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WordPress Plugins and My Week in Review
Posted by Dave on May 18th, 2007
WordPress Plugins and Kontera
Jon’s Showoff Rankings (lower right side) - This simple plugin allows you to display your Google Page Rank, Alexa and Technorati rankings. Besides the “showoff” aspect, I thought it would be handy to have these stats easily accessible once I’m on the road, and don’t have the benefit of a customized browser.
Javascript Pull Quotes - I had to deactivate this plugin because it did not want to play friendly with…
Kontera - I had noticed Kontera’s in-text advertising on many other blogs, however to qualify, they require far more page views per month than I am currently receiving. The application’s lowest option is “Less than 500,000.” However, through a partnership John Chow has set up with Kontera, lower trafficked sites with quality content can be accepted into the program. I am going to evaluate the service for 30 days, before deciding whether to commit to it for an entire year (which is a requirement in the fine print). I care very much about how this type of advertising affects readers, so please share your opinion by casting a vote on my poll on the left side.
My Week in Review
If you’ve been wondering why I haven’t mentioned my travel writing assignments lately, it’s because I’ve been procrastinating big time! Now that my tutor, Jerry, is back from Croatia, I have a Memorial Day deadline.
On Monday, I met up with an old friend, Chris, to watch Spiderman 3. I rarely see movies in the theater, however I certainly enjoy them when I do. On Tuesday, I went out with my family for a belated Mother’s Day dinner. We ate at Ruth’s Chris (a steakhouse). It was also the last time I was going to see my brother Jon before he shipped off to Iraq. I learned he’ll be stationed on a base about 50 miles west of Baghdad, in Al Anbar province. He’ll be there by early July for a 7 month tour. His job as “data Marine” sounds like the equivalent of working an IT Helpdesk job in a war zone.
Next week I’ll be down in Richmond, VA for the first week of leadership/management training. Luckily, I have a laptop at work which I can bring down with me. I’ll be heading straight from Richmond next Friday to New York City for the holiday weekend. Another old friend (of 20 years) named Chris is getting married, and we’ll be tearing up the town in the name of his lost bachelor status!
Dare Me to do something fun, weird, or challenging on the road!
I read a post about in-Text advertising just the other day, can’t remember where from now. I find for a small ad they sometimes take a long time to load, longer than a web page, thats pretty annoying.
They might work though, the only way to tell is to test them.
I’ve definetly noticed the page takes longer to load since I made the update. I changed the link color from blue to black which I think is a much needed step toward making the links less distracting. I’m going to try and take a few more steps to customize the frequency and location of the ads per page.
Ultimately, I’m going to go by the opinion on the poll, which is leaning 5-2 against the ads. I do want to give them a chance though, and more time for people to cast their vote!
Thanks for the feedback!
i adblock everything pretty much that doesnt come from the host site. (which you probably didnt want to hear..) I do try to leave in trackback stuff (ie feedburner backlinks, etc).. mostly because i havnt updated my system and we used to live in the mountains on dialup (24kbps.. not even 56k!!) and all the extra stuff on sites was a huge drain on our wee internet connection… then my works proxy filteres out a lot of extra stuff (alexa etc for whatever reason).
works proxy is very restrictive, esp with javascript. so I’m probably not seeing your page how I’m supposed to be seeing it.
We’re actually working on a policy revision of the TTBN that will try to ban the in-text ad network from sites. Readers have often found them both annoying and deceptive.
One of the new members to the network, someone who has yet to be listed, even was asked by the panel to remove the in-text ads on her site before she was accepted.
It’s all about the division between content and income.
Let me know what you think.