After my adventures with Google telling me I was hosting adult content (again, this is actually my third go-round with them), I’m here to inform you that you can now block Google Ads on one page only.
Add a URL Channel
First you have to tell Google what your URLs are that you want to treat differently. For that, we’ll use a URL channel which you can find at My Ads > Content > URL Channels. Now, you only get 500 of these, which means you can only flag 500 unique URLs as … well … unique.
You may notice, no wildcards. So I can add halfelf.org/2012/legitimate-porn-plugins/ but not halfelf.org/.*/.*[porn].*/ which would be pretty cool. Once you’ve added your URL, you’ll see it like this:
Edit Ad Settings
I’m using Auto Ads because I’m incurably lazy, as my friend Syed knows. So I go to My Ads > Auto Ads, but if you were using specific units, you’d go to My Ads > Ad Units. There you go to the Advanced URL Settings section and click on the add button for a new URL Group.
This brings you to a page where you can select the URLs for this group.
When you’ve picked all your URLs (and yes you can add more later), click next and you’ll get a list of all the possible ad units. Uncheck them all. That’s the point of this, right? Finally you’ll review the group and give it a name. I picked “No Ads” since that’s what this was.
In July of 2018, I was informed by Google Adsense that specific content on my site was going to have “restricted ad serving” and I needed to go to the policy centre on Adsense to find out why. There was no link to this centre, by the way, and it took me a while to figure out I went to Adsense > Settings > Policy where I saw this:
Yes, that image says that the post about Legitimate Porn Plugins was deemed to be sexual content. My guess is that they don’t like the image, because my post about how GPL says Porn is Okay did not get flagged.
My friend pointed out that it was ridiculously damaging to moderate content (or at least in this case, revenue) by “casting a wide net based solely on the presence of key words” and she’s quite right. Now I did attempt to get Google to reconsider, but like my past experiences with their censorship and draconian view, they don’t give a damn if you aren’t ‘big.’ And even then, important people get slapped by Google all the time.
History? What History?
In 1964, there was a landmark case in the US, Jacobellis vs Ohio, about whether the state of Ohio could, consistent with the First Amendment, ban the showing of the Louis Malle film The Lovers (Les Amants), which the state had deemed obscene. During that case, and the reason it became so well known, was not the content matter.
In fact, the decision remained quite fragmented until 1973 Miller v. California decision in which it was declared that to be smut (i.e. obscene) it must be utterly without redeeming social importance. The SLAPS test addresses this with a check for “serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value” – and yes, the acronym is hilarious.
No, everyone knows about the first case because of the following quote by Justice Potter Stewart:
I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that.
Tea, Earl Grey, Hot
When I was very young, maybe six, my father did a talk about artificial intelligence with a slide of Captain Kirk ordering things from the ship’s computer. It stuck with me, which Dad finds amusing, and I’ve often reflected back on it as an understanding of what an AI can and cannot do.
The ship’s computer on Star Trek can do a great many things, but it cannot make ‘decisions’ for a person. In the end, a human always has to decide what to do with the variables, what they mean, and how they should be used. Kirk has to ask the computer to chill the wine, for example, and if he doesn’t specify a temperature, the computer will go back to what some other human (or more likely Mr. Spock) has determined is the optimal temperature.
AIs don’t exist. Even as useful as I find digital assistants like Siri and Alexa, I know they aren’t intelligent and they cannot make decisions. They can follow complex if/then/else patterns, but they lack the ability to make innovation. What happens if Kirk just asks for ‘white wine, chilled’? What vintage will he receive? What temperature?
To a degree, this is addressed with how Captain Picard orders his tea. “Tea, Earl Grey, hot.” But someone had to teach the system what ‘hot’ meant and what it meant to Jean-Luc and not Riker, who probably never drank any tea. Still, Picard has learned to specify that he wants Earl Grey tea, and he wants it hot. There’s probably some poor tech boffin in the belly of Starfleet who had to enter the optimum temperatures for each type of tea. Certainly my electric kettle has a button for ‘black tea’ but it also tells me that’s 174 degrees Fahrenheit.
Automation Limitations
My end result with Google was that I had to set up that specific page to not show ads. Ever. Because Google refused to get a human to take a look and go “Oh, its the image, remove that and you’re fine.” But even then a human could look at the image, recognize it’s not pornography, and flag it as clean.
What we have is a limitation in the system, where in there is no human checking, which results in me getting annoyed, and Google being a monolithic annoyance. Basically, Google has automated the system to their specifications, and then instead of putting humans on the front lines to validate, they let it go.
This makes sense from a business perspective, if you’re as big as Google at least. It costs less. But we’ve all read stories about people getting locked out of their Google accounts, for a month or more, and facing drama because there’s no way to get in touch with a human being.
The Heart of It All is Humans
And that’s really the heart of the problem.
Have you ever visited a forum or a chat site and it’s full of people acting like decent people to each other? Humans did that. A human sat down, purged the site of the vile content, and had to sit and read it to be sure. They pushed back on trolls and other problematic people, all to help you.
Don’t believe me? Okay, do you remember the WordPress plugin WangGuard by José Conti? He shut the service down in 2017 because it was giving him a mental break down. The plugin worked so well because he, a human being, evaluated content.
WangGuard worked in two different ways, one an algorithm that had been perfecting for 7 years, and that was perfecting as the sploggers evolved, so it was always ahead of them. And a second part that was human, in which I reviewed many things, and among them sploggers websites to see their content, improve the algorithm and make sure that it worked correctly both when a site was blocked and not it was. The great secret of WangGuard, was this second part, without this second part, WangGuard would not have become what it was.
After upgrading my theme, I saw a note that I could add my Google Adsense ID, but “Auto Ads must be enabled in your AdSense account for this feature to work properly.”
Auto Ads?
Auto Ads
A month ago Google introduced a new way to handle ads, and simply that is you don’t have to mess around with placing adds. You put your code in and then you tell Google “Gimme them auto ads!” and they add in … well … ads.
Depending on your options, you can show in-article ads or just section ones, and it comes out looking a bit like this:
Not Perfect
There are some issues with this.
There are obvious pros to this, and mostly it’s that I don’t have to think about where an ad is going to go. I can tell Google “Show a medium amount of ads where you think is best” and walk away. I don’t have to worry about which ads to use. Also they use Google’s ‘what fits with the content’ magic algorithm.
But.
I can’t exclude certain areas.
Which means on one of my sites has an extra hunk of ads in the headers, as Google inserted an ad in each section. And I can’t tell it not to put adds in specific sections. I can tell it not to put ads on specific pages, and with Genesis I can do that from within WordPress, but the options just aren’t quite where I want. Yet.
Setting It Up
Like all
In the left navigation panel, visit My ads and select Get Started.
On the “Choose your global settings” page, select the ad formats that you’d like to show and click Save.
On the next page, click Copy code.
Paste the ad code between the < head > and </ head > tags of each page where you want to show Auto ads.
It takes about 20 minutes for ads to show up
If you’re using Genesis themes, upgrade to 2.6 and paste your Publisher ID in the new setting field for Auto Ads, in either the Theme Settings, or the new Customizer panel.
If you don’t want that at all, Gary Jones made a plugin to remove it entirely from Genesis Themes. Though I’d point out you don’t have to use it if you don’t want.
The basic design of a page using AMP works for news articles. This is by design. It’s meant to be fast to load and fast to display, and that means removing the majority of cruft we shove in sidebars and footers. It means a streamlined website.
That’s a basic page but it works well for what it needs to be. The issue happens when you consider pages that aren’t your typical ‘news’ pages.
Compare the information in a character page. On the left is the normal page and the right is the AMP page.
There’s some work to be done, obviously. Enter Custom Templates.
Calling the Right Template for the Job
The example code works great when you want to universally replace things. I don’t. I want to use a different template per-CPT, so my code is this:
Now I need to make the template. It’s actually not as obvious as it might be. You can’t just copy the single.php file from the AMP templates folder and go. No, if you want to use it as-is, you will need to set up how to pull the custom templates.
For the quick example, we have the Single Template and with that we have to replace all the calls to load_parts. They look like this:
We have to change them because the code for load_parts is relative to the file, and it doesn’t call .php so it’s a bit of a drama to call them. I replaced it with this:
This is pretty much what I tell plugin developers not to do. Never ever use WP_PLUGIN_DIR unless you absolutely have to. Always use plugins_url() and plugin_dir_path() please and thank you. But since I can’t use a URL in include_once() because it’s https) and I can’t use plugin_dir_path() because it’s relative to the file it’s called from, and this is called from the theme. So yes, here I have to use the one constant I tell you not to use. I’m aware of the irony.
The rest of the template is mostly removing things I can’t filter out. I removed the feature image, I removed the byline (we don’t care who wrote the CPTs, authorship isn’t an issue), and I removed the taxonomies.
Fix The Images
Once the main file is loading properly, it’s time to address the two problems with the images: size and location. There’s, thankfully, some default code that can help with this that didn’t need a template. AMP comes with directions on changing your featured image but the example code had to be tweaked in order to handle multiple post types:
But. This made double images! Why? Because this is a lie: “The default template does not display the featured image currently.”
It does. This is why I removed the featured image in my template. If I can figure out how not to do that, I’ll be 90% of my way to not needing a custom template at all, because everything else I did in the filter.
Add the Extra Content
Remember function lez_amp_add_featured_image() above? Yeah I threw it out and made an insanely complex. I renamed it function lez_amp_add_content() and the if ( $post_type === 'post_type_characters' ) {} section became huge so that I could output the code the way I wanted.
In the image above, you can see I’ve not only added in a lot more meta content from the post, but I also tweaked the CSS to float the image to the left and resize the SVGs. I went super image light on this, loading the smallest image that would work, and the SVGs are very small sized.
Overall? It should be easier
The biggest issue I have with this is that I wish I could filter more. If I could turn off the featured images and remove the bylines, then I wouldn’t need the custom template at all. At least, not for the characters. The shows? That’s another matter.
No, not bad emails as in the ones that you consider saving and posting for someone’s everlasting internet shame. Bad emails are the ones that go to the wrong place, through none of your fault. We’re talking about the people using an email you’ve not used in a decade, or someone who can’t remember your name is spelled with an A and not an E, and so on. You know, typos.
One of the things I did on my old email was set up a trash email box. That is, people could email not-me@domain.com or me@olddomain.com and they’d get an auto-reply telling them the email was no longer in service. It was more important for an old domain I owned but didn’t use and yet people I needed to talk to still thought it was real. I could have forwarded it to me, but after 10 years, I upgraded to the “Folks, seriously!” alert.
Doing this on cPanel was pretty easy, making a custom alias that dev/null’d and sent a reply. Doing it on Gmail was a little weirder and made me think about the situation.
Canned Replies
First you have to set up Canned Responses, which is a Lab (go to Gmail -> Settings -> Labs). You made a response like you make an email, only instead of sending it you save it by clicking on the down arrow and saving as a Canned Response:
Once you have it saved, set up a filter so any email to @domain.com gets a reply of that Canned.
Don’t Be Sneaky
If you’re thinking “Aha! I can use this to be sneaky!” with the intent of sending people emails to pretend you really are reading it, there is a problem with that. The email comes back from YOU+canned.response@example.com and no, there’s no really easy way around that. Someone did come up with a Google Script for it, but it’s not for the faint of heart.
Now the question is, is that a bad thing? Is it bad for people to know they got a canned reply? No, not really. By putting in the +canned.response it’s obvious that it’s a canned, but it’s also obvious for you and you can filter the emails however you want. People who reply to canned? Auto-trash ’em. Or block them.
Filters
Instead of the canned reply, though, you can also just discard the email. Either don’t even bother to set up the email (or it’s alias at all), or if you do, filter it out and dump it. The only reason I could see bothering to make an alias for email you don’t want is if you either plan to review it later, or if you have a catch all email address. If you do this, making an alias, make sure you filter the emails and mark them read so you don’t get distracted by them.
Catch All
There’s a slightly different approach to all this, though. The idea of a catch-all email. By default, G Suites sends all your misdirected emails to trash. Accidentally mailed bob@example.com instead of b0b@example.com because the numbers and letters look the same? Tough luck. Unless Bob was smart enough to set that up as an alias (which I tend to do), your email was lost. The alternative is to designate a user as a ‘catch all’ account that gets everything that doesn’t belong to an existing user.
That catch-all can auto-reply to all emails, forward ones that are important, and everything else. If you’re a business, you should do this so you don’t lose any misdirected emails from customers (they can’t spell after all), but remember to check that email often as it will also collect all the spam for all your accounts.
With the new release of Yoast SEO 3.6, I decided to test out their new walk-through setup.
As someone who’s been studying SEO to one degree or another since the 1990s, SEO in and of itself is no great mystery to me. The bare bones of how it works, how you make good content, is understandable. But what Yoast SEO does, and what I like it for, is it makes it obvious to people without my experience what is needed. It also takes the generally good SEO of WordPress (and a good theme) and optimizes it for the myriad, constant changes that Google does.
For that, the walk-through is a wonderful idea. I like it. I think new users will love it. I think it’ll lessen the barrier to those people who are told “You need a website!” but no one is willing to (or able to) sit with them and help them get started.
Initially I was super impressed. Yoast had clearly studied the aspects of walk-throughs that had worked and that didn’t, lifting pages from other complex plugins that needed to be used by, perhaps, non-technical savvy people.
Being asked what kind of site I was running was brilliant. For the purposes of this test, I decided to use my community/wiki/library – LezWatchTV. And right away I ran into a problem.
The tool wanted me to say if I was a company or a person.
Well … Neither. I’m a community site. Or maybe a group? Either way, the two designations didn’t really apply properly. Where was “Other”?
This couldn’t be Yoast making a boneheaded maneuver, I realized. Few people know better than Joost and his crew what WordPress is used for. They’re smart people. They’ve seen more of the Internet than most of the rest of us and they know well how it’s used. So could the screwup be Google or Schema.org?
I went to Schema.org to look up how they would classify the site, and determined that DataCatalog was the most appropriate. Alright, knowing there was a good classification, I looked back at Google’s Knowledge Graph.
Google’s Knowledge Graph is a weird thing. It’s Google’s attempt to figure out how to answer your questions. You know how you can type in “How do I do X?” into Google and you get that interesting formatted answer?
That’s from their Knowledge Graph. But more importantly, so is this:
The more you dig into it, the more you realize that the only boxes like that are for people or companies. So the breakdown is that Google has not yet figured out how to flag non-people non-companies.
This means my ultimate question of ‘what I am?’ has become a little more existential than I’d wanted, and a little simple. It’s not a person, therefore it must be a company. And while that is entirely, totally, daftly incorrect, it’s also less incorrect that a person.
Thanks, Google.
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