Adventures, Tips, and Technology

I’m actually honoring a Microsoft product in this post. I think Microsoft Writer is one of the nicer things since sliced bread. With a WYSIWYG editor, you can post images to your blog much faster. WAY faster. You just drag and drop images in the interface and when you post your new entry, it uploads and takes care of the rest. When uploaded, the images seem to retain their filename for optimization purposes and doesn’t become some id number, which is good.

Even cooler is you can do basic image editing without having to use Photoshop and optimizing for the web. So, after you drag an image into your editor, you can adjust the brightness / contrast, if the image is too dark, for example. Very nice.

The image above was added in 2 seconds, by choosing About Windows Live Writer, pressing the print screen key and pasting direct from the clipboard into this editor.

You can also edit your blog post locally, by just tweaking in the editor and clicking ‘Publish’ again. It will automatically delete the old post and will post again, assuming that’s how it works.

You can store multiple blog accounts and it will post to many blogs besides WordPress.

Posting this entry took less than 10 minutes. Microsoft did a good thing. Kudos.

I relented and added Google AdSense ads to my personal WordPress blog. Finally chose to convert some of the traffic to a little $ cash. I’ve been using it on two of my other sites and have been pleased with its performance. I was trying to avoid commercializing and spamacizing my blog, but oh well.

It was fairly easy to install in WordPress. The configuration, however, takes a bit more time.

I downloaded the AdSense Manager plugin for WordPress, then uploaded the folder to the plugins folder. In the ‘plugins’ tab, activated the plugin, then went to Settings > AdSense Manager to configure it. It involved copying the code I got from Google’s AdSense page and pasting it in my WordPress AdSense Manager config page.

I had thought it would then magically start displaying ads, but it really takes more work. You can manually type [ ad ] (without spaces) at the bottom of each post and it will show an ad, if you have the size configured properly where it fits in your WordPress theme. I had previously sized it too large 768×60 or something, where it didn’t fit in the column of the template and didn’t display, so that’s something to be aware of.

Instead of typing the ad tag at the bottom of each post, it’s better to add it to the template. I had thought the footer would be the right choice, but it doesn’t display the ads correctly. Easier is to add to the bottom of the Main Index Template. Go to Appearance > Editor, then select Main Index Template index.php on the right side of the screen. Then mid way in the code enter:

<?php adsensem_ad(); ?>

I placed it between <?php wp_link_pages(); ?> and a div tag </div>, but this probably varies based on your theme. Just stick it in somewhere and do a preview to see how it looks.

Keep in mind these instructions don’t apply for older versions of WordPress. The admin interface was significantly changed in the last year or so.

If you don’t already have an AdSense account, it will take a few more steps to get running. The layout of the ads aren’t 100% to my liking, but it will do for now.

Yep, I bought a KX 250. I’m ready for next summer.