I thought new Adsense features should always increase the revenue, but targetable AdSense channels didn’t work for me – tried it for one month and the income dropped 20% despite of better ads integration. I wasn’t sure of the reasons but after I hid the channels from advertisers, the picture becomes very clear.
Google Analytics and Smarty
Some popular PHP scripts such as phpLD and PHP Classifieds were developed based on Smarty, adding Analytics code is a bit tricky. The best way is using the tag literal, enclose Analytics code with {literal} and {/literal}.
The following text is from Smarty online manual:
{literal} tags allow a block of data to be taken literally. This is typically used around Javascript or stylesheet blocks where {curly braces} would interfere with the template delimiter syntax. Anything within {literal}{/literal} tags is not interpreted, but displayed as-is.
Analytics and phpBB 2
I’m running several phpBB 2 forums, I was never able to make Google Analytics work on them. Analytics didn’t report any errors, just couldn’t get any stats, it’s so weird.
I finally did some search today and found a solution:
Forum Merge
I purchased a diet forum from flippa, it has a solid history and huge amount of posts, but it’s been quiet in the past two years, without dramatic changes, I think it will be fading away. I’m also running a health forum, solid ranking, beautiful design, better software, active. From all the information I gathered, a merge seems to be a great move.
Evil Websites
A destructive virus, fileerror_22001, propagating via web pages emerged since one week ago, it damages Office documents on the infected computers, very few viruses are as evil as this one, as far as I know. Fortunately, Anti-virus software can detect this and give a warning, Anti-virus software becomes more important than ever.
Recession and More
My AdSense CPM dropped 30% this week, I started to feel the recession impact on my websites – more traffic but much lower income. It’s kinda scary to imagine how bad it will be in the future.
Do Outbound Links Hurt Ranking?
Do massive outbound links hurt the rankings? Not necessarily. Please note that it’s different from linking to bad neighbors in site-wide range.
Why Paid Directory Always Fail?
Over the past few years, I have witnessed a few paid directories that were very successful at one time, but failed in the end. The only one survived is botw.org, AFAIK. Their promotions are very interesting, they used different strategies but basically was getting high PRs and tried not to make Google unhappy at the same time.
Traffice Jump After Server Move
Three days after the initial ranking drop, I started to see traffic jump across the server. I regretted the move after I found the new server had hardware problems, now I’m very happy. 
Server Down Hurt Rankings
I moved my websites to a different server, my poor planning caused a few hours unexpected down time. Most rankings on Google dropped several spots, which is really surprising! When transferring websites, my first concern before was to avoid data inconsistency, especially for forums. But I have to change my mind, avoiding any down time should be the most important thing.