When I announced the release of Problogger Clean, a WordPress theme with some exciting features regarding Adsense, a reader commented that one of these features would probably constitute a violation of Adsense Terms of Use.

Indeed, "Adsense Click Safety" is a toggable option that modifies Adsense code on the fly when you are viewing your own blog, so that a test account is used to display ads. Therefore, any accidental click on your own ads is not recorded and not counted as fraudulent. I consider this a safety bonus that could even help in some extent reduce click fraud. On the other hand, Adsense TOS clearly mention that any modification of the javascript code they provide is prohibited.

So, I simply asked Google for an official statement over my Adsense Click Safety. Here is their answer. Or lack thereof :)

Hello Ozh,

Thanks for your email. While Google encourages third party software development, it is our policy not to endorse any specific product at this time. We're therefore not able to comment specifically on the software you've noted.

However, we recommend that you read through the AdSense Terms and Conditions (https://www.google.com/adsense/terms ) to ensure that your software is not in violation of any of our policies. You may also wish to review Google's Software Principles, found here: http://www.google.com/corporate/software_principles.html

Basically, you understand this answer does not change a lot the way I see things.

Let me make things clear : this feature is a TOS violation. However, I have the strong feeling that breaking TOS with no side effect, but reducing click fraud you might generate, is not very questionable, while accidentally click on one of your own ads is probably much more likely to get you in trouble. I can easily imagine Google banning someone from their Adsense program because of the latter problem, not because of the first one.

In other words : use at your own risk :)

WordPress tip of the day : how to momentarily turn your WordPress blog down, while working on some heavy maintaining task ?

There are a few plugins around that, once activated, redirect every request to a page telling readers that your blog is currently under some maintenance, reconstruction, attack or anythnig. There is a much much smarter and simple way to do this :
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From time to time, someone is posting comments here with my name, email and URL as contact informations. It's not really a pain in my blog, but well, it's just a bit weird.

It's not spam or random crap, but average comments, the polite kind even. And it's not comments from me on drug at night that I don't remember afterwards : every time the IP is from Japan (218.47.16.48 this time). It looks like some rather normal folk has, for some unknown reason, stored my name and email in a cookie and just comments without noticing his name is not appearing.

To my other self from Asia : could you please check the commenter's contact info stored in your cookie before you comment next time ? (Or do I have to install the impostercide plugin ?)

Google's new service, Google Base, is live.

Basically, you can upload there anything, in any format : news, articles, job offers, classified ads, recipies, in plain text, XML, RSS or zipped archives.
Basically, this is supposed to be the one-place-to-go for people to upload and share stuff so that it's easily findable by others.

Basically, I just don't understand WTF this is for. For the first time I feel that Google is confusing me :-)

Yesterday Tim Yang released a new WordPress theme I've contributed to : Problogger Clean, a clean 3 columns theme, featuring some original and kick ass features.

No CSS or graphical showcase here, the theme focuses on the content you are writing. A close attention has been given to internal navigation, internal linking, article promotion and search engine optimization, so that both readers and the Googlebot can easily find everthing they are looking for.

Several features of this theme are concerning Adsense. When most (all ?) themes today come ad free and are a blogger's hell to nicely implement ads in a layout that was not designed for it, Problogger Clean comes with built-in ads, with optimized colors and positions. Tim's own experience as a somehow "serious blogger" has been valueable on this topic.

This theme is particularly aimed towards bloggers who want to spend more time blogging, and less time installing. From within an admin option panel, you specify your Adsense id and channels. No need to manualy edit files before uploading the theme : install it, modify options in a neat interface, and use it.

Another feature I dig is called "Adsense Safety Click" : when you are viewing your own blog, the Adsense code is modified so that a test account is used instead of your own Adsense id. Benefit ? Any click you would accidentaly make on your own ads will not be counted, and therefore will not be considered as fraudulent (this feature needs your login cookie as "admin" to be active)

Several other features controlled from a neat admin panel concern support for third party RSS services such as Feedburner, promoting (old) articles of your choice on your front page, built-in support for "Asides" posts, and much more.

The layout and aesthetical aspects of Problogger Clean are Tim Yang's ideas. I'm responsible for all the PHP things that work under the hood, including the theme admin panel, powered by my own WordPress Theme Toolkit.

A few weeks ago, I released WordPress Theme Toolkit : something to help theme authors add an admin panel to their themes as easily as editing 3 lines in a file, so that theme users can select options and customize things on their blogs without manually editing files.

This is a hot week : in a few days will be released a full featured WordPress theme I've been working on with another blogger, using my Theme Toolkit, with a lot of built-in functionalities aimed towards Adsense.

And today, Ben told me about his releasing Regulus, a WordPress theme using my Theme Toolkit to give users the ability to chose from various options (header graphics and colors, sidebar options…) from an admin page. Besides these back-office features, the theme itself looks gorgeous.

I think my Theme Toolkit is, let's not be modest, a revolutionary way to help designers enhance their themes. Seeing it used by a talented theme author makes me happy :)

At work, colleagues and I are working on network shared directories. Just like everybody else I guess : you have a personal directory bound to your login username, and you are granted access to various shared directories where various people also have read / write permissions.

I've been doing some fun experiment these past few days at work : creating an Excel document with an appealing name (say, "salary_augmentation.xls", burried deep into "Confidential\HR\Budget\") and silently logging usernames everytime someone loads this file.

Here is how I did this :
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