How to build & check to see if your ads.txt file is correct for Google Ads (Adsense)

Your ads.txt file is composed of the following parts

For example: google.com, pub-XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX, DIRECT, f08c47fec0942fa0

Where:

  • “google.com” is the advertising system domain
  • “pub-XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX” is your unique publisher ID
  • “DIRECT” indicates a direct business relationship
  • “f08c47fec0942fa0” is Google’s AdSystem ID

So to create your own ads.txt, all you need to do is go to your account information page (Account information – Settings – Account – Google AdSense) and pull your publisher ID and slot it in.

Once you’ve got your ads.txt file set up on your website (I used Ads.txt Manager – WordPress plugin | WordPress.org for this).

When its added in, you can check to see if its showing up properly by visiting website.com/ads.txt (in my case pezant.ca/ads.txt)

Or if you want to, you can also use this tool which works well!

ads.txt Validator – Free ads.txt Validation Tool by ads.txt Guru (adstxt.guru)

Updating your wordpress PW without being able to password reset via email (GCP hosted WordPress instance)

Steps:

  1. Get to your VM instance page (https://console.cloud.google.com/compute/instances)
  2. Click on the SSH dropdown
  3. Enter the following commands

~$ cd /var/www/html
/var/www/html$ wp user update [username] –user_pass=[new_password]

Here’s an example if your user name was “admin” and you wanted the password to be “new_pass” you would enter the following after navigating to the right directory.

wp user update admin –user_pass=new_pass

Here’s the SSH button if you don’t know where to find it

Getting iframes to appear centered for WordPress pages/posts

I recently set up a few iframes and they were stubbornly left aligned despite all the other content being center aligned. Here’s how I was able to fix the issue.

  1. Go to Appearance –> Customize –> Additional CSS (/wp-admin/customize.php)
  2. Add this value to your custom CSS

iframe {
display: block;
margin: 0 auto;
}

3. Hit publish and you should be good!

Getting podcasts onto your Garmin Watch

Let’s say you have a podcast you like listening to and you want to listen to it off of your Garmin watch (and not your phone). Here’s how you can set that up!

Block any ads from showing on your computer with AdGuard DNS

Connect to public AdGuard DNS server (adguard-dns.io)

Set up your network settings to use AdGuard DNS and they’ll block any ad server requests for you. A good option if you don’t want to block ads across your entire network with something like a PiHole. Downside is that you’re sending all your traffic to a DNS server that you don’t control.

DNS addresses

Default servers
AdGuard DNS will block ads and trackers.
94.140.14.14
94.140.15.15

Non-filtering servers
AdGuard DNS will not block ads, trackers, or any other DNS requests.
94.140.14.140
94.140.14.141

Family protection servers
AdGuard DNS will block ads, trackers, adult content, and enable Safe Search and Safe Mode, where possible.
94.140.14.15
94.140.15.16

Examples of blocked ads

Privacy Policy for URL Transformer

Privacy Policy for URL Transformer

Effective Date: January 30, 2024

This Privacy Policy document outlines the types of information that is not collected, gathered, or processed by URL Transformer

Since we do not collect any personal data, we have no information to share or use in any way. Our commitment is to ensure your privacy and data protection rights at all times.

1. No Data Collection

URL Transformer does not collect, store, or transmit any personal information. We do not track user activity, browsing history, or any other information related to the user’s online or offline activities.

2. No Third-Party Data Sharing

Since no data is collected, there is no sharing of personal information with any third parties.

3. No User Authentication

Our extension does not require any form of user registration or authentication. Users can utilize the functionalities of URL Transformer without an account, which ensures that their identity remains anonymous.

4. No Cookies

URL Transformer does not use cookies or any similar tracking technologies.

5. Extension Permissions

The extension may require certain permissions to function correctly (such as activeTab for interacting with web content). However, these permissions do not allow the extension to access personal data. They are solely for providing the features and functionalities as intended by URL Transformer .

6. Changes to This Privacy Policy

We may update our Privacy Policy from time to time. We will notify you of any changes by posting the new Privacy Policy on this page. You are advised to review this Privacy Policy periodically for any changes.

7. Contact Us

If you have any questions about this Privacy Policy, please contact us at nick@pezant.ca.

This policy is effective as of January 30, 2024.

Disabling Speak to Chat on Sony XM4

I was frustrated at my Sony XM4 headphones cutting out and playing a sidetone instead every time you start talking during a meeting. Since I was using it on my Mac I couldn’t turn off the Speak to Chat functionality through the app settings. Here’s the fix I found!

SOLUTION:

To turn off this annoying feature, hold two fingers down flat on your right earbud until you hear a “Speak to Chat deactivated” message. You might need to try a few different finger placements (just holding for a few seconds should do)

Credit to hiiamhere1 for this solution (Wh-1000XM4 CUTS OUT WHEN TALKING? : sony (reddit.com))!

Advice for an early-stage PM

Someone reached out to me recently (through a career coach of mine from years ago!) about my journey into PM and asked some great questions about how I got to where I am and how they might consider approaching a career in Product Management. Below are their questions and my answers.

​From your perspective, you’ve had several interesting roles with an expansive field of work, I’d love to learn:

  • how you navigated your career path
    • I get my first full time exposure in Product Management because I wanted to work in games. I went to GDC and networked morning to night for the full week and managed to get a break with a referral for a role at Pocket Gems as an APM.
    • Since then, I’ve mostly worked in startups and I gradually branched out from Gaming specific PM work to a broader consumer PM skill set (although these skills are applicable broadly anyways).
    • I chose to move on to a new opportunity when I felt that the company wasn’t the right fit for me anymore, or if I didn’t see a strong path forward in terms of learning & development in my current role.
  • where you see the market going in your current line of work
    • The most significant change here would be with regards to advances in AI. I think the role of PM will still remain critical but you’ll be able to hand over some of the busywork over to the AI. For example, you’ll still be a central conduit for the team in terms of bringing everything together but folks might be able to query a bot to ask who to talk to for a certain thing or what the status of a ramp is.
  • the skills you have gained throughout your career (either on the job or through structured learning)
    • When I started out as a PM I had a strong business background and was reasonably technical but I didn’t have a academic background in software engineering. I was also data-oriented and analytical but I’d never learned SQL. On the design front, I was already familiar with design tools like Illustrator but hadn’t used tools like Sketch or XD yet. I learned a number of things through doing at Pocket Gems in particular:
      1. How to write SQL
      2. How to read & write JSON
      3. How our systems worked and how to provide direction on feature development as a PM
      4. Using collaborative design software
    • In general, applied learning is going to be most useful as you can become familiar with actual use cases for the tools you’ll be using. Those opportunities can come up in work or as a result of the projects that you’re pursuing yourself.
  • how you leverage ML in your current job (saw you did some studying on the topic)
    • I’m the Product Lead for prompt engineering for a project at LinkedIn called collaborative articles (see articles at linkedin.com/pulse/topics/home). On that track I was both developing prompts themselves but also planning out our roadmap and prioritizing our workstreams to make sure we hit our targets as we were producing content at scale using a pre-release version of GPT-4.
    • Outside of that, I work with AI teams at LinkedIn on projects applying to my area so knowledge of how these systems work generally (data, features, model training, model types, etc) is useful to enhance my ability to work with them effectively.
  • small vs. big companies (what you liked, disliked working in different environments)
    • Company size has an effect on a number of dimensions (although some companies aren’t transformed to the same degree as they grow) things like job stability, level of communication required, liquid vs. illiquid compensation tend to be connected to company size. Generally, being at a larger company is going to give you a more stable outcome (less downside, less upside) but won’t give you as much flexibility and breadth to explore as a smaller company. What I tell early stage PMs is that generally, starting off in a larger company is probably the better overall decision as you’ll have much better liquid compensation, an opportunity to build out your network and a strong brand name to build off of for your future career moves.
    • For me personally, I have a few factors I consider when deciding what kind of company to join
      1. Quality of their product
      2. The people
      3. Culture
      4. Growth potential
      5. Financial upside
    • Now that I’m working at a larger company, what I’ve felt most of all is the sheer amount of work required to get things done. The scale means that your impact still carries well but it does generally slow down the pace at which you’re able to innovate and experiment. I think the sweet spot for me would be starting my own company (small, agile, freedom to make own decisions and own mistakes, shape company as I see it) or joining a pre-IPO startup (still agile and quick moving, getting into scale territory but still room to grow)
  • any advice you may have for me based off my interests (I am sometimes overwhelmed with the possibilities so I am learning how to work through this and focus on my current job dtd)​
    • Being a PM is a mix of many different skills and responsibilities (and that mix also varies across companies). If you like the variety and the challenge of bringing together so many different disciplines and wide groups of stakeholders together you’ll probably like being a PM. Another factor here will also be your comfort with ownership and responsibility, as a PM you’ll be leading your area and often making final decisions on how to proceed so you’l need to be comfortable with being accountable with how things turn out (even if its not necessarily your responsibility in certain situations).
    • On the other hand, if you find you’re really enjoying a certain subset of areas you’ve explored like design, analytics, software engineering, product marketing, user research, etc – it might be work exploring an IC role in that specific area as you’ll be able to focus in on those specific areas that you really like the most.

Things to Do in NYC

Little Island
Xian Famous Foods
Hamilton History Walk
The High Line
Central Park
The New York Public Library
Russ & Daughter’s Cafe
Take the ferry to Stanton Island (for free) and see the Statue of Liberty
The Strand book store
Bike along the west side of Manhattan
COTE Korean Steakhouse is incredible
Bike along the Brooklyn Bridge
Visit Hunter’s Point
Milk Bar for Dessert
9/11 Memorial Museum
Prospect Park

Fix: This version of ChromeDriver only supports Chrome version 103

If you’re like me and trying to set up a scraping project and leveraging Selenium you may have run into the path requirement that I found to be puzzling. Luckily chromedriver-py solves that for you. However, upon install, I found that it wasn’t accepting the version of Chrome that I had installed (apparently the latest release only supports the beta version of Chrome).

My error message:

selenium.common.exceptions.SessionNotCreatedException: Message: session not created: This version of ChromeDriver only supports Chrome version 103

Current browser version is 102.0.5005.115 with binary path /Applications/Google Chrome.app/Contents/MacOS/Google Chrome

After installing Chrome’s beta version and being unsuccessful there I figured out that earlier versions of chromedriver-py support earlier versions of the browser.

I was able to install a specific version of chromedriver-py via pip using this command (which is also helpfully included on the version pages on pypi.org):

python -m pip install chromedriver-py==102.0.5005.61

https://pypi.org/project/chromedriver-py/102.0.5005.61/

Remember to uninstall the version that isn’t working for you first.

Happy scraping!