Archive for March, 2008

Adsense Manager

Published
by
Chalupa
on March 24, 2008
in Add-Ons and Plug-Ins and Getting Started
. 0 Comments

If you started using Google Adsense or already are, I hope you’re not copying and pasting the ad-code into custom text boxes for your blog. There are several plugins out there that make the job so much easier. One I finally settled on using is Adsense Manager. Other than installing, you’ll just need to copy/paste your Adsense account number under Options…Adsense Manager.

Once you do this, you can go to Manage…Ads and create new ad content for your blog. Instead of logging into Google and choosing colors, size, type, etc…you can manage it all easily from your blog. After you create something here, you can save your options and then add it as a widget under Presentation.

You might have heard some news in the past year or so about Adsense Manager being blocked by Google. I’m not sure exactly what was happening there, but whatever was happening has been cleared up. One thing to check though is under Options, where you enter your account number, there is a thing at the bottom about donating a small percentage of your ad revenue to the plugin creators. This is not required to use the plugin. If you’d like to donate some money to them, I’m sure they would appreciate it, but that’s up to you.

Wordpress 2.5 Around the Corner

Published
by
Smitty
on March 20, 2008
in Blogging Platforms
. 2 Comments

If you haven’t heard Wordpress 2.5 is around the corner according to Matt.

Highlights:

  • Customizable Dash Board
  • Multi File Upload
  • Built in Galleries
  • One Click Plugin Upgrades
  • Tag Management
  • Built in Gravatars
  • Text Feeds
  • Faster Loads

Cool ah? Can’t wait.

So you want more than one blog? Part II

Published
by
Smitty
on March 17, 2008
in Getting Started and Templates, Themes, and Design
. 0 Comments

One of the things you will want to do once you get your WordPress Mu installed is to offer up your users a variety of templates to choose from.

WordPress Mu boasts as being able to support all themes that work on a normal install of WordPress. That works in theory, but doesn’t work in real life.

Tip: Use one of the more popular themes, it is more likely to work with WordPress Mu.

There are several big names using various versions of WordPress Mu. I try to use themes that they use, I figure that they have invested sometime to determine which themes work well and don’t work well. Below is a list of themes that I’ve compiled that I would consider using in my WordPress Mu installs.

Themes

  • 72 Class
  • Almost Spring
  • Ambiru
  • anarchy
  • Andreas04
  • Andreas09
  • Anubis
  • Banana Smoothie
  • Batavia 1.5
  • Benevolence
  • Black-LetterHead
  • Blix
  • Bluebird
  • Blue Green
  • Blue Moon
  • Blue Zinfandel Enhanced
  • Borderline Chaos
  • ChaosTheory
  • ChaoticSoul
  • Citris IslandWP
  • CleanTidy
  • CommentPress
  • Connections
  • Contempt
  • Copyblogger
  • Cordobo Green Park
  • Crop Circles
  • Cutline
  • Daisy Rae Gemini
  • DayDream
  • Deep Blue
  • Deichnetz
  • Digg 3 Column
  • Dignity
  • Dixie Belle
  • Dusk
  • Emire
  • Fadtastic
  • Falling Dreams
  • Fauna
  • Fjords04
  • Fleur De Lys
  • Flex
  • Flower Power
  • Framefake Theme
  • Fresh Bananas
  • Freshy
  • Garland
  • GenkiTheme
  • Gentle Calm
  • Girl in Green
  • GloriousDay
  • GlossyBlue
  • Greenday
  • Greenery
  • Green Marinee
  • Gridlock
  • Hemingway
  • Iceburgg
  • Jakarta
  • Jentri
  • K2
  • K2-lite
  • Kubrick
  • LetoPrime
  • LetterHead
  • Light
  • Mandigo
  • man~ja
  • MistyLook
  • Neat!
  • Neo-Sapien
  • Newsportal
  • Nikynik BlueMU
  • Northern-Web-Coders
  • Ocadia
  • Ocean Mist
  • OceanWide
  • Pinky-Kupy
  • Primitivo
  • Pool
  • PressRow
  • Quadruple Blue
  • Quentin
  • RadMod
  • Reaching Darkness
  • Redoable
  • Redoable Lite
  • Regulus
  • Rounded
  • RoundedFlow
  • Rubric
  • Sandbox
  • Sandbox-10
  • Sapphire
  • SeaShore
  • Shocking Blue Green
  • Silver is the New Black
  • Simpla
  • Simplr
  • Solipus
  • Sunburn
  • Supposedly Clean
  • Suhsweet
  • sumenep
  • Stean
  • StrippedPlus
  • Sweet Blossoms
  • Tarski
  • TerraFirma
  • Trevilian Way
  • The Journalist
  • Thirteen
  • Thoughts
  • Toni
  • Treba
  • Twenty-eight Thirteen
  • Twilight
  • Unsleepable
  • Vermilion Christmas
  • veryplaintext
  • Vertigo
  • Vistered Little
  • WaterWilly
  • White as Milk
  • WordPress Classic
  • WordPress II Silver

There are many places to download themes on the internet, usually each theme can be found in a couple of places. I would suggest Googling the theme name plus “WordPress”. You could also use one of the many theme viewers and cross reference your findings with this list to see if it is one of the themes known to work with the Mu version. Lastly, I would suggest downloading the lastest release directly from the developers website. This might take a little extra work, but you would be guaranteed to find the most up to date version.

WP Authors plugin

Published
by
Chalupa
on March 16, 2008
in Add-Ons and Plug-Ins
. 0 Comments

Does your self-hosted Wordpress blog have multiple authors? Would you like a simple plugin displaying their names with the number of posts that belong to them? Well, look no further. The WP Authors plugin should easily do the trick for you.

After downloading, uploading, and activating, the last thing you’ll need to do is place the widget on your sidebar. If you’re already using several widgets you can choose the placement so your new author plugin shows up where you want.

runPHP plugin

Published
by
Chalupa
on March 16, 2008
in Add-Ons and Plug-Ins
. 0 Comments

If you’re wanting to use some PHP code on your blog, you’re going to need a plugin. If you didn’t know, your text editor can accept plain text and HTML, but not much of anything else. I haven’t used any plugins for PHP except runPHP, but I haven’t really had a need to look for anything different. As far as I know, Blogger, Xanga, and MySpace don’t have the option to add in a plugin for PHP. Wordpress and Typepad do, though.

In Wordpress installation is pretty simple. 1.) Download the plugin. 2.) Upload the folder to your plugins folder 3.) Activate the plugin from your Plugins menu. Now you can paste PHP code into a post or page and something should show up. Other plugins you setup may require runPHP because they utilize some PHP code. I found an archives plugin a while back that required runPHP to also be installed.

Akismet is my anti-spam

Published
by
Chalupa
on March 12, 2008
in Add-Ons and Plug-Ins and Getting Started
. 1 Comment

I was trying to think of something clever to title this post. I wanted to somehow tie in SPAM, the meat product, but couldn’t think of anything that would work.  So this is what you have - a play on a TV anti-drug campaign.  I’m sure somebody will hate me for it.

If you’ve looked at your Wordpress plugins, you’ve probably seen Akismet.  It’s one of those default things that gets installed just because.  It isn’t setup to go though.  You’ll have to activate it and input a code.  No worries though because that code is free.  All you need is an account at Wordpress.com and you get a free code you can use on all of your Wordpress blogs.

After you’ve done the setup work, all you have to do is wait for pretend-people to start posting comments.  If Akismet catches some suspected comments you’ll find them when you login to your blog and check your Comments tab.  There will be a new sub-tab called Akismet Spam (0).  If something accidentally goes in there, the number won’t be zero anymore and you can mark it as not-spam and rescue it.  On the same hand if something goes in there that should, you can delete it.  This is very similar to the spam catchers for your email inboxes.

I’ve been using Akismet for a while now.  On my personal blog it catches all of those annoying gambling/casino, wonder drug, and pornography comments that seemingly come from nowhere.  Another thing to check in the way of comments are your moderation settings.  Under Options…Discussion you’ll find some boxes to check or uncheck.  I usually have everything selected except requiring an administrator to approve every comment.  As long as somebody has already made a comment and I trust them, I’ll allow them to do so again without being moderated.  Also, just in case anything unwanted sneaks past, you can always mark a pre-existing comment as spam and/or delete it.  If you have any questions feel free to ask.  There are other spam plugins out there and I’ll be reviewing some of those in the future.

Blog Ads: Shake your money-maker

Published
by
Chalupa
on March 4, 2008
in Getting Started
. 3 Comments

When Gmail first came out a few years ago, I remember there being a lot of talk about the ads. Friends of mine would go on tirades about how they were never going to use Google’s email service because they wanted to protect their privacy. They didn’t want these ads showing up. These ads that would find keywords in their emails and conjure up ads on the side. I also had a few other friends of mine who said they really didn’t care. The ads were just going to be text - nothing flashing nor colorful.

I’m glad I listened to my second set of friends because I’ve had Gmail accounts now since 2003 or 2004 and love them. They were right about the ads. They’re over there on the side and I rarely even realize they’re there. Google Adsense is very similar. You can insert ads on your blog, or website, that are just text on the side. Adsense is a little bit more complicated than the GMail ads though, because you can customize them to some extent, and choose where they are located.

Setting up an account is pretty easy. You just need an existing account with Google. One thing to keep in mind is that you can only create one Adsense account with your personal information. You’ll have to give them an address, SSN, etc for tax purposes and they won’t let you make multiple accounts. After you account is created you can creat five types of ads: Content, Search, Referrals, Video Units and Mobile Content.

For all ad types you can somewhat customize the size, shape, colors, etc of the ad. This is helpful when placing something on your blog/site in case you want something horizontal, vertical or have a particular color scheme. You can choose between just text, graphics and combinations. You can also restrict specific ads from showing up. I had one particular ad for some new wonder drug constantly showing up so I blocked it. If you happen to be selling some particular item or service on your blog/site you could also easily block competitor ads from showing.

Like most other services, there also happen to be plugins to easily integrate Adsense into Wordpress and other applications. I’ll be reviewing a particularly good one for Wordpress in the near future.