Month: June 2006

Google AdSense will not display any ads

I’ve been noticing a strange problem with my Google Adsense advertisements. Quite often, in fact just too often, Google would not serve any ads in the right sidebar of my homepage. There would be just this blank space staring at your face. What’s weird though is the fact that the ads would display properly on any of the content pages. No ads equals no money, so that was not acceptable.

Trying out different ad combinations and sizes I’ve noticed that the ads would suddenly start appearing when there was only one ad block per page (be it a homepage or a content page). Most of the time I had three and I’ve rarely seen all of them being displayed. Placing just one helped greatly. I’m thinking that maybe Google has some content to ads ratio system in place as that would at least partially explain this behavior. Nonetheless it’s working now (meaning that at least one ad block is displaying properly all of the time).

It’s a pity that Google does not want to make more money off me letting me decide how many ads to run ;)

UPDATE: Seems I’m not the only one.

WP Movie Ratings v1.1 released!

This is mostly a bugfix release as it does not include any revolutionary features (they are planned for 1.2 and 1.5 versions). It is now available for download. Remember to follow the upgrade instructions when upgrading from 1.0 or 1.0.1.

Notable changes include:

  • sidebar mode, where movie ratings are on a separate line, so the box can be as thin as 170px for star ratings (images) and 100px for text ratings.
  • renamed HTTPRequest class to WP_HTTP_Request to avoid conflicts with other HTTPRequest classes from other plugins.
  • new options panel which lets you set different display options (like the aforementioned sidebar mode).
  • option to display movie ratings using just text as an alternative to the images with stars.
  • fixed CSS problems with Internet Explorer (now works properly even with IE 5.0).
  • css inclusion moved to <head> so that the generated pages that include the output from this plugin can now be XHTML compliant.
  • removed nested SQL queries so that the plugin now works with older versions of MySQL.

WP Movie Ratings plugin page.

Russian rocket missile shot over Eastern Poland

It all happened after 9 am on Saturday, 17th of June in Łomża, a small town in the Eastern Poland. There was a loud noise and few seconds later something big crashed into the ground. Luckily, no one was hurt. The object hit a car – Nissan Primera (pictured below) parked at local housing estate. It managed to crash the windshield, control panel and the engine of the car.

Russian rocket missile hit the car in Eastern Poland

Eyewitnesses began wondering what actually this thing is that fell from they sky. Looking at the crashed car some of them were assuming it must have fallen from an airplane passing by. The doubts were dispelled by sappers from the local army unit. – This is a part of a Russian rocket missile from the 1950s. – It seems someone was conducting a military experiment nearby.

The missile is about 15 centimeters wide and over 50 cm long. The police is looking for a person who shot it up in the air. Not everyone is convinced that it was shot from the ground, though. Some of the local residents believe it was UFO. – It must have fallen from the space. You don’t see that kind of missiles just lying on the street – argues Mr. Jan.

(via gazeta.pl)

V for Vendetta poster

Only after it had ended I have realized that there is actually no Keanu Reeves in the newest Wachowski brothers movie. I was hundred per cent sure that he acts in it! At first I thought that V is him and his voice is just distorted (and that he will finally remove his mask). After one hour had passed I have begun to think that he might be just another hero or a villain that will appear in the second half of the movie. None of that has happened. I mean, just look at the poster below. Doesn’t he she look very much alike Neo from The Matrix (especially while looking from a distance)?

V for Vendetta poster crop

What’s important, though, is that Keanu Reeves acts in another new Sci-Fi movie called A Scanner Darkly directed by Richard Linklater. Can’t wait to see this one!

WP Movie Ratings v1.0 released!

Finally, just as promised, WP Movie Ratings – a wordpress plugin which lets you rate movies with just 1 click (using Firefox bookmarklet) has been released. It took me about three months to have everything polished (hReview implementation, code comments, documentation, pictures) and made ready for public consumption. Version 1.0 is available for download. Installation instructions, screenshots, faq and other important information is located on a separate page dedicated to this project.

The code is open source and has been released under the GNU GPL license.