I’ve been using Adsense for a while, and I have to say that I’m not totally content with it. I think this has more to do with me than Google, my main problem is that ads in posts are not as relevant as they should be. I get a load of Excel ads, which is not really what I think I, or other visitors, are looking for.

One of the reasons for this is that I have varying content. In about a year, the overall spa of my content will stabilize, but until then it is ultimately developing and this results in a lower Adsense revenue. One great way I found to guide Google in how they serve your ads, is using special conditional HTML tags.

The basic principal is that you can encase contents inside these tags to tell Google that these are very relevant to your site, so it should take this section into account with more weight than others. You can also tell Google that a specific section is not really relevant.

The tags to use to indicate an important, relevant section are

<!– google_ad_section_start –>
<!– google_ad_section_end –>

If you want to tell Google not to take into account a part of your site, just encase it in these tags:

<!– google_ad_section_start(weight=ignore) –>
<!– google_ad_section_end –>

If you take Hack Your Day for example, you know that my main focus is productivity and organization. Every now and again though I write a bit off-topic stuff, or I just write more about a more specific topic, like 3 Excel tips a week. I can encase off-topic posts inside the ignore tag, and I can choose some specific content, like Excel related, and encase one or two. I can then go to my most relevant content, and encase it in the first tag set, to tell Google that this is indeed what my site is about.

Additionally you can do it in-post as well. Obviously you see Excel ads because I mentioned Excel 100 times in 3 posts. I can take the sections of a post which are strictly relevant to productivity and encase them in the tags that tell Google this is important, and encase the rest with the ignore tag.

This is a great tool for targeting your ads, especially for start-up blogs like mine, where there are shifts of focus in the short run.

Those of you who read Hack Your Day probably noticed that I didn’t show any life signs for about two weeks. This was a conscientious decision I made, and although it was hard, it was ultimately worth it, and I feel totally comfortable with it. I also have a day job, which I do from home, but the amount of work I needed to do escalated there and I had to make the difficult decision to stop all my blogging activities for a week or two.

Many people don’t really manage to make these decisions, and don’t know how to make decisions easy on themselves. There are two types of people, the first one will try and multitask, the other person will make the choice, but then dabble in both parts of their life creating a much worse situation.

Let me give you a checklist of what I think you should go over when you are faced with a difficult decision.

1. Go through the possible solutions to your problem
2. Realize what your decisions mean to you
3. Spend time thinking about the impact of each
4. Choose a decision and accept the consequences
5. Follow it through

<--adsense#old-->

Obviously the first thing to do is to go through all your options. Are you sure there aren’t better solutions? Take a look at the 100 item list decision making process if you need some inspiration. I don’t want to go into this part, I assume that you know the possible solutions to your problem.

Make sure that you realize what the decisions mean to you. If you stop blogging for two weeks, you know that you can’t write posts, your visitor count will suffer, you will not be active in your community for a while and so on. These all have implications of varying degree, you should assess these impacts and use the information in the decision making process.

When I say spend time thinking on the impact, I mean what does this mean in terms of your to-do’s later on. In my case it means hundreds of unread emails, thousands of unread Google Reader items, some of which I do need to follow up on, it means I have to get re-settled in my blogging environment and so on. In essence, this, and the item before are the negative consequences of your decision.

When you feel informed enough, make the decision, and make sure you are familiar with all the consequences and have accepted those. I accepted that I can’t write for you guys, I won’t be able to follow up on news and that I will fall out of the community for a while. You also need to go through the positive consequences, you need to know why you are doing this. For me, this meant I could work on another project with greater efficiency. I would do a good job, and then I could come back, and after everything is sorted out in the blogging business, I would be in a better state overall.

Additionally, you need to make sure that you follow your decision through. Many people in my place would have blogged just a bit now and then, so that they wouldn’t fall totally out. In some cases this may be the way to go, but for me this would have meant much lower productivity in both areas. I’d rather not blog for two weeks than do a half-hearted post now and again. I would have suffered in the other project as well, since my mind works best if I can focus on one thing for a longer amount of time.

The comparative rule

In decisions like this, I like to think of the comparative advantage principal from economics. Although not quite analogous, it fits pretty well. Basically, I sacrifice something to make me overall better of in the longer run. By doing both projects I may advance my monthly income like so: $100, $150, $225 for three consecutive months, a steady 50% increase. By focusing on one thing, ideally I will loose first, but then overall be on the winning side, perhaps like so: $100, $140, $280. If you manage to achieve this, even the hardest decision was worth it.

If you have a few annoying people on your Gtalk, you will be pleased to know that there is an invisible mode available for your privacy needs. I personally don’t have a problem with telling people to leave me alone, but if you don’t have the heart to, this is for you.

Many people can use this to substitute their away messages. I know a few people who have varying degrees of away message severity, and they suffer a great deal of frustration, since inevitably some people don’t read these messages and bother them anyway. Invisible mode gets rid of this problem, if you really want to be away, while being there for the top 1-2 people, just switch to invisible and let the top people know you’re still there.

I would love to see a feature in messengers where you can actually select who can see you when you’re invisible. There are some instances where I want to be seen only by personal good friends, but sometimes it’s ok if other contacts drop me a line as well. It would be cool to exactly specify who sees what state.

Via the official Gmail Blog

Since I came of age (hah), Office Depot has become the new Toys R’ Us for me. I mean you can get all kinds of notepads, post it stuff, calendars, printers, chairs, and a whole lot more. I can easily spend a lot of time in there, but enough of me telling you why I’m crazy, let me show you some cool stuff. Oh, and this month I had 11 items ordered through Hack Your Day, so thank you to all those ordering through my site.

Organizer Cart

My first choice may seem a bit weird, since the official name is “Classroom Cart and Organizer“. The reason I’m showing this to you is that for me this would be perfect. I pretty much divide my time and I live 3.5 days a week in one city, and 3.5 in another. I spend at least 20 minutes before and after each trip (four occasions a week) packing my essential stuff. I need my external drive, my folders, my Moleskine, my Laptop (and everything that that includes) and a host of other work related stuff.

While this cart is not something you might take to a business meeting, it is perfect for personal use if you travel a lot. It can be fully closed and opened (like you see in the pic), and the design isn’t too childish either, it reminds me of an everyday suitcase.

In addition,with some modification, you could use it as your workstation, since after punching a few pluggable holes in there, you could just get out your laptop, and plug everything in, while keeping all the cables and stuff inside the cart. All in all I love the Classroom Cart and Organizer and I wouldn’t mind dishing the 50 bucks they ask for it.

Rotating phone cord detangler

Yes, you heard me, this little thing is a cord detangler. Please do not buy one of these. Just take that $4 and send it to me instead, I’ll write you a personalized post on how not to pirouette while on the phone, so it won’t entangle itself. You need to plug this gadget straight into your phone, and plug the cord, into it. It will turn as you move, so it won’t allow the string to tangle.

To tell you the truth, this wouldn’t be a bad idea to build into phones, but buying anything separately for this? I love the site of a really good tangled phone cord, which allows you to stray a full 2 inches from the phone base! When all is said and done if you order through Hack Your Day, I get commission, so don’t let me stop you, all your phone cord tangling probles will be solved. No need to thank me.

Orange File Folders

Now this is nothing special at all, a 100 pack of legal sized dual colored File Folders. The reason I love them is the simplicity of it all. They will appeal to people with a few sheets of paper lying around, but also to the GTD productivity ninja, because you can make good use of them in your GTD system as well.

For me it is a benefit that they all look the same, it gives me a more organized feel, something which is very important for my work morale. They are all a great shade of orange on the outside, while a lighter shade on the inside, creating a soothing feeling as well. I know this sounds a bit like a sales pitch or a paid article, but for me looks are very imporstant. I go for soothing any time and this is definitely it. Oh, and it’s all recycled, so that’s another plus in my book.

If you need a box of File Folders, click on the link and buy them for $30, that’s just $0.3 a piece.

Easel Ring Binder

Again, I here the words “What?” arise from my readers. The Easel Ring Binder is a normal binder, which can be propped up, much like a desktop calendar. There are loads of people who create daily task lists for themselves, and for you guys it would be great to be able to have this staring you in the face without having to shift through some papers (or files) to find it. Just write it down (or print it), place it in this binder, prop it up, and place it next to your calendar.

You can also print tomorrow’s tasks, or other bits of info you need throughout the day, you will be able to access it easily, without having to pull it out all the time. If you won’t use it like this, I recommend getting a different binder, since the Easel Ring Binder at a hefty (for a 1″ binder) $10.2, you can get a regular one for about $3 - $4. Yes, this is the price I have pay for productivity.

I think that much productivity comes from merging two separate things you use into one. Using Outlook for managing email and tasks is more productive than using Outlook and Remember the Milk for example (not in all caes, but many).

One such example I found today is a way to get notified of news quickly in your instant messaging system. An online service, Feed Crier, will send you an instant message whenever a feed in your RSS list gets updated. This way you don’t need to check your Google Reader every ten minutes, or keep it open, you will be notified automatically.

Since most people use some IM client anyway, this is productive use of resources, even if you’re not that big on news. Personally, I’m not that big on IM, but following the news is much simpler this way, since you don’t even need to lift a finger.

As part of my day job, I needed to get people to correct a lot of posts on Wordpress blogs. I wanted to create a table which would help the person doing the majority of the work, so all he need do is click on the links. For this, I had to copy the links of all the posts, on multiple blogs (I’m talking about hundreds here) and I found a tool to make this all relatively quickly possible.

A Firefox Addon, the aptly named Copy Links came to my rescue. This little addon embeds itself into the right-click menu and enables you to either copy all links on a page, or copy just the selected links. They are all neatly copied in separate lines, so copying them into a text or Excel file is simple.

One of the features of the Wordpress post management interface is that it gives you the posts in a table form. If you click on box around the first “View” link, pres control and while keeping things clicked you drag down, you should be able to select all links vertically. Then I just needed to right-click and select “copy selected links” and voila!

While I used this for a very specific reason, it could do a lot of good in other places as well. If you want to see if your site has been tampered with, you can keep a record of all your links. Then just copy all the links on the site and see if there are any discrepancies. A great tool for a simple job.