first tried to install phpmyadmin without updating, it complained that phpmyadmin isn't found.]
2. sudo apt-get install phpmyadmin [will trigger a installation wizard]
3. Choose apache2 for the server configuration and choose no for database configuration (since we have already installed database).
4. sudo cp /etc/phpmyadmin/apache.conf /etc/apache2/conf.d [copies the server configuration so that it is accessible via web]
5. sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart
6. http://yourdomain.com/phpmyadmin should work now.

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The usual placement of ads in a blog post is either before the post content or after it. But, if you want to place the ads within your content, then there’s a way to do it in WordPress. This same technique works in Thesis theme too!

Using wordpress filters, we can insert ads (or any content you wish) within the post content. Filters are great way to modify a content. They take one input, apply the modifications and return the output. That’s what we are going to do now for your post content. We are going to put a place holder for ads in our post content and using filters we are going to replace this placeholder with Adsense.

Follow these steps:

1. Get your Adsense code.
2. Open functions.php or custom_functions.php (if you are using Thesis theme) in your wordpress dashboard and add the below code (take a backup before, if you like):

   function insertAdInPost($post_content){
     $ad='[your-Ad]';
     return str_replace("[adsense]", $ad, $post_content);
   }
   add_filter("the_content", "insertAdInPost");

3. Replace the place holder “[Your-Ad]” with your adsense code and save the file.
4. Edit any post in which you want to add Adsense, and place the markup “[adsense]” where you want to insert the ad.

That’s it! Your own smart Adsense, without using any plug-ins stuff!

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Adsense is one of the easy and effective way to monetize any website. I have been using Adsense ever since I started blogging and it gave me good returns too!

In my last post about Adsense, I had summarized some of my observations from using Adsense to monetize this blog. Long back, I shared a PHP code snippet to insert Adsense based on the post length. Today In this post, I’m sharing few more tips on Adsense, which I think might helpful to you. Here we go:

I assume that you are using WordPress and you know how to edit WordPress theme files. If not, you are using these code snippets at your own risk!

1. Target Adsense content and get better ads

Your blog might have n-number of things – comments, sidebars, ads, etc – apart from the main content. The user comes to your site to read your content, not the n-number of other things. So, it is better to target the main content to show best matching ads, which in turn increase the click through rate. This is called as Adsense Section Targeting. It’s an approved method from Google to improve the advertisement shown on your website.

For Section targeting, all you need to do is, put the following code snippet in your blog/website.

<!-- google_ad_section_start -->
Your main content / blog post.
<!-- google_ad_section_end -->

WordPress users can add the above snippet in their single.php file in appropriate place.

2. Show Adsense only to the search engine traffic

If you want to show the advertisements only to the users who are coming from a search engine (Google or Yahoo!), use this snippet. For wordpress users, in your single.php file place this code in appropriate place.

<?php
$ref = $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'];
$SE = array('/search?', 'images.google.', 'web.info.com', 'search.', 'del.icio.us/search', 'soso.com', '/search/', '.yahoo.');
foreach ($SE as $source)
{
        if (strpos($ref,$source)!==false)
        {
                echo 'PLACE ADSENSE HERE';
        }
}
?>

3. Add ad only to the older posts

In case you want to show ads only on the posts which are older than, say 10 days. This way you can hide adsense to the regular readers of your blog and still show advertisement to the people who are looking at your old posts. Well, here’s the code snippet for that.

<?php
  global $post;
  $DAYDIFFERENCE = 10;
  $postDate = $post->post_date;
  $currentDate = date('Y-m-d');
  $diff = abs(strtotime($currentDate) - strtotime($postDate));
  $diff = ceil($diff/86400);
  if($diff > $DAYDIFFERENCE ){
    echo 'PLACE YOUR AD HERE';
  }
?>

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When you have an idea and you want to develop it as an application, you have several choices to make, like the programming language, the open source libraries, the software tools, etc. Along with these choices, it is also important to choose what framework you are going to use. Because frameworks make the development a lot easier and they bring some best practices, out-of-the box, into our project.

And, if you are a PHP programmer, then you have a tough time when it comes to choosing a PHP framework. Because there are n-number of solutions out there. But very few of them stands out, in terms of easy of use, better performance and wide acceptability by programmers. No doubt that CodeIgniter (CI) is one such PHP framework and that’s why I chose CodeIgniter for my PHP development. It is MVC, light-weight, gives better performance, well documented and have a great community following. After using CI, I could really appreciate my decision of choosing it.

So, to get more grip on the CodeIgniter framework, I’d started reading more materials. Currently, I’m reading the book CodeIgniter 1.7 by Jose Argudo Blanco and David Upton. The book claims to improve the PHP coding productivity with CodeIgniter framework. It explains how to use CodeIgniter framework in a better way. Rather than explaining the syntax and rules of CodeIgniter, this book focuses on getting the big picture and ideas on how to use CodeIgniter. Here’s the link to the sample chapter if you are interested : CodeIgniter 1.7 Book – Sample Chapter – Navigating Your Website

This book has around 300 pages, so I guess I might take a week to read it completely. I’ll probably write a review of this book once I done with reading it. So, till then enjoy PHP coding with CI!

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If you were diligently following my blog for some time, I hope you must have read my earlier post about PHP Development with CodeIgniter. I wrote that post a long back, to say exactly, 10 months back. I was planning for a series on CodeIgniter, but had to stop with just one post, due to my official workload. After that I didn’t get much time to visit that article, until last week.

When I asked for a best PHP framework, I got mixed views on various PHP frameworks, such as CakePHP, Zend, Symfony, etc. But, later I chose CodeIgniter mainly because of it’s very detailed documentation. I was new to PHP then, so the detailed documentation of CodeIgniter helped me to get started quickly with PHP development.

So, enough of CI praising. Just wanted to say that I again started with my PHP side project. Needless to say, I’m building this app using CodeIgniter framework and I’m enjoying the every bit of the development. Will be announcing about my project, soon once it’s in some shape. And, i’ll be restarting the CodeIgniter post series, too. So, keep watching this blog!

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