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Displaying Ads With The Show125 Plugin

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One way to display ads on your WordPress powered site is to load up a text based widget with all of the HTML necessary to display 125X125 pixel banner ads. However, this can be cumbersome and a pain to manage. A WordPress plugin called Show125 helps take the pain out of displaying ads.

Show125 gives you granular control over your ads. Some of the features included in this plugin are:

  • Display from 1 to 8 ads
  • Available in English (default) or French
  • Display all your ads together, or in an eye-candy Mootools slideshow
  • Optionally add the target=”_blank” attribute to links, if you want ads to open in a new tab.
  • Show (or not) a title for your ads block
  • Clean code
  • Add custom css class to links for styling it your way

After downloading the plugin and extracting it’s contents to your desktop, upload the plugin into your plugins folder. Then, browse to your plugins area in your WordPress administration area and activate the plugin. The settings for this plugin will be located in, DESIGN-WIDGETS where you will need to add the widget to your sidebar. Once added, click on the EDIT button which will then display the widgets configuration options.

The configuration options are pretty much self explanatory.

While testing this plugin, it did give me a few issues in which I have yet figure out. For starters. after configuring the widget to display four ad images, the link to edit the widget disappeared. This means I can not remove the widget from my sidebar unless I deactivate the plugin or delete it from the plugins folder. I’ve tried deactivating the plugin, deleting it from the server but to no avail. The plugin appears to be *STUCK* inside of my WordPress installation. Even after deleting it completely from the server and reinstalling the plugin it appeared as though the configuration was still saved inside of WordPress.

At first, this seemed like an excellent plugin/widget to mange the display of multiple ads. However, looks like there is still work that needs to be done to the widget to ensure it works properly. Use this plugin at your own risk. If it works, it’s great if it doesn’t look for something like OIO Publisher which may be more than what you need.

Rojo Is No Mo

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Finally, a news item where I can have fun with the headline! Rojo, the self acclaimed “best free RSS and Atom feed reader” has announced that they will be shutting down their service only to replace it later on. The new version of Rojo will come with a new name, new way of bringing the news to you along with a new look. Rojo is owned and operated by Six Apart, the makers of MovableType and Typepad.

By the time Rojo comes back, everyone will be gone considering they have given users instructions on how to export their feeds to move somewhere else.

They may think Rojo was the best but I’ll leave my personal claim of the best free FeedReader to FeedDemon. Beg to differ?

Learning The Hard Way

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Over the past few days, I’ve been busy Googling away, trying to figure out all of the various methods of migrating content from a Drupal installation into WordPress. The results are few and far between. I did find a MySQL script here and there to migrate bits and pieces of one version of Drupal to one version of WordPress but there are no tools available to make the process simple, manageable, or effective on the first try. I’ve looked all over the modules section of the Drupal website, along with the forums for help but I have come up empty. Drupal does not contain any way to export your data which makes me wonder why they prefer to have people locked into their open source software. When I say locked in, in this case I mean, not easily being able to leave their platform. This isn’t so much of a problem with WordPress.

Let me give you the summary of the problem in which you as a blogger must think about before publishing that first post. Performancing has been running on Drupal since 2005. This site contains thousands of registered users, thousands of comments, thousands of posts ect. At it’s current stage, Drupal no longer satisfies the needs of the site and the purpose along with the direction of the site has changed. Because of the enormous backlog of content, we have been facing a critical decision. Do we stay with Drupal, upgrade the software, redesign it and deal with it? Or, do we pay a freelancer or an established company to migrate the important data off of Drupal and into WordPress. This is a task which is by no means cheap. (I’ve come up with yet another idea but a little more research is warranted before I can claim that it’s doable.)

To bring things back full circle. If you are a beginning blogger, make sure that you plan ahead a year or so with whatever platform you decide to use. Before using that publishing system, check to see how portable your data is. Will you be able to easily take your data out of the publishing system and transfer it somewhere else? Check around on forums as well as the web to see how people have faired in transferring content from one platform to the one you are interested in using. Check to see if plugins, tools, or scripts are available to make the process easier. If none of these options are present, I highly suggest not using that software no matter how great it is. You don’t want to end up in a position where you are stuck, indefinitely with a publishing system.

Those of you who are established bloggers, (The ones who have been around the block a few times) have you come across these same crossroads? Perhaps you found yourself in a similar situation. If so, I’d love to hear your experience in how you solved the problem. Some bloggers start from scratch while others simply deal with the issues at hand until they have no choice but to do something about it.

Ever hear that saying, “The choices you make today help shape your tomorrow”. This rings true, even in the world of blogging.

Building RSS Group Writing Project

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GroupWritingProjects.com is now holding their Building RSS Group Writing Project/Contest. The contest started on July 1st and ends on July 13th which doesn’t leave much time for you to get your entry in. The list of prizes looks pretty impressive with the chance of winning a 30 minute subscriber consultation with none other than Liz Strauss and a 30 minute design consultation with David Airey.

The goal of the contest is to create an awesome guide on how to grow subscriber numbers. They are aiming for the guide to be so good, every blogger will want to link to it or save it as a reference. Be sure to check out the site for more details.

Thanks to Perfomancing user jshare for pointing this out in the public forums.

Filed Under: RSS

Is It Possible To Disable FeedBurner

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I’ve spent the past few hours playing around with trying to export Drupal posts through XML or RSS into WordPress. However, I’ve run into a problem where I can only import posts from Performancing through the Feedburner XML file. This results in posts successfully being imported into WordPress with all of the FeedFlare options. Not only that, the links within the posts (when linked to older posts on the same blog) show up as FeedBurner URLs. So, I’ve spent some time trying my best to figure out of you can disable the FeedBurner redirect so that I can get access to the raw XML file being produced by Performancing but for the life of me, I can’t find one.

You simply can’t turn FeedBurner off. Sure, we could delete the feed from FB but then we risk losing all of the RSS stats and if we create a new feed, we would have to redirect readers to the new Feed address. What an unnecessary pain in the rear.

Knowing that many readers of Performancing use FeedBurner on a daily basis, have you noticed anyway to temporarily disable the redirection service? If not, does this mean that those who have used FeedBurner for an extended amount of time are locked into the service when a need for access to the raw XML file is needed?

Do You Effectively Use That Sidebar?

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VandelayDesign has published an extensive article (Effective Use of Blog Sidebars) detailing the effective use of blog sidebars. Sidebars are known as areas on a blog that stretch vertically where things such as widgets, or snippets of code can be placed. Sidebars are prime real estate to highlight various sections of your blog. The types of content most commonly seen within sidebars is, RSS subscription information, recent comments, most popular posts, recent posts and third party widgets.

After reading this article, it’s made me rethink my use of sidebars. I used to place anything of misc. origin into the sidebar as I didn’t know where else to put it. But now I think I’ll go through my blog and give my sidebar a purpose and make it more usable to visitors, especially those new to the site.

In what ways have you used your own blogs sidebar? Do you use it to highlight content or do you use it to house third party widgets/services? Which sidebar configuration do you use/prefer? I typically enjoy using a large column for content along with a large column at least 300 pixels wide for the sidebar. But the VandelayDesign website showcases how two columns for sidebars can be pulled off effectively.

BoingBoing Extinguishes The Flames

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Not long ago, I wrote a post which commented on the BoingBoing/Violet Blue situation where Violet Blue, a one time contributor to BoingBoing discovered that all of her posts on the site had been unpublished. Today, the NYTimes has an in depth piece which continues the story and the backlash which has come from fans of the site.

After reading the article, it’s worth noting that the unpublishing of Violet’s posts had taken place over one year ago. Only recently has it been discovered that all of her posts were unpublished. Because BoingBoing did not properly address this issue at the time of it taking place, this recent development spurred rumors and conspiracy theories up the ying yang. The backlash of comments have given BoingBoing a chance to reassess their decision to unpublish her posts but so far, her posts have yet to be reinstated on the blog.

By the way, BoingBoing did publish a post back on July 1st which has seemingly cleared the muddy waters.

Here is a quote from the NYTimes article by Jardin who is one of the contributors to Boing Boing.

“Any unpublishing of a statement,” Ms. Jardin said, “can become a really big thing. We are no longer just a small personal blog, obviously, and the way I think about the blog has changed.”

This is the subject that I wanted to discuss with you. They are few and far between, but have any of you been able to turn a mediocre blog into something much bigger? So big in fact that you had to reassess the way you make decisions in relation to the blog? For a small personal blog, you can easily make the decision to just delete someone’s comment or to delete a guest post. But, once you become a big player in the blogosphere with a dedicated following, if you screw up, there is that possibility that if you are not transparent about the situation, your readers will pile on like a mob and let you know about it. Thus, I’d be interested in hearing from anyone who has managed a blog that has had to go through an experience similar to the one BoingBoing has gone through. How did you handle the pressure, the constant barrage of conspiracies and rumors from your audience?