Problems with BT Broadband

Lately we've been having big problems with BT broadband. Once a week or so the ADSL connection drops out leaving us disconnected from the internet. We are so used to spending a few hours a day online - answering emails etc. - that it drives us a bit nuts. I've contacted their 0800 support line and the people try to be helpful but the only guidance they seem to be able to give is to help us reconnect our PCs to the wireless hub.

My suspicion is that there's a couple of problems. The first is that when someone else in my village uses broadband, the ADSL link goes down, i.e. we interfere with each other. In Window's list of available wireless connections, I often see another wireless hub when the service is very ropey. The second thing is that when someone uses a wireless telephone in the village, I have trouble connecting my desktop wirelessly to my hub. I think this is the case since I sometimes see another wireless connection with just a number like 209871245 - instead of a name.

We've been unable to get online for more than a few minutes in the last day. Does anyone else have broadband problems like these?

Adsense Penalty: Is there such a thing?

Since around the time I tweaked the Adsense on my software downloads site the page impressions have been dropping. The number of pages in Google's main index has also been declining in the last month or so. I can't pin the drop in impressions down to the exact date when I changed the Adsense but it's within a week or so. I'm now making about a quarter of the Adsense income I was. This isn't a big loss, since the amount of money involved wasn't great anyway but I'd still like to get back to where I was.

I've been scratching my head trying to figure out whether I've triggered some sort of Google penalty or whether, since the site is only 7 months old, the site is still doing the usual new site dance in SERPs.

I went and read Google's terms of service for Adsense and couldn't really see anything that I was doing wrong. There is a vague warning about breaking the terms of service if the site is purely constructed for the purposes of showing Adsense. If this was my problem though, every download site would have the same issue.

The clause that caught my eye though was one saying you shouldn't have more than 3 ads per page. I had upped the ads/ page to 3 but on my work computer I sometimes got a strange "can't show page" panel appearing below the ad tower on the left of the page. I didn't see this at all on my home computer so I thought it was just a firewall issue or some other weird problem. The company I work for is a large American corporation with big paranoia about security and spends more on firewall protection than they do on the server. Quite often Google ads won't show at all on some websites.

However, it suddenly occurred to me that there might be a bug in my PHP script. I took a look and found a cutdown Google ad script sitting below the proper ad script for the tower. This might have been taken as a 4th Google ad on the page and may have triggered a penalty of some kind. I've now removed the script fragment. With any luck my traffic will return over the coming weeks as the Adsense robot reindexes the pages.

Marketing via new toys for my CD software?

I've finally made some progress with my new licensing functionality for my maths cds.

I can now accept a few of the users details along with a 14 digit numeric key, all of which I will print at the bottom of the customers packing slip. Thus making my life tonnes easier as I can create cds before I get the orders and not waste tonnes of time, when I'm busy.

I haven't really touched the code in the program since 2006 and therefore I was a bit unfamiliar with it. However, the code I have now added provides me with room for some creative marketing.

Firstly, the program only use to work with a license key file, which I included in the setup exe file, re-generated at order time for each CD. If the license key is deleted, they are given a 30 day trial period. Obviously not something a paying customer would do; also not something I'm really worried about, if someone were to want to try and copy my program and use without the key file.

However, this functionality does give me the option to provide users with a period, perhaps a trial or a grace period. My initial thought was to give customers maybe 5 days before they have to enter the key. Then I thought, why should I do that, I'll just lock them out if they don't enter the key etc.

Now, I'm thinking a little about the marketing side of this, if I give people a 5 day grace period / trial and market the cd, so that people are allowed to pass on to their friends, I could get some extra sales.

Secondly, I've kept in my first licensing strategy which either accepts a key file (as provided when i use to burn a cd per customer) or more interestingly, to accept a key block provided as provided by ShareIT online.

So I could add a button to my paper license acceptance screen, something 'Help Options' which would show a screen with radio buttons. Options could be, A) help me enter my paper license info (I'm an Idiot), where I could send them a license block over email. B) Purchase a new license online via ShareIT. C) Maybe purchase a new CD.

Maybe I'm getting carried away with all these extra toys?

I'm just not sure what to do?

Also how to term things, like grace period, trial, etc, after all it might upset customers who have bought the CD?

Lots of questions.

by JM

How to make a website template?

Rather than just ask a flat out question without any real substance, I thought it might be useful to others as well as myself, if I discuss my issues. I'm going to talk about the very basics, which is were my site is at. I have mostly hard coded HTML in my php files.

My biggest problem is trying to figure out the holy grail, how to produce template files which are complete HTML files, with markers / tags for where I need to add my data. I can do the basic replace of strings. Heres an example of what I have now.

$middleheader = template("tpl/header.htm");
$middleheader = str_replace("SUBDIR", "", $middleheader);
$middleheader = str_replace("[1NEWS]", "", $middleheader);
$middleheader = str_replace("[2NEWS]", "", $middleheader);
$middleheader = str_replace("TEXTADS", $TEXTADS, $middleheader);

echo $middleheader;

So here I'm reading in my header file and replacing elements with values, in most cases here, blanks.

However, this is the first use of a template in my file, I'm not doing anything with meta tags, I'm tempted to just leave them hard coded in my php file, but this would make it more difficult, if say in the future I wanted someone with only HTML knowledge to design me a new style for my site.

A) What should I do with my meta tags? what should I put in my template file? Should I keep them all in some sort of settings file?

The most common problem with my hard coded files, is loops, where I have html (perhaps the start of a table), data, more html etc, back to start of the loop.

B) How would I create tags in the template file to handle loops?

Also, I have a lot of similar pages with small differences.

C) Where do I draw the line and create another HTML template file?

Hope someone can give me some insight.

by JM

Security license code enter by customer with their address etc?

I'm about to develop a new licensing strategy for customers who buy cds. The customer will get their packing slip / invoice with a box at the bottom of the page, with their details (name, address, email address) and some sort of license code. The idea being that they have to type the contents of the box into a matching screen in the program.

My issue is how secure will the licence code (shown in the box) be? I mean it has to be tied to the the customer detail and the product itself.

I don't want to make this process too difficult. Although it already sounds a little difficult. Also, I don't want to make the code too long.

I do think its worth putting a degree of effort into this, otherwise anyone with a programming language could easily figure out how to build the code.

I don't like Blues approach were he gives people a key, I definitely want to tie in their personal details.

Thoughts?

By JM

My first RentACoder request in months

I've just put up a rentacoder request, first one in ages. I was feeling lazy and I need my home page fixing and its a nightmare with some code embedded in php etc.

But I can use winmerge to pick out the changes.

Accepted a big with in 15 mins of posting, £11 :)

by JM