New banners in bg’s feeds
Just finished up creating a couple of quick banners that I hope to start displaying in the footer of the feeds that get sent out from this site. While never a “huge” fan of having to have such forms of advertising, I am learning more as I go about the essentials of earning income. And sometimes you have to find ways to make that happen. Banner units in feeds seem to becoming more and more “mainstream”, at least in a wide cross section of my subscription threads.
Now it will come down to numbers of units. How many is too many? I’ve seen some feeds (note: feeds that are no longer in my reader!) that have 3, 4, or more ad units. That is just abusive. Currently thinking one, perhaps two at most. We’ll see.
Below are the two banners I slapped up lickety split today. They should start rotating into the feeds today (starting with this one, I hope, and if so, please pardon the fact the post will have two clickable banners, and one in the footer. The two are just to show you in case the FeedFooter Plugin fails to work. TIA)
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How to improve boldlygoing.com’s theme
Over the past several months, the theme I am using here at BoldlyGoing.com has undergone a couple of major overhauls, and many, many minor ones. Working now to fine tune things. I really like the overall “feel” I have when at the site, however, I know there is ALWAYS more that can be done. What would you suggest I work on next to make the site just a byte better? Thanks for your input.
TED’s Steven Pinker and his brief history of violence
One can never get too much of really smart people talking about our history and how it is likely to affect our future. Steven Pinker is clearly one of those really smart people, Below, un a preview of his next book, Steven Pinker takes on violence. We live in violent times, an era of heightened warfare, genocide and senseless crime. Or so we’ve come to believe. Pinker charts a history of violence from Biblical times through the present, and says modern society has a little less to feel guilty about.
Do you give away ideas?
My friend Steve Poland does it (well, I might add). My newly married buddy Kevin Leneway does too (though I wonder about him at times ). I don’t know Colin Dowling, but I know he does it and for other people at times. And then there’s Seth Godin, and his post yesterday entitled Big Ideas
, which is all about the charity of giving away ones ideas.
Ack! The blasphemy of it all! And yet, after a really nice conversation with my very close friend Joseph Cizek the other day, I’ve realized that in conjunction with Seth’s sentiments, this is exactly what I need to be doing. I need to learn to give away what I have been collecting in my “Ideas File” for the past several years. And more importantly, “the hard work of actually executing” is something I am working very hard to incorporate into my very being.
So, do you give away ideas? Do you give money to pan handlers? Do you block ads on the web sites you visit?
How do you come back from a blog layoff?
What does it take to get you back into the flow of posting again? For me, I really have to be focused, and just do it. I’ve tried to have a grand plan, but rarely does that work. How do you come back from not posting for a long period of time?
Ad Blocking: To be or not to be
While reading the great daily posts over at Web Worker Daily , I really thought I needed to chime in on Anne Zelenka’s post furthering the conversation regarding ad blocking, as started by Noam Cohen in his NY Times column on Adblock Plus as well as his discussion about whether or not it’s moral to use software to keep ads from appearing in your browser.
My friend Andy Beard feels that Blocking Adverts Might Cost You Money and sparks some more interesting conversation when he shares his take on Nicholas Carr’s pondering of what a certain deity might do if faced with the choice of surfing the net with AdBlockPlus at his disposal.
There are many, many ways to monetize ones venture online. Inline ads on websites are only one choice a website owner has in order to try and financially support themselves. All one has to do is look at the phenomenon of businesses like SiteSell.com and all they promote for literally thousands and thousands of site owners to support themselves. In fact, anyone who owns a Site Build It! account knows the mantra of CTPM (Content>>Traffic>>Pre-sell>>Monetize) and that what is most stressed is NOT putting advertisements on your site until you have the traffic (generated by quality content).
To me, all of this means that market forces will always win out over ridiculous edicts from the old media about whether or not the market’s participants are “morally correct” in what they are doing when surfing the Internet. I wish I could tell you how many times, while reading a newspaper, I lamented to myself just how many pages this issue would be with out the ads. If I could get a ad blocker for the newspaper, I would use it in a heart beat. And at the same time, being an entrepreneur, I realize the value of the medium for the small businessperson. A trend I would love to see is a reduction of ads (online or off) and a higher cost for placing those ads.
Think about that for a moment: fewer ads on a page, would surely bring more attention to themselves, and presumably have a higher response rate. Right? Seems reasonable to me. Sure the cost for the business person will be higher, but so will the rewards. Works for me!
BUMPzee Integration
I was able to “finally” get the BUMPzee! widget integrated into my site today. No easy task I might add! Following is what I had to do to attain the same look and feel that my other “Social Sidebar” widgets are exhibiting:
- I downloaded and activated the BUMPzee! plugin in the WordPress Admin section
- Next I went to the BZ custom widget page to learn how BZ was doing what they were doing with relation to the display of their widget on my page. There, you’ll see that you have the capability to customize the look and feel (somewhat) of what will display on your site. Unless you share that vibrant lime green as your base color, I’d highly recommend that you make some changes. Don’t be afraid! You can do it!
- Now a key reminder here: realize that if you have installed the BZ plugin code for your WordPress self-hosted site, you should use the php code that is provided to you on the generate widget page. Why? Mostly because that plugin has the one bit of admin functionality that allows you to insert your BZ user ID number. This permits the plugin code to interact directly with BZ’s database and pull your relevant info into your site. At this point you can use the information to display the sidebar widget, or the “bump this” widget
- Next, since I have Erik Rasmussen’s Widgetize Anything plugin installed, I am able to create my own widget from that php code, that I can then put into either my left or my right sidebar. On my other two “Social Sidebar” widgets, I am actually using the simple text widgets that come with WP, since both of them are being called via JavaScript. That allows me to wrap that JS code with div’s that I am then able to style to better fit into the look of the site. When using the Widgetize Anything plugin, however, everything that is entered has to be in php code (with out the open and close brackets and php calls, since the widget does this for you.) So, in order to get the “Social Sidebar” image to display, I had to rewrite that html code in php (pretty easy as long as you perform the correct syntax with the “echo” command in php.)
- Now a little “trickeration” had to be coded in order to get the “by BUMPzee!” to display under the “Social Sidebar” image as the myBlogLog and BlogCatalog names were showing above. By default, if the BZ code will show on the site as “Recent Visitors”, and (yuck) it will be centered in the widget table. Again, that’s cool if it fits your site’s look and feel, but in my case, I needed everything to have that uniformity about it. BZ’s challenge here is if you use the php code with the plugin you do not get the variable “headtxt” sent through to the browser, and thus you display the default Recent Visitors and it will be centered. If you are using the JavaScript code that was generated on the widget generator page you can reset that text to whatever you like (”by BUMPzee! in my case) however you still get it centered. To fix this to my liking, I did have to hack their plugin php code page and manually add in “&headtxt=by+BUMPzee!”.
This was actually a leap of faith (aka, guess!) on my part. I was doubtful that I would be able to override what was being sent to the browser by their servers, but it worked! Woo Hoo. Now I just had to get some styling in there as well, which I’ll address in the next item.
- Of the three social, community avatar display widgets on the site, BUMPzee’s is actually the easiest to style. The key here is that you have to have a browser that will show you the table code which is created by the JavaScript. Internet Explorer won’t do that for you, but FireFox will! (Gooooo, FF!) By viewing the source code that displays the BZ widget, you get to see all of the id’s and classes that the BZ engineers have coded into their application. From that point you can easily add style selectors to your style.css page and further manipulate the widgets look:
/*bumpzee*/
body table#bz_tbl .bz_img {border:1px #000000 solid;}
(I wanted the avatars to reflect the black, one pixel border from the other widgets)body table#bz_tbl .bz_header {text-align:left;font-size:9px;color:#000000;font-weight:800;}
(this was the styling for the “by BUMPzee!” text. Note I was able to align the text to the left!)body table#bz_tbl .bz_footer {display:none;}
(I probably shouldn’t do this, however, I had been doing it on the other two widgets for two reasons:
1)I could do it, and
2) I know of no one who is going to click on a link on my site and sign up directly to one of these services. The more likely action is that a visitor is going to click on one of the avatars (probably one of a cute person) and go into that social communities site. Then the work to convert that visitor into a member resides with their site. Until the services pull my ability to hide those links, I’ll keep them hidden.) - And if you’re wondering why I don’t hide the “Sign Up!” link, I’m not able to, as there has been no class or id assigned to it. And I was not able to find anywhere in the JavaScript code a variable for it, so, if you are not a member when you come to my site, you’ll see the sign up code. I can live with that, however, I wish they would give me a style id so I could move it up or to the left (or display:none; it
)
And that’s it. Now I have the BUMPzee! capabilities to display my membership and activities on BoldlyGoing.com. Hopefully, that will bring visitors from Bumpzee.com as well as flow visitors into their site. Have you had any interesting challenges or experiences with the customization of a social community widget/plugin into your site? Would love to hear about what happened, both good and bad!
The Identity Corner » The problems with OpenID
Please be careful, very careful if you are using openID on other sites that you visit, especially ones that display cute pictures of little kittens. Thanks James
The Identity Corner » The problems with OpenID
If you have had a negative experience with the use of your openID and logging into producer sites, can you tell us about it? Looking forward to hearing about it.
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