Software: "TweakThis" Vanilla Extension

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      CommentAuthorSpode
    • CommentTimeFeb 8th 2008 edited
     

    I've released another, currently small extension, for the Vanilla forum software. To quote my readme:

    TweakThis will be a collection of minor tweaks and settings I make to Vanilla, that aren't large enough to be considered for an extension in their own right. Each tweak can be set from the settings page.

    - Discussion Capitalisation

    I was a little tired with people not capitalising the first letters of words in the title of discussion posts. In an attempt to maintain a professional image, this setting parses the discussion title through PHP's ucwords function, and then filters out a few words (a, the etc.) to bring back to lowercase. This only affects NEW discussions, so once submitted, you can edit the discussion and change the capitalisation, should it look wrong to you.

    You can find this on the Lussumo website.

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      CommentAuthorLolly
    • CommentTimeFeb 8th 2008
     

    capitalisation, surely? :P

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      CommentAuthorSpode
    • CommentTimeFeb 8th 2008
     

    LOL. "Capilatisation".

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      CommentAuthorSpode
    • CommentTimeFeb 13th 2008 edited
     

    Many of you on the forums have noticed the sheer number of Spode China adverts that pop up. This is because I have been hit by what is classed as a "poison word". In order to circumvent this, I've done a number of things. Firstly, I've removed Spode's Abode from the page title, and replaced it with spodesabode.com. I've also removed references from a few of our sticky posts. I've also been very tempted to parse the whole page through a search and replace, replacing Spode with "<span>Spo</span>de" which splits the word up and stops it being indexed as a single word. I've taken a similar tact in this very post, using italics to split the word up.

    By far the biggest thing I did, was use Adsense section targetting, as recommended to me by John Chow. Using tags, I can suggest what areas of the page Adsense should spider for relevance. I have forced it to only spider the titles of each discussion and the posts, thus avoiding the author names recurring 101 times. This, combined with my other efforts has increased click rates by 300-400%. Even I have noticed the adverts becoming a lot more relevant. A few ads are still creeping through, hence why I might do a search and replace on the entire site at runtime.

    Today I released version 1.01 of TweakThis. This automatically adds in Adsense targetting in the ways that I have described, so that others can also see the benefits.

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      CommentAuthorLolly
    • CommentTimeFeb 13th 2008 edited
     

    The old Abode tended to have lots of ads for Spode China.

    I think you should start a low cost airline flying from Stansted to Beijing. Then you could call it "Spode China". Hehe.

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      CommentAuthorSpode
    • CommentTimeFeb 13th 2008
     

    Thanks Lolly. By mentioning the S and C words, we now have S C adverts...

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      CommentAuthorLolly
    • CommentTimeFeb 14th 2008
     

    mwah ha ha ha ha..

    Having said that, I don't see any adverts due to AdBlock. Maybe I'll put the Abode on the "allow adverts" list so you get about 3p more out of me...

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      CommentAuthorSpode
    • CommentTimeFeb 14th 2008
     

    Having an Adblock on is as good as stealing :O

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      CommentAuthorLolly
    • CommentTimeFeb 14th 2008
     

    sorry! i turned it off! :$

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      CommentAuthorSpode
    • CommentTimeFeb 14th 2008
     

    That's strike one Lolly :P

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Copyright Andrew Miller (Spode), 2008