This post was written to support the ‘Adsense Target‘ WordPress Plugin

Introduction:

This article provides a very brief overview of how contextual advertising works and then illustrates how a webmaster using section targeting can have more control over the advertisements served by Google Adsense. Specific recommendations for bloggers are made on how best to use ad section targeting code to maximize profit. » Read the rest of the entry..

If you’ve ever tried to use the popular image manager plugin or the digital fingerprint plugin at the same time as the immensely popular Adsense Deluxe plugin then you’ll have probably run across a perplexing problem: some buttons won’t show up in the post and page editor. Seemingly, Adsense Deluxe doesn’t play nice with the ButtonSnap Class Library created by Owen Winkler. ButtonSnap makes it relatively easy for plugin authors to insert customized buttons into the WordPress post and page editor regardless of the users editor preference (WYSIWYG vs rich editor). For an example of how this works see the Sawchuk Buttons plugin and the corresponding Tutorial on how to write your own button functions using ButtonSnap.

With hundreds of plugin writers and authors contributing to the WordPress community there is bound to be some conflicts between plugins. The method that the Adsense Deluxe plugin uses to create it’s button in the WordPress post and page editor stops any plugin which uses the ButtonSnap class library from producing it’s own button in the editor. The two just don’t work together.

In order to get around this, I suggest a simple workaround to the Adsense Deluxe plugin until a more suitable solution can be found: disable the part of Adsense deluxe plugin that produces the button in the post editor. Its easy: » Read the rest of the entry..

When I created the Sawchuk scheme for K2, I wanted a clean minimal theme that emphasized the content that I wrote. I wasn’t concerned with bells and whistles, I just wanted people to easily be able to read this website. WebDesignFromScratch has some great tips for emphasizing readability in webdesign. Those tips combined with a little common sense and style created the current look of Sawchuk.

However, the big problem with having different text styles available for use when writing posts is that you have to manually type out the class designations. For example, WordPress offers a blockquote button which theme authors can style using CSS. Sawchuk employs three different styles of blockquote each with their own background colour. In order to use these three different styles, the full class must be typed out like so: <blockquote class=”red”> Some text </blockquote>. The blockquote button alone isn’t enough to define the style (class=”red”) of the blockquote wanted.

This is where Owen’s ButtonSnap Class Library comes in. Using it, buttons can be added to the post editing screen for any class / span / element that a theme author / designer can imagine. Here is how its done: » Read the rest of the entry..

With the rampant rise of plagiarism, lawsuits, and just the general state of affairs around the blogosphere it seems that sooner rather than later, every blog should put up a Legal Notice / Terms of Use page. A Legal Notice page for your blog is like alarm company stickers on the windows of your house, they doesn’t really do anything other than alert visitors that you mean business. Professional burglars are still going to break in and steal things just as unscrupulous Internet visitors / scrapers continue to repost your content with their ads. At least you are giving the bad guys the heads up that you are serious about your work.

My current legal notice is copied from Elliott Back (by his permission). I changed the name and website in the text of the notice and added my own little blurb about RSS use and the theme that provides the look of this website (sawchuk). Once written the way I liked, I then published Legal Notice as a WordPress page (instead of a regular post).

Now, its all fine and dandy that the Legal Notice had been published, but I wanted it to be visible at the bottom of every page ever published on MaxPower.ca. I wrote a quick plugin to do the job and I thought that maybe others would find it interesting as well. So here is a quick how to / how it works:

» Read the rest of the entry..

I have just implemented some nifty sidebar tabs for navigating around on this blog. I think they look great. They use the javascript provided at OnlineTools called DomTab (Navigation tabs with CSS and DOMscripting). You can download and view the working example at the OnlineTools website. I searched out a way to do this after I saw the very neat navigation tabs used at AlwaysBeta and their post on how to use them. Unfortuneatly, I couldn’t figure out what they where doing (I’m a cut and paste / follow the example pattern kind of guy, and they didn’t provide much in the wat of how to [thats not a knock against them btw]). In the alwaysbeta version, they have incorporated some slick slide and fade effects — to savy for this guy. I’m just happy mine works (tested in IE, Opera, and FF using XP). » Read the rest of the entry..