June 30th, 2009 by Stephen Cronin (159 views)
Earlier today I received an email from an irate commentator, accusing me of spamming him and threatening to report me. He was receiving emails from my blog, via the Subscribe To Comments plugin, but he thought couldn’t unsubscribe. The cause: my wp-admin folder is password protected.
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Tags: apache, security, spam, WordPress
Posted in WordPress | 2 Comments or Pingbacks »
June 3rd, 2009 by Stephen Cronin (981 views)
Earlier today, I released my first Greasemonkey script, Bing Numbered Search Results. As the name suggests, it numbers the SERP entries delivered by Microsoft’s new Bing search engine. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: bing, greasemonkey, SERPs, tools
Posted in Web Related | 5 Comments or Pingbacks »
May 28th, 2009 by Stephen Cronin (800 views)
Tonight I was browsing the Internet, when my virus software notified me of a potential threat from openstat.ws. None of the websites open in Firefox had a link to this site in the source. After some investigation, it appears that the potentially malicious site is called by Google Adsense.
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Tags: Adsense, google, security, virus
Posted in Web Related | 13 Comments or Pingbacks »
May 25th, 2009 by Stephen Cronin (1,020 views)
Over the last couple of years, I’ve been a big supporter of the DoFollow movement, but the time has come to say goodbye to DoFollow comments on this blog.
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Tags: Dofollow, KeywordLuv, spam
Posted in Dofollow | 35 Comments or Pingbacks »
March 30th, 2009 by Stephen Cronin (4,899 views)
Custom page templates are a powerful feature of WordPress that can be used to make pages (not posts) do something different from normal. You can make them do pretty much anything. Obviously, this can greatly increase the flexibility of your site.
Amongst other things, I’ve used custom page templates to create a basic photo wall and a dynamic listing of jobs in China.
However, because of the way most WordPress themes are created, calling an external CSS file from a custom page template is not straightforward. Here, I explain the problem, look at the options and explain how to use ‘plugin functionality’ to overcome the problem.
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Tags: custom page templates, WordPress, wordpress themes
Posted in WordPress | 46 Comments or Pingbacks »
March 11th, 2009 by Stephen Cronin (2,745 views)
Some of my most popular posts are those in my make money online series that discuss how to avoid Adsense smart pricing by displaying Adsense only to search engine visitors. Now I’ve found the most complete solution to the problem of smart pricing, over on the Blog associated with RT’s backlinks service Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Adsense, linking, make money online, smart pricing, traffic
Posted in Monetization | 62 Comments or Pingbacks »
February 27th, 2009 by Stephen Cronin (3,828 views)
So far, my WordPress development work has consisted of writing WordPress plugins and occasionally hacking themes. I’ve always said that I wanted to write a WordPress theme from scratch, but never had time to do so. One of my sites is going to need a redesign shortly, so here’s my big opportunity.
However, with the rise of the WordPress theme framework and the limited time available to me, I’ve started thinking that the sensible thing to do is use a theme framework. But which one?
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Tags: poll, theme frameworks, WordPress, wordpress themes
Posted in WordPress | 58 Comments or Pingbacks »
February 22nd, 2009 by Stephen Cronin (1,975 views)
When I’m working on WordPress related development (ie themes and plugins), I like to run WordPress locally. This is great for trying things out before it goes live and also lets me squeeze in some development time in on the train!
My web server package of choice is XAMMP Lite, the Apache distribution that contains PHP and MySQL. Works great in general, but I had some problems with WordPress permalinks and XAMMP Lite. Here’s the solution.
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Tags: apache, permalink, WordPress, xammplite
Posted in Web Development | 14 Comments or Pingbacks »
January 31st, 2009 by Stephen Cronin (3,528 views)
Want to make money online with Google Adsense? If so, you better make sure you don’t get smart priced! One of my most successful posts covers how to avoid smart pricing by only serving Adsense to search engine visitors. That post was written for the WordPress platform. In this post, I outline how to do the same on Blogger blogs (although there are severe limitations). Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Adsense, blogger, javascript, make money online, smart pricing
Posted in Monetization | 47 Comments or Pingbacks »
January 16th, 2009 by Stephen Cronin (5,837 views)
I was recently optimizing Adsense on one of my Blogger sites and decided I wanted to place Adsense inside the posts – but only on single posts, not on the home page or in the archives. Here’s how.
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Tags: Adsense, blogger, google, make money online
Posted in Monetization | 71 Comments or Pingbacks »