I was using Martin Fitzpatrick’s excellent plugin called AdSense Manager to handle Google ads on my blog. Version 2.x worked well but version 3.x stopped working properly with sidebar widgets and the admin interface failed to commit certain page changes.

My quest to find a solution was unsuccessful so I trashed the plugin and looked for an alternative. Other WordPress plugins looked weak in comparison so I went old-school and within 15 minutes I had a working replacement using a few lines of PHP and JavaScript code from Google. While it’s not as convenient as a plugin, it works fine with sidebar widgets.

Thanks to tamba2’s excellent (and brief) how-to guide.

Since January of this year I’ve been using Facebook to stay in touch with friends, colleagues, and other folks I don’t see often. There’s something to be said about seeing people’s faces every day which reminds you to stay in touch. Poke (and SuperPoke) is the greatest way to tell someone “hi” without getting into a dialog.

Since Facebook wants to make a few dollars in their effort to provide free services, they’ve initiated clandestine tactics to gather and distribute your surfing habits to others. Facebook’s Beacon software isn’t terribly popular for this reason but there are ways to keep it quiet.

wikiHow describes the proper way to disable Beacon in Facebook’s security settings as well as the BlockSite add-on for Firefox. Although the article doesn’t mention this you can use the BlockSite add-on in Flock (which, like Firefox, is based on Mozilla.

Manas Tungare describes how to filter out Beacon in the Mac version of Safari. I haven’t installed PithHelmet to test because it appears only in beta status for Safari 3 (which ships with Leopard).

With new things coming up in 2008 I wanted a standard, yet customized, look for the site. There’s more to do but thanks to Sadish and his SeaShore theme as a starting point.

The images in the header (photos snapped by me) change at random page loads. Thanks to Vlad Mazek for the tip.

I haven’t messed around with Nokia’s Lifeblog service because I don’t have an Nseries device and blogging from a mobile seems somewhat limited. In any event, Lifeblog supports TypePad as a blogging platform but WordPress support is strangely missing.

PhoneBoy developed a solution for WordPress versions 2.05 through 2.2 and today his hack supports 2.3. So grab a copy of his PHP code and go nuts.

[Via Weblog Tools Collection]

If you’re attempting to run an installation of PHPlist alongside Drupal you’ll find PHPlist complains about settings for magic quotes. I can’t vouch for the completeness of this fix but it gets rid of the errors without breaking anything else.

Assuming you installed the lists folder in the root of your Drupal site, you’ll find that an htaccess file in your Drupal install is changing the magic quotes values which are impacting PHPlist. You can override this for PHPlist using another htaccess file. Navigate into the lists folder for PHPlist and create an .htaccess file with the contents:

# Changes for PHPlists running on a Drupal installation

php_value magic_quotes_gpc        1
php_value magic_quotes_runtime    0

Word of warning: don’t modify your host’s PHP.INI for these settings as it will likely break something else if you host multiple domains. In my case it broke WordPress so stick with the htaccess method.