Many WordPress blogs are adopting the CommentLuv plugin, because it gives readers extra incentive to make a comment - it automatically adds a link to the commentator’s latest post at the end of their comment.

This is great for the commentator, for several reasons outlined below. However, some people are not taking full advantage of the benefits. Read the rest of this entry »

I’m pleased to release IFrameWidgets v1.0, a WordPress plugin that can stop slow loading JavaScript widgets from breaking your page.

Widgets remain hidden until completely loaded, then appear in whole. If they don’t load, they won’t take up any space on your sidebar. If they load slowly, or hang, they won’t stop the rest of your page from loading. Read the rest of this entry »

More Than Scratch The Surface has finally been penalised by Google. I noticed today that my toolbar PageRank has dropped from PR4 to PR0. It appears to only be a toolbar PR penalty - I am still in the same place in the SERPs. Read the rest of this entry »

Today is Australia Day, a national holiday celebrating our fine country, and an appropriate time for me to talk about a new community for Australian bloggers: Aussie Bloggers. Read the rest of this entry »

In my last post, I talked about Adsense Smart Pricing and how blogs can avoid it by only showing ads to search engine visitors.

One option for WordPress is the Who Sees Ads plugin, which has the ability to do this. I prefer the Shylock Adsense plugin for the reasons given in my last post: automatic placement of ads; no need to enter placeholder in each post; easy to move ads from, say, top right to top left, etc.

The problem with Shylock Adsense is that although it can show ads on old posts only (mostly search engine traffic), there is no option to show ads only to search engine traffic. I really wanted this functionality, so I added a few lines of code to the plugin to enable it. In this post I explain how to do it. Read the rest of this entry »

In my last post, I mentioned the danger Adsense Smart Pricing poses to blogs. Blogs are particularly vulnerable because most blogs don’t work well with Adsense. In this post, I examine the issue further and look at a couple of potential solutions for WordPress users - but there’s a twist in the tale. Read the rest of this entry »

Adsense - some love it, some hate it. It doesn’t work for all sites, but there’s no denying that on the right site, it can make a lot of money.

Most beginners don’t understand what type of site it works well on. They slap Adsense on their blog and expect the cash to come rolling in. Of course, it doesn’t. Why? Because Adsense doesn’t work well on their type of site.

In this article, I explain the underlying principle of Adsense and look at the attributes of sites that are successful with Adsense. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve just read Michael Martine’s free ebook, How to Start a Business Blog.

I don’t buy ebooks. I normally don’t even read free ones. Mostly that’s because I don’t have much time. Its also because while most ebooks are decent, very few are great and some are just a waste of space.

How to Start a Business Blog is one of the few really worth reading. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve just released version 1.11 of the DualFeeds plugin for WordPress. Read the rest of this entry »

When writing code, its important to keep system performance in mind. No matter how useful your software is, if it places too much stress on the server, it won’t be used. How can you tell if your code is efficient? Well, experience helps, but it also pays to have good tools. Read the rest of this entry »