When I read about the new Google Adsense feature "Allowed Sites" a couple of weeks ago, I thought I'd set it up on my account just to make sure no sites were displaying my Adsense code on their own sites, which could end up getting my account banned or flagged as suspicious due to factors outside my control.
Let's face it, if they're displaying my Adsense code, they've probably scraped or copied my site content without my consent, so who knows what else they may be up to!

Anyway I logged into Adsense recently and decided to check out the Allowed Sites page, and this is what I read...

There are unauthorized sites that have displayed ads using your AdSense publisher ID within the last week. Please click here to view them.

So I did click here, but all I got were some IP addresses:

A little intrigued to what these IP addresses were, I decided to investigate further by issuing a trace route command to glean some more information.

C:\Documents and Settings\Nik>tracert 64.233.183.104

The trace route results resolved the IP addresses all to Google. I'm guessing that these are in my list because of people viewing my sites in Google's cached pages; So panic over!
Would be good if Google could filter out it's own IP addresses from the list though, so I don't have to check out each IP individually.

I just finished publishing a post to my blog and noticed this strange Blogger quirk, which seems to have confused the localisation of the page and published some link text in German.

Has anyone else noticed this?

Google have added an "Allowed Sites" feature in the Adsense console to stem a problem that has been talked about for a while.
Lots publishers have had their site content stolen and re-purposed in an almost identical fashion on another domain, specifically to earn the criminal money from advertising without spending time and effort writing content themselves.
In some cases the HTML contained the victim's Adsense code, which when uploaded to a "junk" domain with other duplicate content, essentially associated the original publisher with a bad site in Google's eyes.
To protect Google's Adsense publishers from being associated with this crime and having their Adsense accounts potentially banned, Google has developed the "Allowed Sites" feature which allows the Adsense publisher to tell Google which domains it publishes to.

What this won't do is stop people stealing your content and code, nor will it stop people hacking into your web server and changing the Adsense account ID in the Adsense Javascript to the criminals Adsense ID, but this is definitely a step in the right direction.

As an avid user of Firefox the dangers of using one browser (apart from initial testing) became apparent today, especially considering most web users still use Internet Explorer.

I recently converted my site to use Blogger, and I also thought I'd share interesting news articles I read with my visitors by using Google Reader's Javascript widget.

Google Reader is still in Beta

I placed the Javascript widget on my home page and my blog pages a while back. I just checked my site in Internet Explorer 7 and was amazed to see only the template was rendered. There was a distinct lack of content!

I looked at the source HTML, and the content was there. I was puzzled for a few minutes until I realised what the blog page and the home page had in common; The Javascript Google widget.

I quickly removed them and FTPed the pages, the problem was resolved. I grabbed the URL the script block was trying to call and tried to download the external Javascript straight to my browser... it timed-out.

It appears that Internet Explorer will get stuck when external Javascript doesn't load, so be aware of this the next time you choose to use an externally hosted Javascript file. Opera and Firefox didn't seem to have a problem.

The British Pound broke through the physiological barrier of $2 yesterday due to the relative strength of the British economy. For us Brits this has some advantages like cheap shopping trips to New York, and some negatives such as companies who export goods to the US will suffer due to their goods becoming more expensive to American importers.

It also affects British web publishers who earn money from American companies. Affiliate programs like Google's Adsense, Amazon Associates etc are all paid in US dollars. Some schemes have the option of holding payments, but with the weakening economy in the US this exchange rate might be with us for some time.