Shall I Update My Account to British Pound Sterling Earnings?

Local currency reports has been available for U.K. publishers for a while, it is currently optional, shall I click that button and update to pound sterling, or keep waiting until it become required in the future?

There are some changes of the terms and conditions, one of these is:

"The party that publishers are contracting with changes from Google Inc. to Google Ireland Limited."

The payment threshold will change to pound sterling, it says in the TOS that "payment due to You is greater than £60, payments to You shall be sent by Google within approximately thirty (30) days after the end of each calendar month",

About the VAT, it says:

You shall pay all applicable taxes or charges imposed by any government entity in connection with Your participation in the Programme. Google will not issue any VAT refunds to You.

In this post, Inside Adsense Team says:

"While you may receive your payments in your local currency, all payments are being made by Google Ireland, a company incorporated under the laws of Ireland, in accordance with the terms of your agreement with Google. Unless your business is in Ireland, you should not have an obligation to charge Google VAT or treat any of our payment to you as VAT that needs to be paid to any VAT authorities. If your billing address is located in Ireland, you may have an obligation to charge Google Irish VAT. Please speak to your local tax adviser if you have further questions."

Do I need to update my tax information if I changed to local currency?

There are un-answered issues, such as this: "Will I miss a payment because of changing currency reporting?":

I accepted the new adsense change to provide £ sterling currency reporting on my account but I am worried that my next monthly payment isn't going to be paid as is states on the site that "Any remaining US Dollar balance will be automatically transferred to your British Pound Sterling balance between the 12th and 15th day of the month". My reporting was changed on the 15th June and it hasn't been transferred so does that mean I will have to wait till next month for it to be transferred and get paid for 2 months instead of 1.

Jack Herrick's Tips to attract visitors

Jack Herrick is the founder of wikiHow, a collaborative writing project to build the world's largest, highest quality how-to manual. wikiHow is a wiki, which means that any visitor to the site can create or edit wikiHow articles. wikiHow is currently ranked as the 100th most popular site on the web by Quantcast, and receives over 16 million unique visitors each month. Jack shared three of his favorite tips to attract visitors.

Tip #1: Produce great content

The first tip is obvious, but it's also the most important. The articles on wikiHow vary widely in quality. We have some of the highest quality how-tos on the net, for example How to Hard Boil an Egg, and we also have some fairly ugly, unfinished drafts we call stubs. Interestingly, the high-quality articles don't get just a little more traffic than the mediocre articles, they get hundreds of times more. When you can produce the single best page on the Internet
on any given topic, people will find it and share it with their friends. Don't settle for acceptable content, always strive to produce amazing content that your readers can't resist sharing.

Tip #2: Learn to share

My second tip is more counterintuitive. To attract more readers to your website, consider putting your content under a Creative Commons license so it can be widely distributed. Everything on wikiHow is under a license that allows other websites to publish and even modify or adapt our content for re-use on their sites. In fact, we have a button at the bottom of every article that allows webmasters to copy and paste the HTML right onto their site. Many webmasters are afraid to share their content, because they worry they will only be aiding competition. By sharing, what you are really doing is encouraging your competitors to provide free advertising for you. The more people who see your content on other sites, the more likely they are to eventually come straight to you.

Tip #3: Make your community a team

Finally, I'd encourage you to allow real collaboration on your site. Lots of websites try to create online communities. To use a basketball analogy, most online communities are just groups of individuals shooting freethrows alone. On wiki websites, people play together as a real team. Humans are hard wired to want to work in groups and collaborate. By allowing this to happen, you can create a passionate community of people that will build something bigger than any one person could accomplish on their own. And that will in time attract a large audience.

Tips from Ricardo Prada, a user experience researcher at Google

Tips from Ricardo Prada, a user experience researcher at Google:

Tip #1: Design for the tasks that visitors complete on your site.

Think about tasks on your website first and layouts second. It's tempting to want a flashy design that exercises your CSS skills, but remember that vistors come to your site with specific goals in mind, like reading your essays, or checking out your collection of sports photos. Write down the top three tasks your users might want to accomplish on your site, and design to make those tasks quick and efficient.

Tip #2: Use ads as potential exit paths, not interruptions.

Ads should complement your site, not distract from it. The most natural place for a user to evaluate an advertisement is after they've completed their goals on your site. Instead of interrupting your user's main tasks, try to offer ads as potential exit path for users who were probably ready to leave anyway by placing them at the end of completed tasks.

Tip #3: SEO - only if it makes sense.

Only do search engine optimizations that benefit your users. For example, page titles that are relevant to the page content make it easier for your visitors to understand what your articles are about. On the other hand, there are lots of sneaky strategies out there for improving search engine rank. Most of those don't work anymore, and they might actually harm your site's reputation.

Chrome: Drag out a tab to create new window, is this process irreversible?

Google Chrome has a cool feature that you can drag out tabs to create new window. Suppose you have two tabs opened in your Chrome browser and you want to move out one tab to a new window, just drag the tab out of the main window, and you get a new chrome window with the same page opened.

Google chrome tabs are separate windows process and as a result if one tab crashes, it won't affect other tabs!

But my mouse is pretty sensitive or my fingers are too clumsy, so when I click on one of my tabs it accidentally drags the tab out, I am NOT happy with it, and wonder if there is a way to restore the newly-generated window back to a tab window. You can drag out a tab to create a window, but as far as I know this process is IRREVERSIBLE, I haven't found a way to "drag" a Chrome window back to a tab.

And I wish there is a way to LOCK tabs so I can't drag out a tab to a new window accidentally.

Create a three column blogger template

I found this tutorial about how to create a three column template in Blogger layouts, using the Minima template as a starting point.

You have to be careful if you use using Blogger's new "Layout" version..

This tutorial uses "left" and "right" as parameter, but blogger has changed these respectively to two variable $startside and $endside instead, so when you edit template html, you have to change accordingly.


#left-sidebar-wrapper {
width: 220px;
float: $startSide;
word-wrap: break-word; /* fix for long text breaking sidebar float in IE */
overflow: hidden; /* fix for long non-text content breaking IE sidebar float */


#main-wrapper {
width: 410px;
float: $startSide;
margin-$startSide: 20px;
word-wrap: break-word; /* fix for long text breaking sidebar float in IE */
overflow: hidden; /* fix for long non-text content breaking IE sidebar float */
}

Glosary

• Impressions: The number of times ads on your website have been viewed in that program.
• Unique impressions: Number of responses to page requests from a visitor’s browser within a predefined time period (most Advertisers do not track this event).
• Clicks:
• Number of times ads on your website were clicked on in that program.
• CTR (Click Through Rate): Clicks divided by Impressions times 100.
• Unique visitors (UV):
  • One click per visitor per predefined time period, for example; if the sameuser clicks on an ad 10 times in one hour that will register 10 clicks but only one unique UV.
  • UVR (Unique Visitor Rate): UV divided by Impressions times 100.
• Leads:
  • The number of leads generated from the website in that program. Leads are generally completed actions without a sale, for example an application.
  • LR (Lead Rate): Leads divided by Impressions times 100.
• Sales:
  • The number of Sales generated from your website in that program.
  • GBP (or other currency): Generated commission.
  • CR (Conversion Rate): Sales divided by Clicks.
  • Order value: The total basket value of goods purchased via the website.
• Digital wallet: Deposits and Withdrawals. Manual transactions that have been paid or removed by advertising agency or the Advertiser.
• Commission: The total commission earned from your website.

YieldBuild' major improvements

Microsoft pubCenter access!
Microsoft's AdSense challenger is still in private beta, but through our Premium Text Ad Program, you can start running pubCenter ads alongside your AdSense or other ads. Want to improve your revenue by seeing how ads from these two heavyweights play out on your site? Opt in to the Premium Text Ad Program to start!

Improved performance. Billions of ad impressions run across hundreds of sites over the past year and a half have taught our optimization algorithm a few things. Our publishers are seeing the top-line benefit of YieldBuild's enhanced format and network optimization.
Shorter training time. Improvements to our algorithm have brought down the training period to significantly shorter than the 100,000 page impressions we previously needed. YieldBuild will narrow in on the ad formats and layouts to test based on an intelligent understanding of your site's format, colors and structure.

Expanded network support. In addition to Google AdSense and Microsoft pubCenter, YieldBuild also supports contextual networks Yahoo Publisher Network (YPN) and Chitika, and display ad networks Advertising.com, ValueClick Media, Tribal Fusion and BlueLithium.