April, 2015

Google AdSense Launches: Matched Content

Google Adsense has come up with a new tool for publishers – Matched Content. It’s a recommendation tool, which shows related content to your visitors – much like a related content widget with images.

Works best when used at the bottom of each article. Since visitors might be looking for more content after they have consumed the content of your article.

Eligibility to use Matched content
The Matched content feature is not available to all publishers. To be eligible, you must have a site that meets our minimum requirements for traffic volume and number of unique pages. We’ve put these requirements in place to ensure that Matched content provides a great experience for you and your site visitors. Once your site is approved, you’ll have access to the Matched content feature in your AdSense account.

Create an ad unit
Create an ad unit in the usual way, making sure to choose an ad size that fits your layout, and to select “Matched content” from the Ad type drop-down in the process.
To get the best fit for your layout, you might want to use a custom ad size. When using a custom size, we recommend choosing an ad size with a width:height ratio of around 2:1 for a horizontal layout, or 1:2 for a vertical layout.

Check if your site is approved for matched content
1. Sign in to your AdSense account.
2. Click the gear icon and select Settings.
3. In the sidebar, under “Account”, click Site management.

Under the “Owned” tab, check the “Matched content” column to see if your site has been approved. If the status of your site is:
Approved: You may place Matched content units on any of the pages of this site.
Not approved: You may not place Matched content units on this site.

If there is no column called “Matched content“, then your account is not yet eligible for it and you’ll have to wait for some months before it is rolled out to every publisher.

Revenue
Going forward am sure Google will roll content matching ads into this widget and help publishers generate more revenue from their site. For example, apart from your own sites content, the widget might show some relevant content and link of an advertiser. This way, advertiser gets traffic and the publisher gets his cut!

Related Read: New AdSense Ad format — Widget Ads

Get Your Phone IMEI Number From The Web

IMEI(International Mobile Station Equipment Identity) is a 15 digit unique number, using which law enforcement authorities can track your phone with the help of network service providers. If you loose your phone and do not have access to your phone bill or the box, there is still a way to recover the IMEI number.

How to get IMEI number?
If you still have your phone, you can dial *#06# to get the 15 digit number. If you have already lost the phone, you can get it by logging into your google account – which you used in your phone to access Google Play Store. Now go to Google Settings. Click on Expand All or the android icon and you’ll get the IMEI number and other details of your phone.

Watch on YouTube.

What to do with IMEI number?
You can register an FIR(First Information Report) and ask service providers to either track the phone or block it, so that no one else can use their service on your phone.

How to Shutdown Windows System With One Click

In Windows 8 you need to go to ‘Charms bar’ and then settings and then shutdown button. This would take some seconds and more importantly rambling around the window screen. Also if you are downloading something and want to shutdown after certain time, you can automate or schedule the shutdown of your windows system with this simple trick. No extra software to install, just follow the instructions below.

Watch on YouTube.

Shortcut to shutdown

1. Right click – New – Shortcut
2. Set location/path: shutdown /s /t 3600
(3600 for 60 minutes. Give 0 for immediate shutdown)
3. Name the file, change icon(if you prefer to) and place it in a safe place – I prefer to have it on my desktop.

Whenever you want to shutdown your system, you can simply click this executable file.

I usually use command prompt to set the shutdown timing of my computer, while I’ve set the system to download something in the background.
Hope this would be a helpful tip.

How to reduce file size of an image in 10 seconds

Photos shot with digital camera usually have a huge file size – anywhere from 6MB to 12MB. If you use these images on a webpage it’ll take a lot of time for the page to load. This creates a lot of problems: user has to wait till the page loads, consumption of server bandwidth, more consumption of users internet data, and it’s not good from SEO angle too!

No Photoshoping
You need not be a photoshop expert to do this. Infact, you need not even install any complicated software.

ms-paint
If you’re on Windows, then you already have the software installed in your system by default.

How to reduce file size of an image and resize(image dimension) the image
Open the image in ms-paint.
Click Ctrl + w and resize the image.
Now save the image and check the file size.

This way you don’t even lose the quality of the image.

Fake your Location in Google Chrome

There are so many websites which require user permission to access their location – so that they can serve information relevant to their location. Previously browser use to depend just on the computers IP address, but with HTML5 geolocation API, browsers have become smart enough to get the users location information via various sources like GPS, IP address, WiFi networks, cell towers etc.

How To Fake your Location in Google Chrome

Watch on: YouTube

Go to Google Chrome’s Developer Tools – Right Click and select Inspect Element or press Ctrl + Shift + I (in Windows).
Switch to Emulation Tab.
Select Sensors option.
Check emulate geolocation coordinates.
Now input a different lat and lon values.

There are some websites which take your default location information and give you information relevant to that area, by using above trick you might be able to change it and access the information related to a different location!

HTML5 Geolocation API Tool: http://technotip.com/demo/GoogleMaps/

YouTube: New HTML5 Video Player for Desktop

YouTube is testing a new HTML5 based video player for its browser based desktop application. Some of the changes looks like being inspired by its own mobile app.

In the new video player, the controller disappears once you take the focus out of the player or once you take out the mouse pointer out of the video player.

Old YouTube Video Player
youtube-old-player

New YouTube Video Player
youtube-new-player

In the new video player the toggle buttons, autoplay and the annotations are brighter and well designed.

How to preview YouTube’s new html5 video player?
Download, Install and open Google Chrome Browser.
Install editthiscookie browser extention/adon.
After editthiscookie is installed, refresh the browser. And you’ll see a cookie icon on the browser – to the right hand top corner. Click on it.
Now goto, VISITOR_INFO1_LIVE and change the value to Q06SngRDTGA.
Click on the green check mark to apply the changes.
Now refresh the browser and congrats, you can now make use of YouTubes new HTML5 based video player 🙂

Update: Some people asked me how it’s done in Firefox
If you are on Windows, open Firefox -> press F12 or open developer console
type the following without quotes “cookie set VISITOR_INFO1_LIVE Q06SngRDTGA” and hit Enter.