The title pretty much says it all. It’s 2 of the most useful AdSense ads tips for bloggers in my opinion. Obtrusive ads have the unnecessary effect of driving away readers after they have found what they needed. Unless you have amazingly great content, the chance of them becoming a loyal reader is rather low when you have ads splashing into their faces – this is not something you want to do to your subscribed readers. On the other hand, you’d want to maximize your AdSense earnings by putting up ads on as many posts as possible.

Ad Injection (WP plugin)

This tiny little plugin, Ad Injection, gets it all. Very useful plugin for you to insert AdSense ads in your blog posts AND set a specific age threshold for the posts to display ads, so freshly published articles won’t have ads to drive your subscribers away. See detailed introduction here: Ad Injection for WordPress.

Just install it from the inventory (upload or install from within your WP administrator panel) and activate it. Go to Settings > Ad Injection > “Random ad (inserted randomly between paragraphs)” and insert your AdSense code there. Depending on how aggressive you are, you can use a variety of ad formats from Google. I used a 468×15 links banner on Health Not. Check out the screenshot below:

By default, Ad Injection inserts a maximum of 2 instances of the Random ad per post. This way, the ads are well blended in the content. What works a few years back with the 336 square ad format on top of the content is gradually dying out in CTR thus click revenues. You should try something new such as this.

Another useful option of the plugin is to set “Only show normal ads on pages older than xx (days) – only for single posts and pages”. This would prove very useful if you want a good balance between ad performance / earnings and user experiences. Only displaying ads on older posts are a pretty good idea for creating a good first impression to those who stumble upon your site.

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Do you know you can actually change the CSS styles of the entire editing area / editor where you create the post content in WordPress? It doesn’t have to be the default styles and since version 3.0, people can freely style the TinyMCE rich text editor shipped with WordPress however they want to by a few simple changes to the theme files.

Step 1

Open the functions.php file in your theme folder (create it if it doesn’t exist) and add this line anywhere in the PHP tags <?php … ?>:

add_editor_style();

Step 2

Create a css file named editor-style.css and put it in the theme root, namely the same folder where functions.php is in. To start with, you may want to copy the CSS styles from that of the Twenty Eleven theme into yours.

Now you can freely change those styles (such as rich text font, size or color, etc.) to have your own customized WordPress editor styles. The default editor styles coming with Twenty Eleven are very nice that make me long to write. So I’m now using them for my editor in the current theme, Thesis. You should too, if you find it more inspiring than the default styles.

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After digging into Magento for a few months and trying to start my own tangible business (I only deal with digital goods as of now), I failed in finding the perfect theme for my store. What I had in mind was a Magento theme much like Thesis for WordPress, the sort of theme that’s simplistic yet powerful, finely crafted and omnipotent (not just for a specific niche). Seemed most of the themes I could find were a bit too frivolous for me, until I found Jake and his Avalanche, premium Magento theme.

Jake was one of a few Magento experts who are true masters of the eCommerce platform. I first discovered Avalanche with awe and thought, that was it – that was exactly what I wanted. With a few improvements it’d be the perfect theme for my store. I contacted Jake immediately with some of my ideas and he got back to me and greatly appreciated my feedback. He adopted and implemented my suggestions the next day. Those were some great ideas such as a mega / exploded menu option for the top navigation. It used to be 3 options, now there are 4 – it’s all yours to choose from in the Avalanche configuration panel.

I bought the Developer License for $399 that night. It was a remarkable experience. We exchanged quite some emails about how to make the theme better. Not every vendor takes customer suggestions so seriously, let alone a customer-yet-to-be; and it’s not every day you find a developer who so vigorously and wholeheartedly keeps refining his product.

The installation was a breeze. Had some minor problems as I was not quite experienced with Magento yet and emailed Jake for help and he got back to me within 1 hour. Every time. That’s the kind of support lacking in the official Magento Go team.

The Avalanche theme has lots of backend options that you can tweak to customize the look and general texts of your store. Cloud Zoom in place. Breadcrumbs are enhanced. Colors, typography, banners, featured products, AJAX quick views, cutting edge CSS3 features and many more.

As of now, I’m very much impressed in all regards, though I’d say it’s more of a theme for digital niches such as technology and electric products. The black and white theme may not suit every customer base (may not yield the best conversion rates in some niches). You need to tweak them a bit, unless Jake can come up with an overall color themes switcher in future updates. For now, we are stuck with color switchers just for borders, links, and action buttons – they are actually pretty nice with gradients, you should try it!

There could be more improvements and I’m sure Jake’s already started working on the next version. By far, I think he’s making the best premium Magento themes.

My 4.9/5 for Avalanche Magento theme.

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Other than making your 404 error page user friendly, you can redirect it to your index pages such as the homepage, sitemap, or search page, to make it useful for the users. Instead of relying on them to correct the error themselves, you offer the new orientation.

How to redirect a 404 error page to the home page?

There are essentially 3 ways to do this depending on the technology your site is built on.

The .htaccess and HTML solution

This works across all sites that are served by the Apache web server with .htaccess enabled. Add this line in the .htaccess file in the root directory of your domain:

ErrorDocument 404 /404.html

And in 404.html, add a meta tag in the HTML head section:

<meta http-equiv="Refresh" content="1; URL=http://www.example.com/">

So when there’s an 404 Not Found error the user would be first redirected to /404.html and in turn, he or she would be redirected to the homepage http://www.example.com/ (or whatever you change it to) by the meta Refresh actions.

The PHP solution

If you are using PHP to code your site, chances are you know this solution. You can always use the previous solution (The .htaccess and HTML solution) to redirect 404 error page to your home page on a PHP site, but you can also try the pure PHP approach instead.

Whenever a user types in a URL request that you do not recognize, render this:

header("HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found");
header("Location: /");
exit();

Which would redirect the user who has hit a 404 error to the homepage / or any other page URL you specify there.

The WordPress solution

If you are using WordPress for your site, make a 404.php file in your theme directory with the following content:

<?php
header("HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently");
header("Location: ".get_bloginfo('url'));
exit();

WordPress would automatically use 404.php as the default 404 Not Found error page and when a user hits that page, he or she would then be taken to the home page your WordPress blog.

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I was debugging about some mod_rewrite errors caused by the .htaccess file on one of my sites and couldn’t solve the problem myself so I opted for a help thread on the SitePoint.com forum. Turned out it’s not the problem of my mod_rewrite rules in .htaccess but some incorrect file permissions that were causing the trouble.

Dklynn was very nice to help me in this regard and offered a gold advice that I thought I should share with you.

You Should NOT Use <IfModule></IfModule>. Why?

He pointed out that I should get rid of the <IfModule> conditional from the .htaccess file. It’s useless and a complete waste of server resources by all means. No excuses.

Considering the fact that all HTTP requests (including those to trivial assets such as .css, .js, .gif, .jpg, etc., thus each web page download would trigger about 10 or even more HTTP requests) to the Apache web server are handled by the rules in your .htaccess file, I think I should get rid of all such <IfModule> conditionals from all .htaccess files on all my sites, or the server would be doing useless check of “If Module xxx Is Enabled” every time a HTTP request is received…..

With a site receiving 1000 page visits per day, your server would have to do 10,000 such useless checks at the cost server resources and performance.

Many famous 3rd party scripts such as WordPress has <IfModule></IfModule> in the .htaccess file by default. This is to prevent potential errors should the module was not installed on the client’s production site / server. You should try and remove it. If the mod_rewrite and SEO friendly URLs are working, you can remove it without any problems.

This is pure gold advice offered by Dklynn. Check out his site about Apache mod_rewrite.

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Data centers are the fastest-growing energy vacuums in the IT industry in the UK, Europe, and beyond. As data centers grow larger to store the world’s data, their energy us is growing, too. Utilizing more environmentally-friendly power sources is tremendously important for the data center industry. Using renewable energy saves money, conserves natural resources, and contributes to keeping our planet cleaner for a longer period of time.

Check out this awesome infographic for some rare facts about data center power usage and green energy adoption in world’s top data centers and SaaS providers.

This infographic is created by Peer1 Hosting.

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I was checking out some live chat services and it came to my mind that Skype might be a great alternative. It’s free and it’s widely adopted. Depending on the merchandise your website sells, Skype would be a great live web chat solution, such as in the niches of technology, digital productions, online applications, etc.

However, Skype may not be a good live chat solution for retailer sites selling common consumer goods, unless they offer some sort of web chat window when the visitor clicks the button.

Add Skype Live Status Button to Your Website

To enable your visitors to initiate live chat sessions with you, you need to add the Skype online/offline status badge (clickable) on your website. Follow these steps:

1. Register an Skype account if you haven’t got one yet.
2. Go here to get a Skype button by entering your Skype name and selecting a button style. The code is dynamically generated. Just copy and paste it on your website where you want the status tab to appear.
3. Download the Skype desktop program and install it.
4. Log in with your registered account in the desktop program, go to: Tools –> Options –> Privacy, and check “Allow my online status to be shown on the web.”

Click paths may vary in step 4 depending on the version of your Skype, but it’s definitely there, in the Options. Lots of people ask why the button they added to their websites doesn’t show Online when they are actually online. That’s why. You have to explicitly allow your status to be shown on the web from within your desktop program.

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I officially signed up with Magento Go‘s Going Places plan for $25 / month and paid $99 for my SSL to be installed. It’s been 3 days and I wish I had better things to say about them.

And this is my review.

Uptime: 4.7 / 5

It’s too early to tell because I’m only with them for 10 days (in trial for 7 days). Sometimes it’s a bit slow. Magento is known to be resource-intensive. But as of now, Magento Go has been constantly up and responsive for me.

Price: 2.5 / 5

I would have given them 5 / 5 if I don’t have to pay $99 for my SSL to be installed – yes, that’s JUST for the installation service, not the SSL. You have to provide your own SSL certificate purchased from a CA to them. And this didn’t turn out to be very pleasant. I’ll come to that later.

The $1 million stimulus package that they promised to discount the monthly subscription fee by $15 for a year hasn’t been activated for me – and I contacted them about this twice – got NO responses of any kind. Waited nearly 24 hours and still no emails. So I logged back in to see the tickets. You know what I found? The tickets are all DELETED, like it’s never happened before.

What kind of support does that?

So the $1 million stimulus program is pretty much false advertising. Chances are, you won’t get it. Or you will. We are totally at their mercy.

Features: 4.1 / 5

If you are ever building an online store, once in your life time, you should use Magento Go. It simply makes sense.

After trying a few more online store builders, I think I’ll unsay the above saying.

Everything seems good, if not great. There are some parts that can be improved, such as the theming system, backup system, etc.

Their top plan for $125 / month offers a tingling of just 32GB monthly bandwidth. Anyone with decent SEO skills would easily hit that mark in half a year, especially if you’ve got lots of large images for the products. And extra bandwidth are charged $10 / GB. Pretty expensive. AND they don’t even have a bandwidth meter where you can see how much you’ve gone so far. So good luck…My tip is to use external website for hosting the product images.

Otherwise, Magento Go is simply NOT an . Be prepared to pay premium when you are locked in with them.

Support: 0.8 / 5

Appalling. If you are ready to pay $xxx per month for the top plan, you would probably be treated much better. But that’s just a theory.

I opened a total of 9 tickets, they DELETED 3 of them and responded to 3 of them.

They sent a very important message to *my* email. I didn’t receive it. Because that’s NOT my email, not even close. How hilarious is that!

Ticketing system is very hard to use. You would view the message and then click “Back” to return to the previous page to reply to it – if you have to quote something, you click “Forward” to view the message sent to you and then click “Back” again to continue writing. Very user-UNFRIENDLY ticketing system.

I posted a “Problem” message to the collaboration site (a collaboration support community to help dilute the workload of the REAL support team) about how my SSL hasn’t been installed after paying $99 and why my tickets got DELETED in the ticketing system. You know what they did? They changed the “Problem” status to “Question“. You know, it doesn’t look pretty in red.

Quick Facts about Go’s Support

People love interesting facts. Here are them.

• A total of 3 tickets that got NO responses and simply got DELETED:
  1) A request for installing my SSL attached with my certificate files from GeoTrust
  2) A request to be enrolled in the $1 million stimulus package they promised – $15 monthly discount for next 12 billing cycles
  3) A question why my store home page doesn’t display the newest products after I added them in the backend – tried 2 different approaches but none of them worked.
• After I complained about the SSL installation, they claimed to have sent an email to me at yanghit (@@@@@) gmail dot com. Apparently I didn’t receive it. Because that’s NOT my email, nor anything close.
• For me, their support turnaround is about 12 hours, sometimes as long as 3 days, IF they respond at all. (I just recalculated the actual turnaround based on tickets’ and questions’ time stamps)

12 Hours Support Turnaround

Any support turnaround that’s 12 hours or longer is just unacceptable for mission critical sites such as eCommerce stores. Ordinary content sites have an eCPM of about $5 – $50 per thousand visits, however, online stores generally averages $200 – $2000 per thousand visits. Every hour of problem or down time causes substantial loss; the greater the traffic & conversion rate, the greater the damage.

People who choose Go are generally not technically oriented and would require a lot of help along the way. It would be a very painful experience for them should something get haywire yet they can’t get anything done in 12 hours.

Magento Go has got to seriously work on that.

Busted?

They got a final score of 60.5 / 100. Merely passed.

I will keep you updated on my experience with Magento Go. Even though their support isn’t the best in the world, I’d still recommend them to you. Hopefully they can see this review and give their support department a revamp.

I would love to see Magento Go becomes the go-to brand for online eCommerce solution. However, as of now, you would be better off with CE and do your own hosting, if you’ve got some technical nerves. In this case, I would like to recommend the Avalanche Magento theme.

What other folks are saying…

Seems I’m not alone on the bad experiences with Magento Go:

1. http://www.shoppingcartsforwebsites.com/general/magento-go-review/
2. http://www.commercestyle.com/e-commerce/magneto-sucks
3. http://www.magentogoreview.com/list-of-magento-go-reviews~123

Update: I submitted a ticket and a *problem* at the collaboration site asking for a refund of the $99 SSL setup fee and they finally got back to me, addressing a question I asked 23 hours ago. After a few more tickets (each taking 2 – 3 hours for them to respond), my SSL is finally up and working.

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I coded a lot in Zend Studio 5.5.1, the gold old version that’s insanely popular because it made it so easy to code in PHP. As PHP evolves, ZS 5.5.1 gradually falls behind of the edge and it simply becomes imperative that you switch to the latest version of Zend Studio, the 8.

The IDE is built on Eclipse, which I have never used before. It’s great but one still needs some time to learn the curves before he or she can jump in and swim like a whale. Today I gave it a test drive and have some tips to share with you when you are just starting out with Zend Studio 8.

1. Change Default Character Encoding

Before you create your project or editing any existing PHP files, you may need to change the default encoding of the Zend Studio Workspace, or make sure it is what you usually work in.

By default, the encoding is that of the container (your operating system). I’m using a Chinese Windows 7 so the default encoding is GBK and it is everything but good because I primarily develop English projects.

For North America users, the default encoding should be ISO-8859-1. If you open up a file that’s encoded in UTF8 without changing the encoding accordingly, you may end up screwing up the file. And another victim.

To change the default encoding of Zend Studio: Windows –> Preferences –> General –> Workspace –> Text file encoding, switch to “Other” and select the encoding you normally use.

2. Display Function Parameters Hint on Demand

In 5.5.1, function parameters hint is automatically displayed when you place the cursor in the parentheses. However in 8, the hint is only automatically shown after you immediately finish typing the function name. When the focus moves away or you click anywhere else in the window, the hint disappears and if you don’t know the correct shortcut keys, you wouldn’t be able to get it back.

After a few searches, I found out the key combinations to get the parameters hint re-appear: Alt + Shift + /

Some pages say it’s Ctrl + Shift + Space but it didn’t work out for me. Maybe it’s a version thing?

3. Display Potential Function Candidates / Auto-complete Function Names

Along with the previous tip, this one is pretty important in modern IDE because they are essential in boosting one’s coding productivity. Can’t live without them.

When you are typing the function name, Zend Studio would guess what you mean and display a list of possible candidates for you to choose from.

If you want it to appear again, just place the cursor on the function name and use Alt + / to make Zend Studio makes a guess again.

4. Display All Shortcut Key Combinations

You can use a lot of shortcut keys in Zend Studio 8 to make things happen quickly and intuitively, just press Ctrl + Shift + L to bring up the key map to see the full list. Here’s a list of the commonly used commands:

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Office 365 is a set of team collaboration / productivity web applications for professionals, businesses, government agencies and education institutions. It currently offers 3 different plans:

1. For professionals and small businesses, $6 / user / month, basic features
2. For midsize businesses and enterprises, $12 and more / user / month, advanced features
3. For education

And I signed up with the first one which is meant for individual professionals, or businesses / organizations with up to 25 employees, at $6 / user / month. For now, I have yet to reach the end of my first month, and I have only one user in my organization which is myself. So this review would be pretty straightforward and very limited to those who are looking at the multi-user features in team collaboration / communication.

You will need a credit card to sign up. To verify the credit card, They billed me $1 when I signed up and that’s it. So I guess they bill clients at the end of every month instead of at the beginning.

What I get for $6 / month?

For $6 / month at Microsoft Office 365, I get these cool stuff:

1. Online web applications of Microsoft Office: Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote. You can create documents, edit and save them in your favorite web browser, and publish them to your team site so you and your colleagues can collaborate on them. You can also upload existing documents from your computer to Office 365.
   
   Shared documents:
   
   Word web app:
   
   Excel web app:
   
2. Instant communication tool Lync 2010 enables you and your team members to send instant messages, easily set up online meetings and perform PC-to-PC audio / video calls.
3. SharePoint Online. A public company website at http://yourcompany.sharepoint.com/ that you can edit from SharePoint. The default theme looks like this:
   
   You can re-create your public website by 3 editing panels, namely Home, Insert and Design:
   
   From the content navigation sidebar on the left, you can add new content and remove existing content to the Recycle Bin: pages, documents, images, etc.
   And as always, you can also add your own top-level domain to SharePoint, from the Admin panel, rather than using a subdomain of sharepoint.com.
4. Other than a public website, a private Team Site is pre-configured and ready to be edited when you (as the administrator) first sign in. This site is used as a portal for all team members where you can list contacts, shared documents, calendar entries / meeting schedules, announcements, discussion posts, and so forth. Much like editing the public website, you can freely edit the Team Site as if it’s a web page: lists, tables, images, links, etc.
   
5. Exchange Online. Emails hosting under the domain @yourcompany.onmicrosoft.com. Likewise, you can add your own domain for the emails thus having @yourcompany.com hosted at Office 365. Everything looks like the desktop applications. You would be using a very similar online version of Outlook (web app) and it’s very intuitive. The learning curve is minimal.
   
   A calendar (Week view): (also are Day view, Work Week view and Month view)
   
   User self management:
   
   Organization management:
   
6. Full administration panel and organization management features:
   

Some quick facts about Office 365

1. It bills you at the end of each billing term. For instance, if you started the plan on Jan. 15th, it would first bill you $1 to verify credit card and then $6 / month each month on Feb. 15th and on.
2. If you cancel the subscription, your subscription will remain active until the end of the billing term.
3. You get 99.9% uptime guarantee.
4. You can add multiple domains to your service. The default one is yourcompany.onmicrosoft.com for email and yourcompany.sharepoint.com for team site / public site.
5. You can use different plans / multiple subscriptions under one administrator account.

Official tours

For administrators: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/videos/office-365-for-professionals-and-small-businesses-a-tour-for-administrators-HA102653442.aspx?redir=0

For users: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/videos/office-365-a-tour-for-users-HA102657904.aspx?redir=0

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When people are replying to a thread, going advanced editing would require an extra click as well as page loading time – very inconvenient. However, at gotalk.org, users would generally want to post a lot of code because it’s a programming language forum in nature. But vBulletin doesn’t come with a CODE button in the quick reply editor toolbar by default.

So I’ll have to add the CODE button to the quick reply box myself.

How to add extra buttons to the toolbar of the quick reply editor? (v4.1.2)

Just copy and paste the buttons code from the advanced editor to the quick reply editor. The advanced editor template is “editor_toolbar_on” while that of the quick reply editor is “showthread_quickreply”. All we have to do is to copy some code from “editor_toolbar_on” to “showthread_quickreply”.

In the example below, I’ll add the CODE button from the advanced editor to the quick reply editor. You can add other buttons to the quick reply box in similar steps.

1. Open “editor_toolbar_on” template

From /admincp, Styles & Templates –> Style Manager –> click “Search in Templates” –> in the “Search for Text” box, enter “editor_toolbar_on” –> click “Find” –> double click “editor_toolbar_on” in the left selection.

2. Open “showthread_quickreply” template

From /admincp, Styles & Templates –> Style Manager –> click “Search in Templates” –> in the “Search for Text” box, enter “showthread_quickreply” –> click “Find” –> double click “showthread_quickreply” in the left selection.

3. Find the code for CODE button in the “editor_toolbar_on” template

Simply search for:

$show['code_bbcode']

In the “editor_toolbar_on” template and you would find a code block like this:

<vb:if condition="$show['code_bbcode'] OR $show['html_bbcode'] OR $show['php_bbcode']"> <li> <vb:if condition="$show['code_bbcode']"><img src="{vb:stylevar imgdir_editor}/code.png" class="imagebutton" id="{vb:raw editorid}_cmd_wrap0_code" width="20" height="20" alt="{vb:rawphrase wrap_code_tags}" /></vb:if> <vb:if condition="$show['html_bbcode']"><img src="{vb:stylevar imgdir_editor}/html.png" class="imagebutton" id="{vb:raw editorid}_cmd_wrap0_html" width="20" height="20" alt="{vb:rawphrase wrap_html_tags}" /></vb:if> <vb:if condition="$show['php_bbcode']"><img src="{vb:stylevar imgdir_editor}/php.png" class="imagebutton" id="{vb:raw editorid}_cmd_wrap0_php" width="20" height="20" alt="{vb:rawphrase wrap_php_tags}" /></vb:if> </li> </vb:if>

Copy this code block, and switch to the “showthread_quickreply” template.

4. Add the code in the “showthread_quickreply” template

Search for:

$show['quote_bbcode']

And you would find the code for the QUOTE button:

<vb:if condition="$show['quote_bbcode']"> <li class="editor_control_group_item"> <img src="{vb:stylevar imgdir_editor}/quote.png" class="imagebutton" id="{vb:raw editorid}_cmd_wrap0_quote" width="20" height="20" alt="{vb:rawphrase wrap_quote_tags}" /> </li> </vb:if>

Immediately below the QUOTE button block, paste what you just copied from the “editor_toolbar_on” template, and add a class=”editor_control_group_item” to the <li> element:

<vb:if condition="$show['quote_bbcode']"> <li class="editor_control_group_item"> <img src="{vb:stylevar imgdir_editor}/quote.png" class="imagebutton" id="{vb:raw editorid}_cmd_wrap0_quote" width="20" height="20" alt="{vb:rawphrase wrap_quote_tags}" /> </li> </vb:if> <vb:if condition="$show['code_bbcode'] OR $show['html_bbcode'] OR $show['php_bbcode']"> <li class="editor_control_group_item"> <vb:if condition="$show['code_bbcode']"><img src="{vb:stylevar imgdir_editor}/code.png" class="imagebutton" id="{vb:raw editorid}_cmd_wrap0_code" width="20" height="20" alt="{vb:rawphrase wrap_code_tags}" /></vb:if> <vb:if condition="$show['html_bbcode']"><img src="{vb:stylevar imgdir_editor}/html.png" class="imagebutton" id="{vb:raw editorid}_cmd_wrap0_html" width="20" height="20" alt="{vb:rawphrase wrap_html_tags}" /></vb:if> <vb:if condition="$show['php_bbcode']"><img src="{vb:stylevar imgdir_editor}/php.png" class="imagebutton" id="{vb:raw editorid}_cmd_wrap0_php" width="20" height="20" alt="{vb:rawphrase wrap_php_tags}" /></vb:if> </li> </vb:if>

Click “Save” or “Save and Reload”. Done!

Now refresh any thread page and you’ll see the CODE button as well as the HTML code button and PHP code button are all added to the toolbar of the quick reply editor. Following the same steps, you can add other buttons from the advanced editor to the quick reply editor.

(This is for vBulletin 4.1.2)

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The quick reply box of vBulletin is by default about 100px or less in height which is bit small for large chunks of text editing such as code. To change the default height of the quick reply box without having to click the enlarge button manually every time, you’ll have to edit the template:

Changing default height of quick reply box

After you have logged in the /admincp:

Styles & Templates –> Style Manager –> Edit Templates (in the dropdown menu) –> double click Show Thread Templates (in the left selection of all the templates) –> double click “showthread_quickreply” –> search for “rows=” and you will arrive at the line you should edit.

However, just updating the rows property to a larger one won’t work, you have to manually add a style property like this:

rows="10" tabindex="1" cols="80" style="height:25em;" dir="{vb:stylevar textdirection}"

25em indicates that the quick reply box will be able to accommodate 40 lines of text within one scroll.

Now click “Save”.

Changing default height of advanced editor

The steps to change the default height or size of the advanced message editor in vBulletin goes similar. Instead of “showthread_quickreply”, just search for “editor_toolbar_on”. Search for “row=” or “textarea” and you will find the editor control. Add a style property just the same:

rows="10" tabindex="1" cols="80" style="height:40em;" dir="{vb:stylevar textdirection}"

These steps are for vBulletin 4.1.2. Some of the tutorials you can find for changing the default height of the editing boxes are a bit outdated and for older versions.

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By default, only the forum name / title is displayed in the <title></title> tag of the homepage of your vBulletin forum, which is far from ideal in terms of SEO. One should give a much more descriptive title to the home page of the forum other than the mere name of it.

To do this:

1. Log in to the /admincp of your vBulletin forum
2. From the left administrative menu, Styles & Templates –> Style Manager –> Select Edit Templates in the right drop down of the current style set.
3. In the left selection of templates, double click Forum Home Templates –> double click FORUMHOME.
4. Now opens the homepage template of your forum, search for ‘<title>’ and you would find the HTML tag to edit.
5. Add something descriptive and keywords-rich in the <title></title> tag and click Save.
6. Done!

vBulletin is such a sophisticated application with a very large user base. Took me some time to find this solution. Hope it helps! Check out how I changed the homepage title of the forum for Go.

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Several of the Google results for ‘how to delete Skype account’ suggest that you can’t literally delete any Skype account once created. However it really bothers me that more than one account under one email address would definitely confuse people who have searched for you and are trying to figure out which one is the regular account of yours. Half of the chance is that he or she would end up with the wrong one.

So how can you delete extra Skype accounts so that you have only one user account under your email address?

The answer is you can’t. But you can change the registered email address of the extra accounts. Just sign in to your Skype account and go to https://secure.skype.com/account/personal/change-email to perform the change. After the change, people will see no more unwanted accounts under the original email. Problem solved.

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• How to Enable / Change vBulletin Default Thread Subscription Mode for New User Registrations?

One of the foremost things you want of your own vBulletin forum is that the users can engage in it as much as they would. Though email subscription is a little too bothering than people need, control panel subscription that lists all the threads your users have started or participated in will definitely increase the vitality of your community because they can easily find out if their threads / posts have been responded to and then feel compelled to post back.

The default subscription mode when a new user registers with vBulletin is no subscription at all. People would have no way to find out how their posts have been received and responded to thus would become engaged in the conversations. You should turn the control panel subscription on by default so all new users will subscribe to their own threads or threads that they have posted in automatically.

Log in your vBulletin control panel:

Admin CP –> Settings –> Options –> User Registration Options –> Default Registration Options –> Automatic Thread Subscription Mode

Select the dropdown list to Subscribe with no notification. And click Save. However, for users who have already registered, they’d have to manually change their account settings to change their subscription options:

User CP –> My Settings –> My Account –> General Settings –> Messaging & Notification –> Default Thread Subscription Mode

Change it to Through my control panel only.

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