There are several tutorials on the Internet on how-to integrate the Google Custom search in your website, but the results are not very attractive. The older iframe version doesn’t fit perfectly in most of our templates and the style for ads and results doesn’t look good in the past. A few month Google has released some nice new features:

• Custom search element placements
• Custom styles and themes using CSS
• Promotions, set your own premium results for specific search queries
• A new AJAX powered CSE using the Google AJAX API loader

With all these new features the CSE (Custom Search Engine) becomes very attractive to use it on your own site as site search. In this tutorial we show you how-to add the custom search feature to you site using jQuery, the Thickbox plugin and the AJAX API provided by Google. To do this a result page is not necessary anymore, we show only a search box somewhere on a particular website.

Including the Google API, jQuery and the Thickbox plugin

First include the following rows to your page HEAD, you need to add them on every page where you like to show the search box.

<script type="text/javascript" src="jquery-1.3.2.min.js"></script>
<link rel="stylesheet" href="thickbox.css" type="text/css" />
<script type="text/javascript" src="thickbox.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.google.com/jsapi?key=YOURAPYKEY"></script>

To use the Google API you need to register an API key for your website, request a key here.

HTML code for the search box

Below the simple HTML code for the search form and the container for the results. Place both somewhere on your webpage.

<div id="searchcont">
	<label for="query_input">Search Query: </label>
	<input type="text" id="query_input" />
	<input type="button" value="ok" id="searchbtn" />
</div>
<div id="resultcont">
	<div id="title" style="visibility:hidden;"><a href="#">Close</a></div>
	<div id="results"></div>
</div>

jQuery code snippet

The following JS code will load the Google API and if the user has clicked the search button the customSearchControl is initiated, the Thickbox is called, the title inside the Thickbox becomes visible, the result element is prepared and at last the input element value is executed for the search query. Add this code in your page’s HEAD surrounded by some script tags.

google.load('search', '1');
$(document).ready(function() {
	$("#searchbtn").click(function () {
		var customSearchControl = new google.search.CustomSearchControl('UNIQUE_CSE_ID');
		tb_show("", "#TB_inline?height=480&width=800&inlineId=resultcont&modal=true");
		$('#title').css("visibility", "visible");   
		var drawOptions = new google.search.DrawOptions();
		customSearchControl.draw(document.getElementById("results"), drawOptions);
		customSearchControl.execute(document.getElementById("query_input").value);
	});
	$("#title a").click(function () {
		tb_remove();
		$('#title').css("visibility", "hidden");   
		$("#results").hide();
	});
});

The other click event is used to hide the Thickbox, the event will hide the title and hides also the results. The last action is needed because we show an inline element, if we don’t hide the content the results are still visible after the Thickbox is closed.

That’s all, simple or not? The code above needs of course some styling. I used a slightly modified version for my network site search on this blog. If you search for “wordpress” you see the “promotion” feature I mentioned above.

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Posterous is a great hosted Blog system that we talked about in this blog about social media services. The current version has already a lot of features like custom themes and functions for services like Twitter and Facebook.

The best of all their service is still free!

I noticed the last weeks that Google doesn’t index all my Posterous pages and that while I point my blog Prime Blogger to a .com domain name. My first idea was a missing Google Sitemap. I tried before to add my Posterous site to my Google Webmaster Tools account, but this requires a custom meta tag on your homepage or you need to upload a unique file to your site to proof the ownership. I suggested a function for a Google Sitemap to Brett from Posterous  and he gave me the hint that I’m able to change the HTML using a custom theme and yes this is key to get your site accepted in your Google Webmaster Tools account.

Just add your site to your account and choose the meta tag to proof the sites ownership:

Next surf to your Posterous site and in the control panel choose your blog -> Settings -> Theme and customize my site -> Advanced.

Paste the meta tag code into the code box at the top. Save the settings and confirm to copy your custom theme settings.

Now it’s possible to confirm the website ownership within the Google Webmaster Tools. Next we like to add a sitemap, click Site Configuration -> Sitemaps -> Submit a sitemap

Posterous doesn’t offer a Google sitemap format but you can use the XML feed instead. This gives you not a complete sitemap but at least you can submit the latest 20 blogs to Google. I hope it helps…Similar Posts:

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Finally I’m in, I got my invitation for Google Wave! After creating the first Wave pages I can say that the system looks really cool and I’m very happy that it’s browser based and not some Windows desktop application.

Why should I use Google Wave?

First what people asked me after I told them about Google Wave was: “Why should I use it and what is so special?” If the same people are already on Twitter and/or Facebook it’s easy to explain; It’s like Facebook, Twitter or MSN. Google Wave is a tool to share your content with other friends in real time and also private communication tool. Currently is Google Wave a preview release and I’m sure we will see much more features before the system is out of a future Beta period. I think a lot of people are missing the function to publish their content to others users without adding them to a conversation and you can’t discover stuff or profiles from others. On the other site there are already features like real time content updates and adding content is very easy and powerful. Adding content is like creating a word document with abilities to add images, links, gadgets and attachments.

Gadgets are allowed but there is no function for YouTube videos

As I said before, its possible to add gadgets to your Wave. Add Google maps, simple polls and many gadgets from the google gadget gallery. Since Google Wave is in an early state, not every 3rd party gadget works and adding gadgets is limited. The first thing I noticed is that there is no standard function to add YouTube videos to your Wave. We (finalwebsites.com) created a small YouTube Gadget Generator to create your custom YouTube Video object. Using this generator it’s possible to create a gadget from every YouTube Video URL.

Google Wave Invitations available

We like to share 10 Google Wave Invitations with our blog reader. If you like have one, post some nice comment why you deserve one of the invitations. We publish the most creative responses in the comment list below and we give away the invitations in a random order.

Invitations for Google Wave are send via the interface from Google wave. There is no code or something we can send via email or this website. If you like to get invited, provide your e-mail address which is connected with a Google account or your Gmail address. Post this e-mail address with your comment and mark this address: “My Google account is …”

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Today I read about the new search options on this Google Blog and thought great more control. I didn’t understood why people should use the Blog Search feature from Google because I was never that satisfied as the regular search.

Using the new search options I tried some searches and selected the Blog filter as well. I was very surprised to find in the Blog search result a few duplicates from my Blog post two weeks ago.

First I thought maybe my blog was not so relevant at the moment, but after I switched off the Blog filter I found my Blog post at the top of the list.

I know that the Blog search has some great real time results but this make no sense. Google shows some excepts or duplicates instead of the original content. Similar Posts:

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These days I tried some plugin to send mail message within bbpress via SMTP. Since my domains email is hosted with Google applications I decided to send my messages via the SMTP server from Gmail. I found several articles and tutorials, but a lot of them didn’t worked for me.

Why using Gmail for sending mail messages?

First of all it’s FREE! Sure most website owners can use their own SMTP server for sending email messages from their website, but it makes sense even than to use Gmail for sending mail. The chance is big that your websites IP address is on a blacklist if your site is on hosted by a shared web hosting provider. If not or you host your site on your own server, there is always a risk that your IP address get blacklisted. Because of some limitations, the SMTP server from Google is a good choice applications with less than 500 recipients a day, check this information from the Google help pages.

Requirements

You need for this code example a PHP5 enabled web host (I tested only on Linux), the port 465 need to be open and of course you need a Gmail or Google applications account.

SMTP for Gmail tutorial

1. If you don’t have one, register a Gmail account or setup your domain for Google applications.
2. Download a recent version of PHPMailer (I used the version 5.02)
3. Check with your web hosting provider if port 465 (TCP out) is open, if not ask him to open that port
4. Include the phpmailer class file: require_once('phpmailer/class.phpmailer.php');
5. Create those two constant variable to store your Gmail login and password. Use the login for your Google application mail if you have one.

   define('GUSER', 'you@gmail.com'); // Gmail username
   define('GPWD', 'password'); // Gmail password

6. Use the following function to send mail messages (add the function in one of your included files):

   function smtpmailer($to, $from, $from_name, $subject, $body) { 
   	global $error;
   	$mail = new PHPMailer();  // create a new object
   	$mail->IsSMTP(); // enable SMTP
   	$mail->SMTPDebug = 0;  // debugging: 1 = errors and messages, 2 = messages only
   	$mail->SMTPAuth = true;  // authentication enabled
   	$mail->SMTPSecure = 'ssl'; // secure transfer enabled REQUIRED for Gmail
   	$mail->Host = 'smtp.gmail.com';
   	$mail->Port = 465; 
   	$mail->Username = GUSER;  
   	$mail->Password = GPWD;           
   	$mail->SetFrom($from, $from_name);
   	$mail->Subject = $subject;
   	$mail->Body = $body;
   	$mail->AddAddress($to);
   	if(!$mail->Send()) {
   		$error = 'Mail error: '.$mail->ErrorInfo; 
   		return false;
   	} else {
   		$error = 'Message sent!';
   		return true;
   	}
   }

   Most of the setting inside the function are required by Gmail. While searching for tutorials I found articles with different settings for the port and security. My advice use them as in this tutorial.

7. Call the function within your code:

   smtpmailer('to@mail.com', '', 'from@mail.com', 'yourName', 'test mail message', 'Hello World!');

   Use this more “advanced” usage inside your application:

   if (smtpmailer('to@mail.com', 'from@mail.com', 'yourName', 'test mail message', 'Hello World!')) {
   	// do something
   }
   if (!empty($error)) echo $error;

Advanced setup with fall-back SMTP server

Because of the limit it might be useful to use a secondary SMTP server if the Gmail option didn’t send the message. For this functionality we need to replace the part with the smtp settings a little bit. First create login/server variables for the 2nd SMTP server:

define('SMTPUSER', 'you@yoursmtp.com'); // sec. smtp username
define('SMTPPWD', 'password'); // sec. password
define('SMTPSERVER', 'smtp.yoursmtp.com'); // sec. smtp server

Next we need to create a if/else statement using the variables for the second server (replace).

function smtpmailer($to, $from, $from_name, $subject, $body, $is_gmail = true) { 
	global $error;
	$mail = new PHPMailer();
	$mail->IsSMTP();
	$mail->SMTPAuth = true; 
	if ($is_gmail) {
		$mail->SMTPSecure = 'ssl'; 
		$mail->Host = 'smtp.gmail.com';
		$mail->Port = 465;  
		$mail->Username = GUSER;  
		$mail->Password = GPWD;   
	} else {
		$mail->Host = SMTPSERVER;
		$mail->Username = SMTPUSER;  
		$mail->Password = SMTPPWD;
	}        
	$mail->SetFrom($from, $from_name);
	$mail->Subject = $subject;
	$mail->Body = $body;
	$mail->AddAddress($to);
	if(!$mail->Send()) {
		$error = 'Mail error: '.$mail->ErrorInfo;
		return false;
	} else {
		$error = 'Message sent!';
		return true;
	}
}

And use the function now as followed:

$msg = 'Hello World';
$subj = 'test mail message';
$to = 'to@mail.com';
$from = 'from@mail.com';
$name = 'yourName';
 
if (smtpmailer($to, $from, $name, $subj, $msg)) {
	echo 'Yippie, message send via Gmail';
} else {
	if (!smtpmailer($to, $from, $name, $subj, $msg, false)) {
		if (!empty($error)) echo $error;
	} else {
		echo 'Yep, the message is send (after hard working)';
	}
}

Both examples are very simple and demonstrate only how-to send mail messages via the SMTP server from Gmail. Of course the user can extend the code to handle HTML messages and attachements etc. If you have any issues with these examples, just let me know. Post a comment here or post to our partner PHP script forum.

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Actually “Adsense for domains” is just like most of the other domain parking services. So why should we park our unused domain names with Google?

For a long time I never used any domain parking services because I didn’t believed in that product. I checked the first time “Revenue Parking” provided by my domain registration provider Dynadot, after several month I was not very satisfied with that product. Another point to not use that kind of service was that you need host a domain name with the same provider if you want to their domain parking service.

Several weeks ago I read on the Adsense blog about this new service and forget it already because the “Adsense for domains” was not yet available in my account. By accident I noticed the new link on my Adsense setup page and started to plat a little with this new product.

Add domain names and configuration

Adding domain names is quite simple just add your name together with the language and in the next step you get the information for the DNS settings. As with most other parking services you don’t need to change the name server entries. You need to enter at least 4 A-records and one CNAME for the “www” sub-domain. The CNAME holds also your Adsense Publisher ID which should be used for the validation that a domain belongs to your Adsense account. For the DNS configuration you will find help files with information how to change the DNS with the bigger domain name provider. I created one account on my own server and add other domain names as domain pointer. This way I’m able to copy past the information directly into “named” data base files.

Validation process and add styles

After you add the domain to your account and the DNS configuration is done it needs a few hours until the validation is done. At the moment you need to check the your account by yourself and if needed to re-validate there is an option too. After validation you’re able to add channels to your parked domain name: “I suggest to do that other wise you didn’t know which domain performs very well and which not”. Tray also to enter some keywords to your domain name and maybe you like to change the style from your parking page. Right parking pages are not very “stylish”, but maybe some custom colors will let the visitor generate more page views.

Reports and earnings

“Adsense for domains” is  (great) CPM based advertising. It look to me as for regular ads, that some domain names perform better some than another. Just like with content related ads Google will show ads with higher and lower revenue. The reports are the same as for the other ads (content, search…) and doesn’t need any explanation. At the moment I can’t see if impressions from the landing page will earn more or less than impressions from other result pages. There is no information about the how many clicks are generated.

Rules for publishers

There are some new rules for the “domain park” publisher, since the earnings are CPM based it’s not allowed to redirect traffic to that page, advertising for parked domain isn’t allowed…

I use the Adsense product for names which are not used anymore and still have some traffic. I noticed that some domain perform much better than earlier with content ads.

What is your experience with “Adsense for domains”?

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These days existing users of the service iGoogle have noticed some modifications on their personalized homepage. The page looks now more straight and has got some new great features.

Maximize / minimize your gadgets

For several standard Google modules there is a extended mode (canvas view). In maximized mode your are able to get more information about a RSS feed item or you get some “light version” inside your Gmail gadget. In maximized view you get each gadget spread over the whole window.

More Gmail controls

In this new version the gmail gadget has got some improvements. Now it’s possible to maintain messages without visiting your Gmail account, but check yourself how it looks like:

New tab orders and functions

In the past version you need to switch between tabs to use different gadgets located on multiple tabs. In the new iGoogle version you can access them directly. The new “tab” bar is located to the left side and you’re able to (un)collapse the list of gadgets for each tab.

Improved and more advanced controls

In the new settings page for your personalized homepage it’s possible to control you iGoogle homepage with features like share, backup or restore the settings for your iGoogle page or just edit your tabs directly from one screen.

I like the improvements very much, I use some Google Gadgets not every day and this new functions are a big timesaver. Thanks Google!

Check also this blog post about the new Canvas Views on the google blog.Similar Posts:

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or Google the Open Source Company presents their new technology!

The Google I/O conference in San Francisco is the first of his kind, during two days the conference provides the attendee 90 sessions grouped by the following categories:

• Ajax and JavaScript
• APIs and Tools
• Maps and Geo
• Mobile
• Social

Furthermore they held sessions like Code labs, Tech Talks and the Fireside Chat. So maybe you’re looking for the “Search” category? Yes there are a few lessons about search optimization and the Ajax Search API, but most sessions are about new modern technologies like Gears and the Google App Engine.

Those people who knows Google as the search engine provider and advertising company would be very surprised about the strong open source character of this conference. With the vision

Create a better, full featured Internet using modern technologies

Google has invited any developer to use Google technologies in their own applications.

While listening to several sessions, I get an good idea about Gears, OpenSocial, Google APIs like Authentication API, content API’s and the Google Checkout API. Before joining this conference I accepted to learn something I can use within my next projects. OpenSocial is something I like, a kind of standard how to create your own Social Community.

My first impression about Gears is not so positive; the idea is really good, but it looks like a browser add-on aka Adobe flash (not the function but the idea how to provide the technology to the client). All presentations are available to the public next week on the Google I/0 website.Similar Posts:

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Several weeks ago a several Adsense publisher has complains about recent modifications in the click behavior for Adsense ads. While an Internet visitor was able before to click the whole ad area to reach the target page, is the new ad only clickable on the ad title and the URL. This modification was done by Google to ban unwanted clicks for their advertisers. Afterwards I think that most of the publisher doesn’t have noticed a change in their earnings (maybe a publisher who need those unwanted clicks to earn money).

Enough about this, there are new features!

Managing Ads via the Adsense control panel

Since a few days it’s possible to use this great feature to maintain existing ad code without changing your HTML. Just create a first (new) ad zone and place some standard Adsense code into your HTML (yeah I’m talking about an account from a publisher in Europe). If you need to change the colors, ad dimensions or ad channel on a later moment, just do it within your Adsense control panel. This is really a time safer! This way it’s easy to change for example the color for multiple pages from your website with just a few mouse clicks.

Ad container with dynamic controls

Maybe some of you have already noticed these new type of ads:

• Ad banners with the more or related links to show the “other” ads
• smaller ad boxes with a dynamic “flashy scroller” to show more ads without reloading the page
• … and maybe there are more?

Sure this feature is only useful for AD-surfer (I hope there are some of them) and maybe this new links/navigation elements makes some people curious.

Video units? And why not (ad free) YouTube Videos?

A few weeks ago the Video ad format was added to my Adsense account, I played with it for a while but skipped this format for the next time.
How does it work? People can watch the videos within the theme you have selected for your video ad and MAYBE the visitor will click some (tiny) ad which is placed above/below the movie and YOU (the publisher) became rich.

Sorry, but these ads make no sense (to me), the video player is really big and will take on some of my websites ~50% from the content space. All this afford to have (maybe) some clicks from a banner with one or two small ads? This clicks need to be very high priced because they could give your website the imago from some MFA site.

People from Adsense thanks for the “Manage ads” feature, I like to see more of them!Similar Posts:

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• Google Adsense Referrals 2.0 or continue with PPC ads?

These days Google announced that the product Referrals 2.0 will become available to the most of their publishers. Yesterday I got the chance to have a first look on this new product. The first thing I noticed is that its very easy to use, just like the other Adsense products.

The old Referral product screen is extended with a number of categories where the publisher can choose multiple categories for his ad publishing campaign. From every category it’s possible to preview the advertisers. At this point there was the first “scary” thing! SPAM!

I checked the telecommunication category and found several advertisers for diet pills! I checked some other popular categories and got the same result.
Nice is the feature to select ads for specific countries and languages, but also in other countries and languages the same situation: non related advertisers in multiple categories.

For my first test I created some Adsense code for my new referral ad and placed it on some web page and hello! These ads are looking the same as the regular Adsense text ads. Nice this way the visitor will just recognize some ads by Google.

Good points:

• Easy to use interface, any experienced Adsense publisher doesn’t need to learn (again) how to get the ad code on some web page.
• A good amount of categories for almost every type of website.
• The payment is done together with the earnings from other Adsense products (you can reach faster the minimum amount)

Bad points:

• The categories are spammed by unrelated advertisers (I’m sure some editor will remove these ads after some days but in the meantime you will publish some yunk)
• Only text ads are available (at the moment), no special ad variations
• No contact to the advertiser (like on publisher networks like commission junction)

I don’t have good results with the old Google referral products and know that monetizing a website with PPA (pay per action) ads needs much more work than adding some PPC ads to your website. I know a lot of companies supporting their affiliates with the result of higher conversions. I’m sure that every Adsense publisher is able to generate better earnings using PPC ads from Google.

Related links:
Check this thread with some guide for affiliate marketing.
Forum thread about Adsense referral 2.0 at webdigity.com.Similar Posts:

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