Over the easter long weekend I setup a new blog that I plan to grow over the next 6 months. Zero RC is a RC hobby blog running Drupal 5.1, the Aurora theme (that I customised to be 760px wide and not full screen), and a lot of different modules. My aim is to get several key authors who each have a different expertise (RC Cars, RC Planes, RC Helicopters and RC Boats).

The modules I'm currently using are:

• Blogs (to handle multiple blog authors)
• Path, Pathauto, Metatags
• Google Analytics, XML Sitemap, Adsense
• Ping, Diggthis
• Search
• Comments, Trackback, Akismet, Captcha, Textimage

I've also customized the node.tpl.php file to insert Adsense code between paragraphs like this:

<?php
  //Split the content based on closing paragraph (</p>) tags
  $content_array = explode("</p>", $content);
  //Rebuild the content and add adsense in between
  $new_content = '';
  foreach ($content_array as $key => $value) {
    if ($key > 0) $new_content .= "</p>";
    if ($key == 1) $new_content .= adsense_display($format = '468x60', $group = 1, $channel = 1);
    if ($key == 4) $new_content .= adsense_display($format = '468x60', $group = 1, $channel = 1);
    $new_content .= $value;
  }
  $content = $new_content;
?>

So, if you're a fan of RC toys, check out the site and contact me if you would like to become an author (paid of course).

I have been setting up a couple of Google Adwords accounts lately and haven't found a tool that would take my keyword list and add Exact Match, and Phrase Match alternatives for each keyword automatically, so I decided to write my own.

What are the different match types?

Google Adwords has three different match types, to helps you drill down and only get the traffic you really want to your website.

Broad Match

The broad match type is the default option, and will match a query as long as your words appear anywhere in the phrase. For example, if I had the keyword web designer, it would match any queries that has both "web" and "designer" in any order.

Phrase Match

By placing quotation marks around your keywords, like "web designer", it will match any queries with the keywords web design in that order such as brisbane web designer, or web designer brisbane.

Exact Match

By placing square brackets around your keywords, like [web designer], it will only match queries contain that exact keyword, and nothing more.

Even though a broad match type would catch all the searches that I want, it helps to by able to see if any of the combinations convert better than the others.

To use this tool, simply paste your keywords into the text box, 1 per line, and select whether you want to remove duplicates, and add phrase and exact matching tags.

I recently setup a small website for the owner of some apartments in the Chevron Renaissance resort in Surfers Paradise on the Gold Coast. The apartments are used as holiday rentals, and we wanted to be able to differentiate these apartments from the other Chevron Renaissance apartments on the market.

The site is very simple, and only required a few of my standard Drupal modules. These were:

• Webform - to create the large enquiry form
• Google Analytics
• Google Sitemap
• TinyMCE

I will soon be adding the GMap module to allow users to view the resort from above.

When I went looking for an opensource content management system to use mid last year, I only knew of a couple, these were Mambo, and PHP Nuke. I had heard mixed reviews about these systems, and wanted to make sure I was using the best, I went in search of one that would do everything that I needed.

After a bit of searching I came across two of the most useful sites on the web (in my opinion)... OpenSourceCMS and CMSMatrix.

I recently designed a website for a new Brisbane boat hire company, Smart Power Boat Hire.

Smart Power Boat Hire, supply affordable hire of 16ft cuddy cabin fibreglass cruisers with all the modern technology and equipment on board one would expect. The boats are powered by quiet and economical 75hp Evinrude E-tec outboards and all boats come on trailers ready to hook up and drive away. Smart Power Boat Hire also offer the opportunity for customers who would like to get out on the water but do not have a licence or tow bar on their vehicle. They can arrange a licence in a weekend and a tow bar fitted up to your vehicle within 2-3 hours at you home, getting you on the water sooner. They are based on the north side of Brisbane at Albany Creek.

The thing with boating is that for most people, it is a hobby, and quite and expensive one at that. Most boat owners take their boats out on the water about 10 times per year, thats just under once a month. Now when you think about the costs of owning and maintaining a boat similar to the ones at Smart Power Boat Hire, which is just over $8,000 per year, that makes each trip out on the water about $800 worth. Compare this to the price that you can hire a boat from Smart Power Boat Hire, $300 for 24 hours, it doesn't make a lot of sense to buy your own.

And if you still think that its worth owning your own boat, why not try before you buy, and hire one for the weekend. Visit the brisbane boat hire specialists, Smart Power Boat Hire.

I have just been setting up an osCommerce website to use Paypal's IPN as the payment method to accept credit card and paypal payments. I downloaded the official osCommerce Paypal IPN module from the contributions site, because the one that comes with 2.2MS2 is out of date.

After downloading this and installing it, I made a test order on the osCommerce store, and when I was directed to Paypal the amount to pay was $0.00 USD. As this is an Australian site, dealing in Australian currency (AUD) only, there were 2 problems. The zero order amount, and the fact that it was in USD.

As I still have one more semester to study at Uni, I recently bought myself a laptop to I could increase my productivity and be able to work and check my email between classes. This is thanks to the wireless network that is currently expanding around the University of Queensland St Lucia campus.

However, I ran into some difficulty because as I am using CPanel as my hosting control panel, I was unable to access it through the university proxy. To login to CPanel, I have to connect to port 2082 of the server, and seeing the University proxy only routes port 80, I can't access it. I can't use FTP or Outlook either.

I am currently studying a Bachelor of Information Technology and Bachelor of Business Management at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia. At the time of writing (December 2005) I still have one more semester until I complete my degree.

I also run a brisbane web design business, dotZero. I have also developed an online food ordering system, Waiter Works, which I will be using to run an Australian restaurant directory, Forage.

I was born in Perth, Western Australia and lived there until I was 5 years old. From there I moved to Murwillumbah where I went to Condong Primary School, and then Murwillumbah High School. I then moved to Brisbane in January 1999, and went Indooroopilly State High School from grades 10 to 12, graduating in 2001. I have been studying at the University of Queensland for the past 4 years.

This is the third "first post" I have done for NickSchoonens.com. I have been playing around with several content management systems and blogging tools, but have decided to go with Drupal. I have used Drupal for a couple of other sites that I am creating at the moment, and it just offers a whole lot more flexibility than any other system I could find.