Google revealed a new Adsense interface known as Version 3 in November of last year and since its announcement, the new interface was kept in closed beta testing to a few Adsense publishers. I wasn’t lucky enough to be selected as one of the beta testers so the only time I’ve seen the new user interface was through screenshots posted on blogs by other beta testers.

When I logged in to my Adsense account this morning, instead of the usual page I was greeted by a page that asked me to try out the new Adsense interface. I didn’t hesitate and clicked on the “Try the new Adsense” button. After a year of waiting, I finally got to try and see the new Adsense interface aka Version 3 for myself.

Screenshots:

What’s New?

• More Insights – Actionable data helps you better understand your performance and make more informed business decisions.
• More Control – Easier to use, richer controls help you protect your brand – all in one place.
• Greater Efficiency – Redesigned interface helps you find what you’re looking for and complete tasks quickly and easily.

Features in full detail here.

I really like the new Ajaxified Adsense user interface and I think that it’s much better than the previous one. Aside from the cleaner design/layout, the new interface offers a much more detailed view of earning reports, more control over ads and advertisers and best of all, it’s user-friendly.

Anyone else tried the new Google Adsense user interface? Do you prefer the old or the new interface? What other features or options should Google add to the new user interface? Please share your thoughts.

These days, its not uncommon to find free premium quality WordPress themes. A lot of WordPress theme authors, design websites and even Premium theme sellers are now creating and releasing freemium WordPress themes and sharing it with the WordPress community. One good example of such a theme is the Milano theme brought to us by Web2Feel. The Milano theme is an advance magazine style, 2-columned theme that has the qualities of a premium theme and lots of built-in features.

Here’s a short description for the Milano theme.

This is an elegant theme designed with attractive color combination for bloggers who look to make money online via ads. This theme is suitable for any niche. The theme layout is stylish and dynamic contents modules like, image slider, tabbed content area are built into it.

List of Features:

• Premium theme layout
• Multi-level dropdown javascript navigation menu
• Featured sliding posts
• Site wide customizable 125 x 125 custom banner ads
• Adsense enabled
• Tabbed content area * Featured Video * Recent posts * Popular Posts
• Two widgetized sidebars
• Customizable welcome message
• Page navigation enabled
• WP 2.7 ready, threaded comments
• Theme support
• Custom theme option page in the admin panel

Screenshot:

My Take:
Like the Monkeypr theme that I reviewed recently, the Milano is hands down a very pretty and well designed WordPress theme and could easily be marketed as a premium theme. It has a lot of features and built-in functions that most free WordPress themes don’t have and can be found only on premium themes.

The feature that stands out the most from the Milano theme is the featured post slideshow. This feature not only enables the author a cool and attractive way to promote the featured posts but it also provides the user easy access to check out the blog’s featured posts. You can configure the slider, video, Adsense and banner ads from within the WP dashboard via the theme options page. It also has features a javascript-powered multi-level drop down navigation menu that is useful when your blog has a lot of categories and sub-categories.

The Milano theme features page navigation, post excerpts and popular posts and in order for it to work, you’ll have to install 3 plugins – WP Page Navi, Popularity Contest and Limit Post. The theme author has included those 3 plugins into the theme download zip file. This theme also uses the TimThumb script to generate the post thumbnails.

So far, I haven’t found anything negative to say about the Milano theme. Maybe the only things that can be an issue for some users are the color scheme and those required plugins, but those can be easily fixed with a few minor tweaks. Other than that, the Milano theme is an awesome theme. It’s very customizable, easy to install, has lots of features and can be used by any blogger and used for any type of blog niche – personal, technology, entertainment, sports, movie reviews, gadgets, etc.

Great job by the theme designer and hope they’d release more free WordPress themes like these in the near future. Btw, the theme author also provided the PSD file for the header logo, so users can customize it to their own preference.

For more detailed installation instructions, check out the Milano Theme Setup Guide.

Preview or Download the Milano WordPress theme.

Here’s how the old login page looks like:

Here’s how the new login page looks like:

The new login page looks much better and provides a simpler Adsense login page interface.

While reading my RSS feeds, I found out from ProBlogger that aside from the new login page, Google Adsense has also introduced a new type of ad called “expandable ads” and announced it on their blog.

We’re excited to introduce to you expandable ads, a new type of ad that can appear on your pages. Expandable ads are rich media ads that can expand beyond the original size of the ad unit, following a user-initiated action. This creates more real estate for the ad, allowing for more interaction from interested users. For instance, expandable ads may stream a movie trailer, show video game clips, or display various views of an item for sale.

Expandable ads will be served as third-party ads and will be created by Google-certified rich media vendors for the top display advertisers in our network. And like other Google ads, you’ll earn based on whether the expandable ads on your site are priced on a cost-per-click (CPC) or cost-per-impression (CPM) basis. Keep in mind that you’ll generate earnings from CPC expandable ads when a user visits the advertiser’s landing page, and not when a user simply clicks to expand the ad.

As of the moment, expandable ads are only currently available to a select number of advertisers in the U.S. who can bid on specific sites where they want their ads to appear. However, all publishers can accept expandable ads regardless of their location. I still have to see an expandable ad in action and I expect to see it anytime soon in either my blog or one of the blogs I regularly visit.

What do you guys think of the new Google Adsense login page? Do you like it or do you prefer the previous one? How about the new expandable ads, what are your thoughts on it?

This will be the first time for me to do something like this for my blog. I’m not doing this because I’m just following what other bloggers are doing but rather, I’m doing this so I will have something to motivate me to do my best, improve on my strengths and work on the weaknesses to further improve JaypeeOnline. Since this is my first blog goals post, I don’t have anything to compare it to so I’m setting these goals based on the current statistics and set some “ideal” goals for me and my blog.

1. Reach at least 500 RSS subscribers (currently at 300+).
2. Increase the average daily blog traffic (pageviews and unique visitors).
3. Increase the monthly earnings on Adsense and other affiliate networks.
4. Increase the posting frequency to 6 or 7 weekly posts.
5. Get the blog’s Google PageRank back to 4 (currently at PR 2).
6. Get back within Alexa’s top 100,000.
7. Have guest bloggers write for JaypeeOnline.
8. Improve the community around JaypeeOnline.
9. Continue the Weekend Roundup feature.
10. Host a group writing project (You can share any good topic that you have in mind).
11. Release a free WordPress theme.
12. Have more blog contests/giveaway.
13, Attend a WordPress WordCamp or a Blog World Expo.
14. Attend the 2009 Philippine Blog Awards (more of a wish).

Even though a few of the goals are a little difficult or a bit too high for me, I believe that if I do my best and with your help, I would be able to accomplish all or most of these goals by the end of this year. If you haven’t subscribed to JaypeeOnline’s RSS feed yet, you can help me accomplish my first goal sooner by subscribing via RSS reader or receive RSS updates via email.

How about you? Have you also set up any blog goals or maybe personal goals for 2009? Care to share it with us? Maybe we can help each other accomplish our goals.

Pinoy blogosphere

• Good news for Ubuntu fans! You can now install Ubuntu on any Windows machine without the need of a different partition or without having to worry about messing up the Windows installation.
• A certain blogger recently published a detailed article on how to rip a WordPress theme using Firefox and a Firefox extension called Firebug. I’m sure a lot of WordPress theme authors especially those who have premium themes are not gonna like this one. Via AJ’s blog.
• Learn how to increase your Adsense earnings by increasing your pageviews with this post from Jehzlau. Very useful tip if you use lots of images on your blog posts. If I have the time, I’ll try this out here in my blog and see if it would work.
• If you’re having a hard time or simply don’t have the time to create a Privacy Policy page for your blog, then you should try out the Privacy Policy WordPress plugin that lets you automatically create Adsense-compliant policies. via PinoyTek. This reminds me, I still have to create one for this blog.

Around the web

• Need a custom homepage for your WordPress-powered blog or site? You don’t need a separate installation of WordPress. Here’s a short but detailed tutorial from Hack WordPress.
• Running full feeds and worried about content scrapers? What you need is the AntiLeech WordPress plugin. This plugin doesn’t stop sploggers from accessing your site but provides them with useless content. You can even customize it to display a link pointing back to your site. Via QuickOnlineTips
• Are you having a hard time or have been unsuccessful in advertising your blog? Bloggin-Ads has a 2 part series on Advertising Your Site The Correct Way. Good read if you’re serious about promoting your blog and want to improve your blog advertisement/pormotion.
• Recently several blogs have been sold and bought for large amounts of money, you might be wondering which blogs would sell for the most money? Well, the guys at 24/7 Wall St have come up with a list of the 25 Most Valuable Blogs. (figures gathered are based on advertising revenue and income from conferences)

JaypeeOnline Weekly Recap

• WordPress 2.5 RC 2 + Screencast
• Digsby = IM + Email + Social Networks
• Finally, WordPress 2.5!

If you have any questions, comments, suggestions or want your article to be featured in the next Weekend Roundup, feel free to leave a comment or send me a message via the contact page.

• Weekend Roundup #22
• Weekend Roundup #15
• Weekend Roundup #19
• Weekend Roundup #14
• Weekend Roundup #21
• Weekend Roundup #18
• Weekend Roundup #20
• Weekend Roundup #23
• Weekend Roundup #11
• Weekend Roundup #17
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