Online Grandma

Archive for July, 2008

After a couple of days of being tied up with various “Grandma” duties, I finally sent the grandchildren packing. (Bless their little hearts … ) Now I can sit down here and finish figuring out what makes this program tick.

My last post received a very helpful comment from Fred, who’s the product lead over at ScribeFire. So, be sure to check that out. Following his advice, I’ve got an ad block showing on this blog now. At the moment, the ad being served up is AdSense. It doesn’t look bad at all. The theme I’m using here has a white background (although I may have changed it by the time you see this), so the white ad fits in well. I’m not too crazy about having a border around my AdSense, but can live with it.

Apparently the various programs that want to get their code snippets in on the same spot at the end of the </BODY> tag are going to get along without fighting. They just have to share that spot and it doesn’t much matter which comes first.

There was one fairly important issue I thought of the other night after finishing that last post. I got to thinking about that lovely check I would undoubtedly receive … (turns out they use PayPal) … anyway, how are they going to know where to send it? I tried to remember, did I fill out the particulars at any point in the sign-up process? Couldn’t remember having done that. But then, my memory is not what it used to be. So, after a little looking around, I found the place where account info is shown. And, no, I had not entered any of that.

Chances are, when the final version of the program is released, there will be some sort of mechanism that won’t let you place any ads until that’s on record. But, right now, if you’re also a beta tester don’t forget to enter your account information.

You can find the place to enter it on the ScribeFire website. What seems to me as the easiest way to get there is right from the ScribeFire entry window. Click the “Monetize” tab on the far left side (second from top — green dollar-sign), then from that screen click “See your earnings in more detail”. That takes you to the ScribeFire Dashboard. In the menu along the top, open “Account” and fill in the necessary information. Then you’re in business!

While there on the Dashboard, take a look around. It appears to have a nice spread of stats to check. Nothing better than checking your stats with your morning tea! If I can find just a few more stats to look at, I won’t have to get to any actual work until noon. (The experienced marketers and mentors say, “Don’t get hung up on watching your stats!” … But, who can resist?) And since you know you’re going to be watching them anyway, isn’t it nice to have an attractive and readable interface?

So, that’s about all I can say on the technical side of this application. Yes, it’s still in beta and still has a few little rough places. But, I expect the system is going to function pretty well. Now, where will this all fit in the business world? Of course, time will tell.

I’m sure an experienced professional webmaster can squeeze more money out of a site by choosing, testing, and placing his own ads. But what can the person who doesn’t have the experience or inclination for all that expect to earn from this? There’s no way to answer that question — just too many variables. But one fact stands out; they don’t have much to lose by trying it.

The advice I’m giving to a couple of young ladies (relations of mine — you know who you are) who’ve expressed a desire to earn some extra cash online is: Start a free Blogger blog. Pop on some QuickAds. (Well, first get your name on the list to be a beta tester for ScribeFire QuickAds.) Do it for fun. Do it for experience. Do it with no expectations. (Unrealistic expectations have killed more businesses than any other factor.) Make course corrections as you go. Keep going.

I really think that would be a great way to get started. They could have their first sites up and running — and monetized — in less than an hour. And with no monetary investment.

It’s not just the beginners this program is likely to appeal to. The established webmaster who has more sites than time might use this as well. How about the dedicated writer who has lots to say, but no patience for messing around with the technical stuff?

Kind of an interesting feature is that you can use your own AdSense account, or go with their in-house account. For people who have had a problem getting an account, this could be very helpful. Even if you do have your own account, there might be cases where you don’t want to use it. If you have a site that’s marginal in attracting nice focused traffic, it might be counter-productive to use your AdSense on that. What happens (or so I’m told …) is that a site producing clicks that don’t convert well prompts Google to “price” your account — your whole account. That means they set your account to get paid on their lower economy price tier. So your sites that were getting one-dollar clicks suddenly start getting three-cent clicks. Yes, all of your sites, not just the crummy one.

This whole issue is not something I can address from experience, so keep in mind that this is just speculation. But if the above is correct, then it would seem logical to use their AdSense account for sites you weren’t too confident in and save your own for your best sites. To do that, you’d have to use a different system to place ads from one of the accounts. When you set up your QuickAds account, you have to choose one or the other — yours or theirs.

The outcome of that could be that your weak site might run AdSense with their account and earn three-cent clicks, which you’d be perfectly happy with. Something is better than nothing, and there would be no stigma placed on your other sites. Or … maybe their system can determine if a site is not a good choice for AdSense and will place other types of ads there, and thereby the AdSense that they do place will perform right up there with the best. Or … maybe Google has different standards for this kind of account and wouldn’t “price” their account with so many users of all levels. Or … maybe the whole concept of “pricing” is a myth made up by old marketers to intimidate the new ones. Hmn … well, let’s wait and see.

Today I was excited to receive my beta invitation for the new ScribeFire QuickAds. ScribeFire is well known as a blog editor. My previous post talks about that. QuickAds is a new service for bloggers which will let you very simply monitize your blog with ads. You wouldn’t have to sign up with different affiliate programs, or AdSense, or any such thing. It all goes through ScribeFire’s program. They serve up the optimal ad from whichever affiliate their system picks out as best. Then you get one check, which combines earnings from all the ads.

The main charm to this is the simplicity of implementation. A serious professional blogger probably likes to have more control over these things. But for a beginner or a hobby blogger, it brings the ability to put some ads in place with only a couple of clicks. Then all they need to do is blog — and (hopefully) take the monthly check to the bank.

Okay. Sounds good. Now the question is, how does it work?

I followed the link from my invitation. It tells me that, if I’m already using ScribeFire, I should download the beta version which contains the new functionality. Did that. And … uh-oh … it’s an .xpi file. What do you do with that? (Yes, I realize that probably the whole world — other than me — have known the answer to that forever. But I’m fairly clueless about these things.)

However, as luck would have it, only last week I had been experimenting with another beta Firefox add-on. The developer of that one kindly included instructions on how to install it. Otherwise I would have been stalled before ever making it out the gate! In case there are any other dummies like me out there, here’s what you do once you download your .xpi file:

1. Open the Firefox browser.
2. From the File menu, choose “Open File”
3. Browse to wherever you saved the download, and select it.
4. The regular box for installing add-ons will appear, and from there, just choose “Install” as usual.

Simple enough to do, but if you didn’t already know how, you’d be left scratching your head.

So, I got it installed. When ScribeFire is opened, there’s a new tab on the left side. The second tab from the top (with a little green dollar-sign) opens the QuickAds page.

In “Step 1″, you’re invited to add a blog to your account. Clicking that opens a box where you can choose from the blogs you already have attached to ScribeFire. First I chose this blog (which is a WordPress blog). After working on it a few seconds, the setup fairy returned with the disheartening news that this blog could not be configured automatically — I’d have to do it manually. It provided a little snippet of code I was supposed to copy and paste into my blog just before the </body> tag. Okay …

I copied the code and went in search of the tag. I opened my blog’s admin section and went to the “Theme Editor” (found beneath the “Design” tab). There I examined every file in the Theme Files … to no avail. I went back to the view of my blog’s site, and used Firefox to view the source (under View menu, “Page Source”). There, sure enough, down towards the bottom, is a </body> tag. But where does it come from? How do I insert anything just above it?

And that brings up another question. I notice that just above that tag, there’s a snippet of code placed there by another program I’m testing (Woopra — I’ll write about that one of these days) which also wants it place immediately above the </body> tag. If I recall correctly, Google Analytics also wants the same position. So, what are you supposed to do about that? And does the Woopra code already occupying that spot have anything to do with why QuickAds couldn’t automatically configure the site?

Well, this is turning out to be something of a cliffhanger. Stay tuned …

So, in the meantime, giving up on this blog I turned my attention to my other one — a Blogger blog. I repeated “Step 1″ with that one. And it worked.

Moving on to “Step 2″, I selected that blog and clicked “Manage Ads”. That opens the selected site, ready for the next step.

In “Step 3″, I chose from the three ad sizes available, then moving my cursor to the blog, indicated where the ad should appear. It took a couple of tries to get the hang of this, but it was pretty intuitive. The problem here was that none of the choices fit very well into the theme used on that blog. I ended up with a skyscraper on the left side which has just a smidge shaved off the edge where it runs into the body text. Also, a white ad block surrounded by a black border sticks out like a sore thumb on the tan background of my site.

But, after all, this is a beta. I’m sure the final version will smooth out a lot of these wrinkles.

As for the ads served, I can’t make much of a conclusion on that. The site where I put this is my personal blog. It’s not really optimized to any subject. Even I’d have a hard time saying what it’s about. So you can sort of see the program struggling to figure out what kind of ads to serve. I can’t say much about earnings either, because there’s virtually no traffic to that site.

For the sake of experimentation, I’ll add this to a couple more sites that I have. (Not that they have any traffic either!) But, that can wait until tomorrow.

Image via Wikipedia

I’ll see if this post will get to my blog. I’m using ScribeFire, which is a Firefox plugin for making blog entries. It has a lot of nice features, but seems a little short on documentation.

It mentioned on the homepage that you can drag and drop formatted text from the web. Nowhere (that I can see) where that is elaborated on. Guess I’ll just try it and see what happens:

Other Features

Additionally ScribeFire allows you to:

• Categorize and tag your blog posts
• Upload images
• Set timestamps
• Save works-in-progress as notes
• Post an entry as a draft
• Share your posts on social websites
• Upload files via FTP

Okay, I just dragged-and-dropped the above bulleted list. That could be useful at times.

I could save this as a draft or publish it. I could also save a “note”. I tried clicking the “Save Note” button. Don’t know if it did anything or not. My question at this point is, if you save a note where does it go? And, more important, how do you get it back?

Aha! I found the answer to that question. In the right section of the ScribeFire window, there are a row of tabs at the top. The second tab, “Entries”, will give you a second row of tabs, “Posts”, “Notes”, and “Pages”. These will show you lists of — you guessed it! — posts, notes, and pages.

That right-hand panel is also where you configure the connection to your blog (or blogs — you can have a number of them). On the first shot of setting up my WordPress blog, it returned an error that XML-RPC services were disabled on the blog. To fix that, you need to log in to the blog’s admin area. Click “settings”, then “writing”. About halfway down the page, find a checkbox labeled “XML-RPC”. That needs to be checked.

Now I’ll try publishing this. I’ll edit in a few more comments … assuming it works … later.

(Next day)

Yes, it published. Now I’m wondering what will happen if a re-open the post in ScribeFire (by finding it in the right panel under “Entries” –> “Posts”), add some more text to it, and publishing again. Now I see two options below the text entry area: “Publish as Edit” and “Publish to Online Grandma”. I suppose that pretty well answers that question … I’m publishing this as an edit.

Here’s my next experiment. What if I do some editing right on my blog? By working in the WordPress editing page, my cool Zemanta plugin (another Firefox addition that I talked about previously) gets activated. Using its suggestions I can easily choose links, tags, pictures, and related articles to beef up my post.

OK. Did that. Now re-opening ScribeFire to see what it thinks of this development.

Far out! That didn’t bother ScribeFire a bit! When I open the entry just like I did before, there it is — complete with all the new additions, links, pictures, related articles and all. To see the categories and tags I added, I have to look in the right pane under the “Categories” tab — and all are present and accounted for. Obviously, this is where I would enter them when doing that from ScribeFire.

This has the makings of a very nice system. Here’s one obstacle I ran into, though. Zemanta didn’t find a link for a fairly crucial term to this article — “ScribeFire”. It would have been pretty easy to just put it in there the old-fashioned way. But, since I’m playing with tools, I used another of my standbys — Linkify. (I’ve written about that in this blog as well.)

Linkify is a little script-thingy that you keep in the bookmark toolbar of your browser. So, it won’t work in ScribeFire; you need to go to the editing screen on your blog. From there, you have to get into the HTML view. Then select the words you want for your link, click on the “linkify” bookmarklet, and a sidebar with search results will open. Choose the result you want and click “create link”. (I’ll admit this is a bit of overkill if you already know the URL, but it’s useful if you don’t.)

There’s another aspect of ScribeFire that sounds very intriguing. They have recently added an ad serving program, which is in closed Beta at the moment. I put my name on the waiting list to give it a look-see. When I find out more, I’ll make a post on that. But, I must say, indications are favorable. They have information on their website.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Posting with ScribeFire
• Desktop Blog Editing Software Roundup – Which Tool is Right for the Job?

I’m using the editor that comes with the Flock browser for this. I wonder of Zemanta can be worked in somehow. I just sort of like it. This is just a very basic editor without very many bells or whistles. But I guess I might use it at times. Maybe.