Including random number (timestamp) in vBulletin

This is useful for 'cache busting' (most commonly used with advertising code that requires a random number). So, if you want to easily include a random number (actually a timestamp) in your vBulletin templates, simply use this code:

<if condition="$randomvar = TIMENOW">$randomvar</if>

Every time I forget the syntax for this, I end up searching vBulletin.org before eventually realising the solution is actually on this thread at vBulletin.com! To avoid me wasting time again in the future, I decided to post this to my blog for reference.

Tweeting from a4uexpo London 2011

Just to let you know that I'll be tweeting live from the sessions at this year's a4uexpo being held at the Hilton Metropole in London. My twitter account is www.twitter.com/geoffblog and the hashtag for the event is #a4uexpo and the official twitter account is @a4uexpo

Review of Ad:Tech London 2011

After reminding myself of the ‘joys’ (think hot, smelly and cramped) of travelling on the Tube during rush hour, I arrived early at this year’s Ad:Tech London for the ‘secret’ breakfast session from the guys at Orange. The presentation kicked off with some interesting stats relating to online advertising, such as that only 49% of ad spending online was done for branding purposes. Having done a small amount of direct sales myself, I’ve often been frustrated with the obsession for a good CTR on a campaign – rather than the client seeing value in having their name and branding being shown X thousand times. Orange also shared their experience that an ad frequency of between 4 or 5 impressions is best in terms of user recall - which I think is now pretty much the standard frequency cap anyway.

Having given us a general overview of the industry, they then moved on to the main focus of the presentation which was to introduce the ‘TV Check’ app that’s due to launch in the UK shortly. This uses a phone’s camera to recognise which TV show (or advert) you’re watching and then loads related content as well as the usual tools for sharing and discussion with other viewers. While I was impressed with the presentation, I couldn’t help think of the Yap.tv app that I was shown 8 months earlier at CES 2011. It will be interesting to see how ‘TV Check’ develops and whether it proves popular, at the moment I’m not sure it’s bringing anything particularly ‘new’ to the market – although I’m happy to be corrected!

The next session that I wanted to share was from Dave Williams (@dave360) relating to ‘Facebook Marketing KPIs’. This was an informative session, again packed with some interesting facts and stats, such as when a friend ‘likes’ a Facebook ad, it can increase recall by 68% and increases ‘purchase intent’ by x4. I also found the overview of Facebook’s new ‘Sponsored Stories’ interesting as it wasn’t something I was aware of. I appreciate I’m probably late to the party here, but for those of you who are still in the dark – it allows you to promote the fact someone has ‘liked’ something. For example, if a user called Joe Bloggs ‘liked’ geoffblog.com then currently it would just be posted chronologically on to their wall. This might quickly get lost amongst all their other postings/likes, but with Sponsored Stories I could pay to move Joe’s like from his wall to the sidebar of his page – ensuring a lot more people notice that he likes geoffblog.com. According to the presentation from Dave, the higher cost of Sponsored Stories (vs traditional FB ads) is matched by their increased performance.

Up next (for me at least) was Scott Renwick, aka ‘the $100m man’, who did a session about an affiliate going from zero to $100m in record time. For those of you who want to check out his past projects (and route to fortune) he started off by selling MetaReward back in 1999 to Experian for $30m, then developed a company called Connexus, and then NextInternet and more recently AdEx. He shared some interesting techniques and recommended checking out the Twilight Fever fan page that someone started on Facebook which quickly gained a large following and now generates income. He also mentioned picky-backing off the trust given to Amazon Kindle books and the idea of doing some publishing yourself as a way of marketing your products. Finally he touched on the fact a lot of affiliates were getting in early to mobile advertising where there’s less competition and cheaper clicks.

Later on in the day I went to the an Adsense session. Some takeaway points from this included the fact the Adsense limit isn’t ‘3 ads per page’ it’s actually 3 standard ad sizes, 3 link units and 2 search boxes – I knew about the search boxes but I thought that link units counted towards the limit of 3, so that was a handy tip. The presentation also mentioned that the first impression served to Google is the most important one, so if you find your mid-page MPU gets the best CTR, then serve that ad first before perhaps the leaderboard you have at the top of the page. I haven’t tried this myself but I thought it sounded interesting enough to check out when I can.

All in all, Ad:Tech was an enjoyable show - I heard there were record numbers this year and the exhibition hall seemed pretty packed. It was a shame some of the large players in the industry (like Ad.com, Vibrant, etc.) were missing this year and I thought the networking event was a big let down compared to the 2010, but I’m pretty sure I’ll be venturing on to that hot tube again this time next year to attend Ad:Tech 2012 (if they'll have me!)

Attending Ad:Tech London 2011

Just a quick post for anyone stumbling across this blog from Twitter. I'm at this year's Ad:Tech London in Kensington Olympia, covering it via Twitter (@geoffblog) and will also be doing a write-up for Latest Gadgets in due course. Ideally looking to cover new developments in mobile apps as well as finding out what's being planned in the industry. Thanks already to Chris and Laura for a warm welcome (literally in my case having got off a packed train!).

Thumbnails for WordPress.com Popular Posts

While working on a WordPress-powered blog I installed a plugin called WordPress.com Popular Posts which uses stats collected from your blog to work out the most frequently viewed stories during a time frame of your choice. The installation is very easy and customizing the plugin can be done via the widgets page. However I felt it was missing something: thumbnails!

On the site I was working on we use the first image in a post as the source image for our thumbnails and use the timthumb.php function to dynamically resize them. I found this blog posting which described how to create thumbnails for an alternative "popular posts" plugin. With a bit of hacking at the code provided there I was able to get thumbnails for the WordPress.com Popular Posts plugin.

So, with thanks to the aforementioned blog, here is a record of what I did for future reference (and for the benefit of anyone searching for a similar solution).

You need to download and install timthumb.php if your theme doesn't currently use it. Then I used the code provided here and added it to my theme's functions.php file (sorry, Blogger isn't good at showing code, so no indentation!):

/**
* Capture the first image from the post.
* @global object $post
* @global object $posts
* @return string
*/
function theme_function_capture_first_image($p=null) {
$firstImg = '';
if (empty($p)) {
global $post, $posts;
$firstImg = '';
ob_start(); ob_end_clean();
$output = preg_match_all('/<img.+src=[\'"]([^\'"]+)[\'"].*>/i', $post->post_content, $matches);
$firstImg = $matches[1][0];
} else {
$output = preg_match_all('/<img.+src=[\'"]([^\'"]+)[\'"].*>/i', $p->post_content, $matches);
$firstImg = $matches[1][0];
}
return $firstImg;
}

Then I edited the wordpresscom-popular-posts/wppp.php file. First find this code:

// Replace format with data
$replace = array(
'%post_permalink%' => get_permalink( $post['post_id'] ),
'%post_title%' => esc_html( $this->truncateText( $post['post_title'], $instance['title_length'] ) ),
'%post_title_attribute%' => esc_attr( $post['post_title'] ),
'%post_views%' => number_format_i18n( $post['views'] )
);

Then add this code after, editing the paths as necessary:

// thumbnail
$img = theme_function_capture_first_image(get_post($post['post_id']));
$src = get_permalink($post['post_id']);
$imgpath = '';
if (empty($img)) {
// define path to default thumbnail
$imgpath = 'http://___PATH_TO___/default.gif';
} else {
// define path to timthumb.php
$imgpath = 'http://___PATH_TO___/timthumb.php?' . 'src=' . $img . '&amp;w=80&amp;h=40&amp;zc=1';
}
$replace['%post_thumb%'] = '<img src="' . $imgpath . '" alt="'. $title .'" />';

Then you can use %post_thumb% in your formatting options (controlled in the widget). If you want to change the image size then edit the w=80 and h=40 in code above.

You might also want to add some CSS lines to your themes CSS file to make it look pretty, I used the following:

ul.wppp_list li {
min-height:45px;
display:block;
list-style:none outside none;
}

ul.wppp_list img {
float:left;
margin-right:8px;
width:80px;
height:40px;
border:2px solid #ECEFF5;
}

I hope that helps :)

Viewing US ads & results in Google

Today I was doing some research and wanted to know how to view Google ads (via Adwords) that were focused at the US market. Typically, if you do a search for a keyword in the UK, Google sees you are from the UK and shows you ads from UK companies. I found the method thanks to this post. If you want to see ads that would be shown to people in the US, you just need to add &gl=US to the URL after you've done your search, for example http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&gl=US&q=geoffblog


"PC Not Listed" XBox 360 - Solution

This was driving me mad, my PC (XP SP3) could see the XBox from Windows Media Player 11, but for some reason the XBox kept reporting "PC Not Found". I searched the internet for hours and tried every solution under the sun, including the renaming/deleting of the DRM folder, disabling firewalls (both Kaspersky and Windows) as well as fiddling around with settings in the Netgear router. Nothing worked. Then I thought I'd try running the Windows "Set up a home or small office network" wizard found inside Network Connections, just to ensure that the settings within Windows were correct for networking. Hey presto, the XBox could now, finally, see the PC. I hope this helps anyone else who is pulling their hair out on this!