Popular local blog advertising network AdGator has closed it doors.

For long Adgator has helped the local blogging community make some money at what they do best, but all good things must come to an end. Yesterday the Afrigator team announced the termination of the Adgator service.

In the statement the Afrigator team only says that Adgator is no longer a viable business, but I tend to disagree. My personal opinion with regards to the reason why Adgator has closed down it because there was no time and effort put into the project.

As for what will be happening with the framework, I hope the guys will either sell it off or give it to someone that are willing to put effort into running such a service. I feel with the right amount of effort and time dedicated to such a project it can be a huge success.

To Justin and the guys, thanks for helping us make an extra buck every month and I believe not just me but every blogger out there are sad to hear about the closing down of Adgator. Good luck with your other ventures.

If you still have some cash left in your Adgator account you can log in here and generate an invoice.

There comes a time in every blog’s existence when you have no choice but to start serving ads to cover costs, I started serving ads since day one as I was hosting local and had to cover the cost of the very expensive local hosting bill monthly.

Unfortunately for me I did not see great returns on my Google Adsense units and was almost at the point where I wanted to pull the whole idea as I was forced to pay the local hosting bill out of my own pocket, but instead of dropping Google Adsense I started playing around with different sizes and the placement of the ads and it paid off withing a few weeks.

Naturally you can’t expect much revenue from ads if you do not have loads of traffic, but a comment on iMod, and the good timing of a Google’s Adsense mail package lead me to this post.

So how can you increase your Google Adsense revenue in just a few weeks? With just a few tweaks here and there you could be earning way more than you are already earning from your Google Adsense units.

Go Wide
Not many know this but smaller Google Adsense ads does not perform well, rather then going with the smaller format why not switch over to one of the top performing Google Adsense units? According to Google, wider ad formats tend to perform better as they are easier to read, and they are also preferred by advertisers. Try switching to one of the bellow Google Adsense units:

• 300 x 250 Medium Rectangle
• 336 x 280 Large Rectangle
• 728 x 90 Leaderboard
• 160 x 600 Wide Skyscraper

More is better
Increase the number of Google Adsense units per page to three, this can be particularly successful on pages with allot of text on them. Also place ads near rich content and locations where users may be focusing their attention. Try adding a 300 x 250 Medium Rectangle at the end of your articles or blogposts.

Enable text and image ads
The Google Adsense system automatically shows ads that will deliver the highest earnings for you, setting up your Google Adsense units to show both text and images will increase the number of ads competing to appear on your pages, leading to higher revenue delivering ads.

Make your ads visible
Position your ads where users can actually see them without the need to scroll down, this is called placing them “above the fold”. Above the fold ads are premium locations and are generally more attractive to advertisers who pay for impressions rather than clicks.

Blend you ads in
Google Adsense has this nice feature where you can actually customise the look and feel of your ads, select colours that complements your site, specially for the borders and backgrounds of your ads. Google recommends creating a borderless look by setting the border and background colour to be the same as the colour of the page the ad appears on.

So there you have it, by just tweaking your Google Adsense units and incorporating the above guidelines you can already start earning a bit more. If you have got any tips feel free to leave them in the comments.

Since Google acquired publishing platform Blogger in 2003 nothing much has really changed when it comes to looks for the 11 year old blogging platform, but Google has big plans.

Blogger may be the sixth largest websites in the world but when you compare it to the likes of WordPress, the blogging platform does not stack up very well. Taking into consideration how well the adoption of WordPress has taken up with online publishers one might even argue that WordPress has overtaken Blogger.

Seems like Google is feeling the threat from WordPress and announced in a blog post that 2011 will be an exciting year for the Blogger platform with the introduction of a brand new next-generation user interface that will go live later this year.

Below is two screenshot Google shared of how the new Blogger dashboard and post editor will look.

So what do you think? I think it looks pretty cool and refreshed.

Friday Internet users was up in arms about the removal of the Google Reader link from GMail suspecting that the service may be nearing its death and that Google are in the process of silently killing it.

The Google Reader link used to sit at the top of GMail alongside Calendar, Documents and Web but Friday suddenly just disappeared from the list being replaced by Photos (Picasa).

Google representative Victoria Katsarou has confirmed that the removal of the Google Reader link was by mistake, Google Photos had made the cut and was to join Reader in the navigation bar, but due to an error Google Reader was replaced instead.

The GMail team are currently working on correcting the error to put back the Reader link.

Last week I had a request for help from the guys at RLabs about blogging from mobile phones to a WordPress blog. Now I knew about the WordPress apps available for iPhone, Android and Blackberry, but the problem is these people that wanted to blog did not have access to smartphones.

I eventually helped them set up an Email to WordPress system, but then the idea came to me. Wouldn’t it be nice if these people would be able to blog from MXit. MXit supports almost any mobile phone on the market and in a country like South Africa where the only way most people are able to access the Internet is through their cellphones, this could be the cheapest way for them publish to the web for all to see.

I mentioned the idea on Twitter and then Paul Scott replied that he already has most of the basic code for this seeing as he helped developed the MXit bot RLabs uses for councelling.

Paul quickly put some code together over the weekend and that is how MXitPress was born. MXitPress makes use of the MetaWebLog API to publish posts to WordPress and Chisimba blogs through the use of the XMPP Jabber protocol.

Using MXitPress is real easy, all you need is a XMPP client like MXit or GTalk, add the jabber contact chisimba.mxitpress@gmail.com and that’s it, you are now ready to publish blog posts straight from MXit.

To make posts you will need to enable Remote Publishing on your blog at Settings > Writing and ticking XML-RPC, then you need to register your blog with the bot by issuing the register command like so: register:www.yourdomain.com /xmlrpc.php user pass replacing www.yourdomain.com with your blog url and user and pass with your username and password you use to log into WordPress.

Once you have register your blog you can go ahead and start making posts by using the following command: Blog Post Title#Blog content goes after the #

This new method for blogging from MXit opens up a whole new market to blogging, and with the new MXit API to be released on 29th of October 2010 this could make blogging in Africa accessible to just about everybody. Imaging live blogging from an event from your mobile phone, take a snap with phone of the presentation, add some text and send it straight to your blog.

Forrst is a new online community where developers and designers can share inspiring code, links and screenshots. Think of it as a social network for developers and designers out there.

Forrst is currently only available on invite and I am lucky enough to be part of this great community, checking in daily to see what interesting things like-minded peers are up to.

Forrst recently released a, lets call it API, with limited functionality where you can look up user info and posts for specific users. It got me thinking seeing as I am such a big fan of WordPress, why not have a nice widget where you can showcase your latest Forrest Post and this is where Forrst WP was born.

Forrst WP is a WordPress plugin that enables you to place a WordPress Widget on your site showing your the latest Forrst Posts for the user you specified. Forrst WP currently has limited functionality seeing that the Forrst API is very restricted at the moment only allowing you to look up posts and user information for specific users.

To use Forrst WP, simply download the file below, extract and upload it to your WordPress plugins directory. In you WordPress dashboard under the Plugins menu, activate Forrst WP and then head over to your Widgets and simply drag the Forrst Widget to where you’d like it and enter the options as desired.

Download Forrst WP v1.0

With WordPress 3.0 that got released only a few months back, the open source CMS platform is winning large amounts of developers over when it comes to choosing a CMS platform for their projects.

What makes WordPress so spectacular is the way the core functionality is coded, allowing for developer to create plugins and themes that can do just about anything without modifying any of the WordPress core functionality.

WordPress is steadily on the increase in South Africa, with a few local companies already primarily developing on the CMS

Here is a list of 10 WordPress plugins developed by South Africans:

AnyFont
AnyFont is a WordPress plugin by Ryan Peel that enables you to use any custom TrueType or OpenType font to replace standard fonts anywhere on your site.

Admin Custom Styles
Admin Custom Styles is a WordPress plugin by Nick Soper that allows you to customize the WordPress admin login screen to suite your own personal brand.

International SMS Subscription Manager
International SMS Subscription Manager is a plugin by myself that allows you to add SMS subscription and notifications to your WordPress blog through a sidebar widget.

Remind Me
Remind Me is a WordPress plugin by Christopher Mills that makes the task of deeplinking to other posts on your blog breeze by automatically finding posts related to your content and allowing you to deeplink on keyword with a simple click.

Mobile Press
Mobile Press is a WordPress plugin by Tyler Reed that turns your WordPress powered website into a full blown mobile friendly site with ad support when viewed from a mobile phone.

WP Section Index
WP Section Index is a WordPress plugin by Matty Cohen that enables you to create a widgetised table of contents for the current page or blog post, based on headings within the content.

Copy Compass
Copy Compass is a WordPress plugin by Nicholas Duncan that automatically analyses your posts or pages to SEO best practices and then giving you a score and recommendation on where you can improve the SEO.

Community Cloud
Comminity Cloud by Miguel dos Santos is a WordPress plugin that displays a “tag cloud” of all the people in your community who have contributed to your WordPress powered site by commenting. The more someone has commented, the bigger and bolder their link.

Please Link 2 Me
Please Link 2 Me is a WordPress plugin by James that adds a text box containing all the code necessary for visitors to easily create links back to your article from their website.

AStickyPostOrderER
AStickyPostOrderER by Andre S Clements is a WordPress plugin that lets you manipulate the order in which posts are displayed per category, per tag, or over-all on your WordPress powered site.

Maybe you have been using one of these plugins and didn’t even notice they were developed by local developers, well now you know. If you are a South African and have developed a plugin feel free to post it in the comments.

There are a few WordPress plugins on the market that can allow your blog to rank better in Search Engines by improving your Search Engine Optimization (SEO), the latest of these SEO plugins is Copycompass, a plugin developed by South African online marketing, design and development company Talooma.

Copycompas is a WordPress SEO plugin that analyzes your post’s copywrite and then giving you a score of how well your post is written in accordance to best SEO practices.

Using Copycompass is a real breeze, once you have written your post simply click the Analyze Content button and Copycompass will analyze the content, work out a overall SEO score and then give you a detailed breakdown of where you can improve your post.

If you see your SEO score is not very good, you can simply return to editing the post following the guidelines as set out by Copycompass.

To get your hand on this great WordPress SEO Copywriting plugin, simply visit Copycompass and download the plugin for free.

When it comes to SEO (Search Engine Optimization) WordPress comes standard SEO ready, but if you are looking for that extra exposure on search engines, and lets be honest who doesn’t? Here is what I think are 5 of the best SEO plugins for WordPress that can help you get that better page rank.

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Platinum SEO Pack

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Platinum SEO Pack for WordPress is an all in one solution for managing all aspects of SEO on your WordPress blog. This is one of the most popular SEO plugins for WordPress with features such as automatic 301 redirects for any permalink changes, Optimized Post and Page Titles for search engines, helps you avoid duplicate content and add index, noindex, follow or nofollow, noodp, noydir, noarchive, nosnippet meta tags to any post/page.

Download Platinum SEO Pack

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Google XML Sitemaps

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One of the most essential tools in getting your content on search engines is this plugin, lets face it the quicker search engines know about your content and index it the better for you. Google XML Sitemaps generates a sitemap for your site and then pings major search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask.com to notify them of new content on your blog.

Download Google XML Sitemaps

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Remind Me

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Remind Me is a SEO plugin for WordPress developed by local blogger Chris M. Remind Me makes deep linking on your site a breeze by showing all relevant links related to the article you are writing and then allows you to easily link to another post with a simple click.

Download Remind Me

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PubSubHubbub

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This plugin has got a weird name, but apart from that it does a wonderful job at notifying the web that you have new content. Everything nowadays strive to be real-time, and PubSubHubbub makes your WordPress blog real-time by announcing to the web that you have new content on your blog, blog aggregators like MyScoop and Afrigator can then now when you have new content and then immediately publish it.

Download PubSubHubbub

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SEO Smart Links

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One of the ways of getting more content on your WordPress blog indexed by search engines is by deep linking to other posts on your blog. Doing this by hand can be tedious so this is where SEO Smart Links comes in. It automatically links keywords and phrases to URLs you would like it to link to.

Download SEO Smart Links

If you have any suggestions to SEO WordPress plugins you use or recommend, feel free to post them in the comments.

We have made it to the next round of the 2010 South African Blog Awards, I am saying we as I could not have made it without the support of everybody that nominated iGeek.

A big thanks goes out to everybody that nominated iGeek for the South African Blog Awards, iGeek has been nominated in the categories of Best New Blog and Best Science and Technology Blog.

The next step before victory is claimed is for you to go and vote, voting for the South African Blog Awards will be open until the 17th of September 2010, from there the judges will also have a vote and then the winners will be announced at the awards ceremony on the 25th of September.

To vote for iGeek follow this link or simply click the South African Blog Awards badge on the right of the site. You can place a new vote every 24 hours with the same email address, so remember to place your votes every day.

Thank you very much for your loyal support.