Art of Blogging

Now that AdSense ads are actually running, I might as well explain how it was done.

Yeah, I know, these Howto’s are boring and not much fun. Trust me, they aren’t much fun to write either. Soon, I will be done with most of them and will get down to the real work.

They sure do take out a lot of the guess work on setting up a new blog though.

The purpose of this article is only to discuss the actual installation of this plugin on my WordPress MU site. Actually using the AdSense plugin is the subject of other articles.

The first one I am using is AdSense Deluxe. Unfortunately, their site seems to have been deleted, so I wont add a link. I did find a copy of this plugin for download that is a patched version. Unfortunately, I closed the window too soon and I lost the link. Sorry to the author of the patch. If you contact me, I will give you credit. I am such a bad blogger.

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I have mentioned comments are important and should be encouraged before, right? Pretty sure I have said something or another about the importance of comments and how to make you commentators feel special at least once or twice.

JohnTP has a list of the Top 5 WordPress Plugins That Help Increase Comments. I already use a couple on this list and agree with the rest.

I won’t go into a lot of detail here but I will run down the list quickly since they are all aimed at normal WordPress and I use WordPress MU (at least for now).

I will add a couple to the list though.

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Want a way to ping Google?

Yeah, I thought that would get your attention.

Go get the Google Sitemap Generator for WordPress plugin and put it in and within minutes, you can be pinging Google every time you make a post.

As a bonus, Yahoo! and MSN use the same sitemap structure. Anything that calls Search Engines to index your sites is a good SEO tool.

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Since I started using Ultimate Tag Warrior 3 I have been very pleased with this plugin for creating Tag Clouds.

Of course, there are things I would like to see added or changed, but I didn’t spend the time writing the plugin or its well laid out documentation. I have no complaints!

What I do have are a couple of pointers for its’ use for a new user.

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Tag Clouds according to Wikipedia: “A tag cloud (more traditionally known as a weighted list in the field of visual design) is a visual depiction of content tags used on a website. Often, more frequently used tags are depicted in a larger font or otherwise emphasized, while the displayed order is generally alphabetical… Selecting a single tag within a tag cloud will generally lead to a collection of items that are associated with that tag.”

For a live example of them, take a look at the end of this post and also on the bottom of my sidebar.php.

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I will speak regularly on the importance of comments to a blog, I am sure. Today, I am going to keep it basic.

Comments are part of what makes blogs such a successful method to convey ideas. They are also a major part in that new-fangled Web 2.0 stuff.

Since blog comments are important, the people making them are important too, right?

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