A team led by researchers from UCLA and the Veterans Administration that were investigating how stress affects gastrointestinal function may have found a chemical compound that induces hair growth by blocking a stress-related hormone associated with hair loss — entirely by accident.

Hair loss has all kinds of sources, but stress has been one that many point to when talking about causes. Almost any remotely effective “cure” for baldness is one of the most sought after vanity secrets there will be.

“Our findings show that a short-duration treatment with this compound causes an astounding long-term hair regrowth in chronically stressed mutant mice,” said Million Mulugeta, an adjunct professor of medicine in the division of digestive diseases at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA and a corresponding author of the research. “This could open new venues to treat hair loss in humans through the modulation of the stress hormone receptors, particularly hair loss related to chronic stress and aging.”

UCLA and VA researchers injected the astressin-B into the bald mice to observe how its CRF-blocking ability affected gastrointestinal tract function. The initial single injection had no effect, so the investigators continued the injections over five days to give the peptide a better chance of blocking the CRF receptors. They measured the inhibitory effects of this regimen on the stress-induced response in the colons of the mice and placed the animals back in their cages with their hairy counterparts.

About three months later, the investigators returned to these mice to conduct further gastrointestinal studies and found they couldn’t distinguish them from their unaltered brethren. They had regrown hair on their previously bald backs. more

To make it even worse this pitcher, Armando Galarraga pitches for the Detroit Tigers. My favorite team, and state team, and the only team I have ever rooted for.

Since most of you probably don’t even know what a perfect game is…A perfect game in baseball is when a pitchers gets out 27 batters in a row. This is the minimum number of batters a pitcher can face in a complete game. This is so rare that there have only been 20 in Major League Baseball History. MLB has been around since the 1800s and there are 32 teams in the league right now that play 162 games a year. If you think about all these years and this astronomical number you can clearly see how rare this is.

This was so sickening because he had gotten 26 outs. The last out was well in hand and the umpire BLEW THE CALL. So he ended up getting the 28th out in this game, but of course this will never be called a perfect game. I need a dehumidifier to get rid of all the cold sweat I am spewing after this sickening display of tragedy.

For me it was neither. Well a little of the first one, but upon reading about 2 sentences of the article I was already coming to the conclusion that this is going to somehow cost us regular folks money.

While I am not one of those people that goes around and says that Global Warming is BS, I am one that likes to think that when I am being told something it isn’t for a reason to trick me into buying into a BS tax. This announcement has that written all over it. Don’t get me wrong I am not against maintaining a healthy Earth at all, but honestly some of this stuff has nothing to do with that.

The proposed finding, which now moves to a public comment period, identified six greenhouse gases that pose a potential threat.

“This finding confirms that greenhouse gas pollution is a serious problem now and for future generations. Fortunately, it follows President Obama’s call for a low carbon economy and strong leadership in Congress on clean energy and climate legislation,” said Administrator Lisa P. Jackson. “This pollution problem has a solution – one that will create millions of green jobs and end our country’s dependence on foreign oil.”

As the proposed endangerment finding states, “In both magnitude and probability, climate change is an enormous problem. The greenhouse gases that are responsible for it endanger public health and welfare within the meaning of the Clean Air Act.”

Check out this article for more of a “both sides” argument in regards to what this really means.

I don’t like it when politics tries to use science to screw me over. All of a sudden this situation is of epic seriousness? New president, new view apparently.

On a few sites I have there is information that is pretty much timeless, but it will sit dormant because there is nothing I need to add to it that often. My Agloco site is one that I have that problem with because there just isn’t a ton of information that needs to be added to it, and news is particularly scarce. So rather than pulling your hair out trying to keep all these sites updated, and ending up in drug treatment this plugin is pretty handy.

The Scheduled Post Shift plugin can be applied to sites such as that one so that you can make older posts pop up at the top as if they were new. This basically tells all your friends at the search engines that your site needs to be pinged regularly rather than it just sitting there. It also pings all the ones you list in your ping page when it rotates a post.

There is something you will need to do however if you want to use this plugin as it relates to your permalink structure. If you use a time based structure like this blog does it is sort of an issue to use this plugin as it will change the url of the post every time a post is shifted. The only structure that will work, and not not change your link structure every time is to use the Custom section and to put only /%postname%/ as your structure. Otherwise it will change the url every time it comes up and anyone that has ever linked to you will show a dead link when it is clicked on to your blog posts. We don’t want that!

To find this on your WP dashboard go to Options>Permalinks. Then select the “Custom” option and put /%postname%/ in there for your permalink structure. Then all your posts will just be either what you put in as your post slug, or the title of your post.

Configuring Scheduled Post Shift Plugin:

As for the plugin, it is very easy to set up, but there are 2 pre-activation things you should work on.

1. Change your permalink structure as indicated above so that your posts keep the same url at all times.

2. For every post that you want to rotate on a regular basis they will need to have the SAME category. The reason for this is that the plugin works on a category basis. It will only rotate based upon a specified category, so if you have any posts that you want rotated you must have them listed under the same category. I used Agloco as my standard category for all posts on my Agloco site so it looks alright. There are hidden category plugins out there as well that you may want to search for, but I haven’t done this myself as I wonder as to whether it will be considered as black hat SEO .

the easiest way to change categories on mass posts for me was to add the plugin WP-Cats to your directory. This plugin allows you to use an A-jaxy way to change categories right on your mangae posts screen instead of having to go into each post and edit the categories individually. Very useful anyways, but especially useful for this.

As for configuring the plugin follow these easy steps:

1. This file is sort of different from most, but you should be able to figure it out right enough. Right-click on this file and “Save Link As”. You must do it this way or it will open up and just show you the code. Once it is saved rename the file from a .txt file to a .php file.

2. Upload it to your Plugins directory and enable it in your dashboard.

3. In your WP dashboard select Manage>Categories. Look for the category you used for these posts and on the far left you will see a number for the category ID. Remember that.

4. Got to your WP dashboard and select Options>DDPostShift. In this area you will need to insert the amount of time you would like between post shifts and then enter the category ID that you just found into the other box. This will ensure that for whatever amount of time you entered, the oldest post in that category will be pushed to the front page of your blog when the time is up.

5. Click on “Enable Post Shift” and it is ready to roll.

Pretty useful for this type of thing, eh? Of course this isn’t useful for every site out there, but if you are using a blog to create a place for affiliate marketing, timeless info about anything, and just need it to appear as if it is updating regularly, this plugin will do the trick.

Take a look at other useful WordPress Plugins I use on various websites.

Just got an e-mail this week from TextLink Ads that notified me I could start using Shopping Ads in my posts. Interesting new add on to your monetizing of your blogs I do say so myself. If you have seen Auction Ads in the past you should be quite familiar with the layout of these ads, but there is a bit of a different approach with these. You get paid on the click for these rather than someone having to go through to Ebay and eventually sign up and buy something to get paid.

Here’s an example of one of the ads:

The ads can be categorized rather than relying on your content to pull the products like Adsense would. They also do not break the TOS for Adsense so you can run them at the same time. You can use any size format you would like as well and the colors aren’t restricted either. If you have used Auction Ads it is almost the exact same set up except you get paid for clicks rather than a long sign up process.

Text-Link Ads is actually a nice program for your blog anyways with out this service. I rather like it as it just pays you to have links on your sidebar. It also allows you to sell ad space in blog posts. These are monthly recurring payments until an advertiser cancels the link. With WordPress it is very easy to set up as they have a plugin to set you up really easily once you get approved. Approval is almost instant.

I just started testing this out on a few sites today so I guess I’ll see how effective they are with their reports. TLA has always been pretty good at keeping this stuff run correctly so I don’t forsee any issues with it. If you are already in TLA make sure to look and see if you have gotten an e-mail about this program. It definitely looks like a very good one. It is quite in depth in how well you can categorize your ads. Take this Mudkips post on my serious business blog for example and how I am able to show only Pokemon ads .

This plugin has been on my radar for some time now, but until now I hadn’t gotten around to installing it because I wanted to have a few dozen posts in my archives to have a decent amount of content to pull from. Now that I have it I love the way it helps readers find more related articles for my posts such as more WordPress Plugins when you read a post such as this at the bottom of the entry.

In addition to the help to your readers, this plugin also gives you some Search Engine Optimization (SEO) benefits as well. Mainly the fact that you are linking to more of your own posts, which in turn helps you get more content indexed in the search engines. This is something you should be doing on a regular basis in posts as well. Take a look at one of my other posts on deep linking and theft sites to see other reasons why I suggest deep linking in all your posts.

The installation isn’t difficult, and is the same as most other plugins, but the set up may be a bit confusing to most who read the documentation that comes with it. (I had a Wall O’ Text of code at the bottom of my posts at first.)

Like most plugins you need to download the plugin zip file for the plugin before you can do anything. This one is one of those where you will want to unzip the file before uploading it most likely so do so. Once you have the folder with the plugin code in it you must then upload the related-posts.php text file into your WordPress Plugins directory.

That is the easy part. Well..not the easiest. Go to your Dashboard and activate the plugin next which is the easiest part .

After activating the plugin you will see a “Related Posts Options” tab under the Plugins tab on your WordPress dashboard. Once you get to this page you should see this:

Go to the very bottom of that page to find: “If this is your first time installing this plugin you will have to run this script (opens a new window) in order to create the index table required by the plugin. If this fails, please refer to the readme on how to create it manually.”. Click on the “This Script” link to create that index table. It only takes a few seconds and it will tell you that it was a success.

Next, you have to decide where you want to display the related posts, as well as pick a catchy title for this section of your blog. For this site I went into my index.php file and found the section under which I have the code for “Enjoy this post? Subscribe to the RSS Feed”. This is under the code:

<?php _e('Filed under:'); ?> <?php the_category(', ') ?> <?php _e('by'); ?> <?php the_author(); ?><br /> <?php comments_popup_link('No Comments »', '1 Comment »', '% Comments »'); ?> <?php edit_post_link('Edit', ' | ', ''); ?> </p>

on this particular blog as you would be able to see by looking at the elements I have on a full page of posts at the bottom of my posts. Once you decide where you want it to appear you will need to create some sort of title to tell people why you have these links on your page. Don’t forget to do this! You can pick whatever you want for such a title. I chose “Related Entries” for mine. You want these to stand a bit a part from everything else on the page instead of using text that looks like that of the paragraph text in your posts so I used this code: <h3>Related Entries:</h3> to set it a part a bit. The <h3></h3> highlight this text and give it a title feel. Those tags increase the size of the text the LOWER the number so if you were going to use <h1>Related Entries:</h1> the title would be HUGE. That is all up to your personal preference. Once you have that situated, you need to place this code below it so that the posts will actually show up:

<?php related_posts(); ?> This code can be modified various ways, but I used it with the settings I have in the options. If you want more customability look at the link towards the end of this post when I mention customization again.

In addition to the index.php file for inserting this you may have to go into your single.php file as well in order to display related posts for when visitors click on just a single post and not your home page. Same theory applies here as to where you want it as the other file. Phew…the hard part is over.

Now head back into your WP dashboard and back to the options page for the related posts plugin. This time you will want to work with the input fields. The first is self-explanatory. I chose 5 related posts to display, which is the default anyways, but I wasn’t able to get them to display with out entering a value there so you may as well do so as well.

The next part you see is the “Before / After (Post Title) :” part. This has nothing to do with your last post, but it has to do with how the links to your related posts are displayed. If you do nothing with this they will show up as a string of words together and just look silly to your readers so you should enter values here. Take their advice from the example and put <li> in the first box, and </li> in the second. This will display them in list form. Mine are bulleted because that is how my stylesheets for this theme are set up to show lists. Yours will look how your stylesheets have been set up.

Show excerpt? This is all up to you. I went the non-SEO route with mine in favor of a sleaker look, but you may want to show a bit of an excerpt yourself. If so select “True”. If not leave it alone. If you do show an excerpt you must pick the number of characters in the next box and you will have to enter the list tags again because you interrupted the other action by enabling excerpts.

That should be all you have to do now to generally set this up. It does fairly well at finding related posts itself, but if you want to go into more advanced strategies you will want to either read the “Readmefirst.txt” that came in the .zip file, or just visit the plugin creator’s documentation page for the Related Posts Plugin for more detailed descriptions of the code.

Also, please visit my archives for more WordPress Plugins that I use on this site, or just look at my related entries below this post!

I’ve been using the Snap Shots plugin for a while now and really never bothered to go look at how to turn them off and on for specific links. I finally got sick of all the scripts on the sidebar having snap shots so I went and looked at how to turn them off for links when I wanted to. Pretty easy process really, but I figured I’d explain it to anyone that may be interested. So jump into your cPanel web hosting, or whatever it is you use, and get ready to do some remedial coding.

All you have to do is create a <div> class before the links and it is all you need to do. You will need the code <div class="snap_noshots"> to keep them from showing up. Here is an example of how it should look:

<div class="snap_noshots"> <a href="webpage3.html">this link does not trigger Snap Shots</a> <a href="webpage3.html">this link does not trigger Snap Shots</a> </div>

Simple, eh? You can use it in your template files, as well as any post you want to. If you take the “no” out of the code it will obviously display Snap Shots on those links.

I also wanted to take this opportunity to ask if those that read this blog actually like them, or if they feel it is too much. I know I have these and the Kontera inline links going on so it may get a bit cluttered from time to time. I contacted Kontera the other day and they have knocked the amount of links down to 6 per page on this site and informed me that they will spread them around a bit more. (Very helpful, BTW) Should clean the pages up a bit and make it less obtrusive. Still…I’d like some opinions on it as to whether you like the previews, or they are just annoying to you. The Kontera links probably won’t go anywhere at this time, but I’d still like some feedback if you could .

Visit my archives for more WordPress Plugins I use on this site.

Adsense Targeting is something that until recently, I didn’t even know existed. Not that I didn’t assume there was a better way to target your Adsense ads than just throwing them on your bog, and trying to target them by how you write your posts, but didn’t ever see it anywhere, and never really looked. Imagine having a Houston social security disability attorney site and having ads for blogging all over the place. It just wouldn’t be effective. The last few days I’ve been reading a bit more than usual about how to increase my Adsense revenue, and found this little nugget that surely can’t hurt my chances.

Adsense and Blogs

When you have a blog, or any website for that matter, you have many aspects to it that Adsense can pull their information from to try and give you the most targeted ads possible. Unfortunately, most blogs have a bunch of links on them that make this a bit difficult to keep ads relevant, if not impossible when you aren’t the best at writing posts in SEO fashion. Adsense looks at everything on your site to define its parameters for your Adsense ads. This means that the links on your sidebar, in your header, and your footer are included in this search. If you look at your own bog, you may notice that many of these links in those areas don’t necessarily reflect what your posts are about. You have to give credit to WordPress and the template creator in your footer. You have tons of navigational links in your sidebars. In fact you may have much more than that in your sidebar such as links to other blogs, links to sites like Technorati, MyBlogLog, etc. that take away from what you want ads on your blog to be.

I get into the habit of just writing posts to write them as well, but in most cases I try to at least link to a few of my other posts in each one, and make sure I use my keywords as often as possible to help the search engines find their way. Doing this is very helpful to give yourself the keywords that describe your content, and to help search engine users find your content. The better you do it, the better you are found in the search engines. Of course that isn’t the only way to master the search engines, but this post isn’t about search engine optimization so I won’t cover that. In the same light as keyword density for helping your blog get found in search engines, Adsense uses many of the same things that their search side does. That is they take all your content and search it to find the keywords that will make their Adsense ads most relevant to your site, and in turn increase your Adsense revenue.

So what is Adsense targeting? Back to discussing your sidebars, footers, and headers, you are letting Adsense target a lot of information that you really don’t want it to target. On this blog it is difficult to show the effects of targeting since I write a lot about blogging, WordPress plugins, etc., but on WordPress related, or blogging blogs, you should see an immediate impact once you begin to target your Adsense. This blog really isn’t well optimized well as it is since I started it a while back before I knew many of the things I do now. Over time it should “fix” itself a bit, but at this point it is still improving.

How To Target Adsense

Now that all of that is out of the way I will tell you just how easy it is to target your content to help Adsense place more relevant ads on your blog. The process is insanely easy to implement and I am surprised it isn’t a more common, and visible tip from Google. Now that I know about it I consider it absolutely necessary, and one of the first things you should do when you create a new blog, or change a template.

Adsense targeting can be done many ways, but the most effective way for most bloggers would be to make sure that Adsense targets your posts, and not everything else. I believe that targeting your post titles, and your post content is the best way to do this. The codes that you are going to need are these:

<!-- google_ad_section_start --> To begin your targeting.

and

<!-- google_ad_section_end --> to end your targeting.

That’s it. No more code for the simple solution.

Now where do you put it? Like I said before I like to target the post titles, and the post itself. For most WordPress templates you will need to do this in a couple different files. index.php and single.php.

Let’s look at an index.php file and decide where we want to put this.

If you are having a difficult time figuring out where to start and end this code the easiest way to do it is to put the start code after:

<?php get_header(); ?>

and before:

<?php get_sidebar(); ?> <?php get_footer(); ?>

Why i say this is because it will exclude your header, sidebars, and footer from being read by Adsense bots.

I prefer to exclude the comments, and al the other post info such as my Sociable links, the line about my RSS Feed, etc. Some say that you should include your comments, but I don’t see any reason to do so.

So really what you are looking for is the tags like <div class="entry">, <h2><a href="<?php the_permalink(); ?>" rel="bookmark" title="<?php the_title(); ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a></h2>, etc. The first is typically where your content starts for your posts and will be the most important. Many themes will have the title tags above this so you want to make sure you aren’t excluding these when you put in the targeting code. This theme has that situation so i had to include the section above that to make sure I got the title searched by the Adsense bots.

This is how mine is set up in my index.php file:

<!-- google_ad_section_start --> <?php if(have_posts()) : ?><?php while(have_posts()) : the_post(); ?> <div class="post" id="post-<?php the_ID(); ?>"> <h2><a href="<?php the_permalink(); ?>" rel="bookmark" title="<?php the_title(); ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a></h2> <div class="postdate"><?php the_time('F jS, Y') ?></div> <div class="entry"> <?php the_content('Read more...'); ?> <center><?php print sociable_html(); ?> <?php if(function_exists('the_ratings')) { the_ratings(); } ?></center> <p class="postinfo"> <?php _e('Filed under:'); ?> <?php the_category(', ') ?> <!-- google_ad_section_end -->

As you can see from this I have made sure that it includes the post title, as well as the post itself. I excluded everything below that including my author name, related entries, and the comments. I may decide to include the related entries links later on, but at this point I don’t think I will.

I extended it a bit so that it would include the category, or tags, for the post, but I am not sure if I will leave it that way or not. In most circumstances it would probably be a benefit to include your tags int he targeting as they should be relevant to your blog. At least I hope they are…lol

On top of working with your index.php file, with many themes you will have to delve into your singl.php file as well. The file for single posts may even be more important than just the index file. This is because you have much less content on that page than you do on the home page of your blog. It has less to search to find content to target ads to.

In the single.php file you are going to want to target the exact same things. Title, blog post, and categories in my opinion. Look for the same tags and remember that at the very least you want to EXCLUDE the tags of <?php get_header(); ?>, <?php get_sidebar(); ?>, and <?php get_footer(); ?>.

In addition to targeting content for Adsense, they have also included a code to IGNORE certain aspects of your site in regards to Adsense. I haven’t had the need yet to implement this code anywhere, but I need to mention it as it is probably something I will utilize at some point. This code is used the same way as the others, but to exclude the content rather than include it:

<!-- google_ad_section_start(weight=ignore) -->

This is by no means an exact science, and you will want to test this with different variations of what you include, but you should see some decent results immediately as to what your ads link to. Play a round with it a little.

There is actually a plugin available that utilizes this code as well, but I have not yet tried it. The Target Adsense Plugin is something that is supposed to simplify the process. I like to do it manually right now, but this plugin may be better for you. If I test it a bit I’ll write another post about it as well. IF anyone uses that now I would appreciate any feedback you have on it.

Looks like I’ve been tagged by another community project. This time it is for MyBlogLog. The Anitokid Chronikos – Billiards and Philippine sports has added me to the project and I am moving it along finally.

Since everyone on the list is obviously in the MyBlogLog community I may as well mention the MyAvatars plugin that can be used for WordPress blogs. If you read that post you will also find a link that allows you to integrate the plugin for other blog services such as Blogspot. What this plugin does is add the avatar of those who comment on your blog next to their comment. It’s the same avatar you see in the little widget, but it shows up in your comments next to the reader. It’s just a nice way to help your readers keep up a bit of their branding by showing their avatar when they comment as well as link to their MyBlogLog profile at the same time.

The Rules

1) Write a short introduction about how you found this list and include a link back to that blog.
2) COPY the rules and ENTIRE list below and post it on your blog.
3) Take “My New Community Members” and move them into the “The Original Community Members” list.
4) Find 3 new blogs, join their MyBlogLog Community and add them to the “My New Community Members” section. Remember to also add the “Join the Community” link next to your new blogs. ( Example: http://www.mybloglog.com/buzz/community/yourblog/)
5) Join as a member to each Community listed here by clicking on “Join the Community”. The goal is that all of the new Members listed will join your community, and hopefully, you should do the same!