It has been more almost two years since I wrote a series of posts on the plug-ins used for this WordPress blog. Since then I’ve cut down on some of the code that did nothing on the front end for visitors, but did slow down the server somewhat, especially when occasional spikes of high traffic occurred.
So, I’ll go through them alphabetically, mainly because that way it is easier for me to keep a track about which ones I’ve already mentioned. I’ll try and stick to one post per plug-in, but for the simple/popular ones, I’ll probably combine posts.
First on the list? All in One Adsense and YPN. The principle behind the code is to provide a one stop shop for blog owners, whether they write about their life in Kazakhstan, to place PPC adverts (Yahoo and/or Google’s AdSense) on the page. You just type in advert network’s ID, select whether you want text, image or both type of adverts, and the dimensions that are allowed. Once you have selected the colours to be used (text, background, URLs etc.), number of ads per post and/or page and the justification (top, bottom, left, right, centre etc.) you are all done. If you want to wrap the advert within some code (be careful with Google on that one), or hide the adverts from certain types of pages, it just takes a click or two. One minor thing you need to notice is that the plug-in’s config page is titled just “AdSense”, which normally throws me for a few seconds if I haven’t changed any settings in a while.
You can of course simply add the exact code you want into template files manually, but should you change themes, or just update it to a more recent version, you’ll always need to make sure you’ve kept a copy of the code and where it was inserted, then hope the new/new version of your theme will work as well without too much tweaking. Using a plug-in means you can skip all of those headaches and just know it will work.
Sep 21 2010
All in One Adsense and YPN
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