Journal
I recently got my bm-custom-login plugin accepted onto the Wordress plugin repository. In order to get it online I had to use subversion - something I’ve never used before.
I found the “using svn page” on wordpress.org to be rather intimidating. For example the first section “getting started” jumps straight into telling you what commands to type without even mentioning the basic things such as what to download. This seems to go against the simple software the Wordpress team try to promote so I thought I’d work it out for myself and document the process. It was considerably simpler than expected.
Before we start
Since this is a tutorial for uploading Wordpress plugins I think I should point out that you will need a Wordpress.org account, and to have submitted an application for them to host your plugin. Once you get the confirmation email (which seems to take a couple of …
November 22, 2007 | Regulus
Finally - an update to Regulus. The updates are coming further and further apart, and this is simply because the theme does everything I set out to do… and quite a bit more. This version is mostly bug fixes but there are a couple of nice new features.
Additions
- The banner image is now a link, meaning you can click it to go to your homepage. You can also change this link to point anywhere you like, which is good for those of you who use Wordpress as a blog and something else for the rest of your website.
- You can also now change the text for the home link in the tabbed navigation. The main reason for this is for people who use the static homepage feature of wordpress, but it’s also nice to be able to customise things that little bit more.
- Finally there are a few new colour schemes - nothing …
Whilst working on my update to Binary Moon I’ve been thinking about the differences between websites and blogs. One of the things I am trying to do with the updated design is steer slightly away from the stereotypical blog layout and use lessons learnt from more traditional website design.
Since blogs first came about the designs have evolved considerably but the basic structure seems to remain the same. You have article pages (the blog posts), normal pages (contact, about etc) and archive pages. It’s almost like there is a set of defined rules that you have to follow - and it’s become so formulaic that I sometimes get confused as to what site I am on. Please don’t get me wrong - there are loads of wonderfully designed blogs out there, but as a rule they are often pretty graphics on top of the same old structure.
Recently there has been
September 18, 2007 | Web Design
Gone are the days of marquees, animated gifs and embedded midi files (thank God) but there are still things that people do that drive others crazy.
Since I am (still) working on my “redesign” for Binary Moon I thought I would look into what stops people from reading blogs. More specifically I was looking for reasons people would stop visiting a site, or worse, close it as soon as it loads.
The Tips
These tips are ranked in my personal order of preference, but I’m sure there are others I’ve missed so please do let me know in the comments if there’s anything I’ve missed.
Snap.com previews. Snap.com offer a way to add “previews” to external websites you link to on your pages. By previews I mean tiny screenshots that pop up on mouse over. In my mind they offer no value to visitors whatsoever. All they do is slow down the page load, …
In my Adsense tips post the other day I mentioned time based ads, and how I like to display ads based on the age of the article they are on - I should probably point out that I only use this technique on single posts, and not on the site at large.
I really like this idea for a number of reasons:
- It stops regular visitors from being snowed under with ads
- It means I don’t have to see the adverts
- It gives search engine visitors (who will likely end up at older posts) the advertising - and I feel they are more likely to click adverts
So how do I do this? It’s actually incredibly simple indeed (I hope). All I do is use the Wordpress command get_the_time(’U') to get the time the article was made. I then calculate what the time was x amount of days ago and compare that with the …
I have spent a long time trying to improve the advertising earnings on my websites and I have managed to go from a couple of dollars a month to 3 figures in a relatively short time, without increasing the amount of visitors to my site.
The tips I am about to tell you are what worked for me, but I encourage you to try different things as each site is unique.
1. Colour and Position
This is probably the optimization which is mentioned most regularly, but it’s for good reason. You really should experiment with different ad positions and different colour combinations. Each time you make a change leave the ads for a week and see how your earnings alter. Make a note of what works and then try something new. I was always sceptical when I read these comments before but since I have started playing with positioning my adsense revenue has …
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