Faces of Yve

Wordpress Theme Preview: Specimen

Yvonne — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 05:41:12 +0000

I mocked this one up a while ago, but haven’t gotten around to coding it yet.

I think it’s kind of Martha Stewart meets Silence of the Lambs.

This one will only be available in a 3-column, fixed-width version. If you want to know when it goes up, please subscribe to the Wordpress themes feed or the site-wide feed.

Want more on these topics ? Browse the archive of posts filed under Theme Previews.

Advertising Offer from ZTMC, Inc: Rejected

Yvonne — Sat, 12 Apr 2008 07:22:02 +0000

I recently received an e-mail from a company called ZTMC, Inc., asking if I was accepting advertising on this site. I am, and thus I began corresponding with one of their marketing managers. They wanted me to place four text links on every page of my site. These ads would rotate and I would be paid each month I displayed the ads.

I ultimately rejected their offer and here’s why.

No Ad Filter

ZTMC assured me that they wouldn’t be placing any ads for porn sites or warez sites. However, there are plenty of non-porn and non-warez sites that I do not wish to advertise. Mobile phone sites, for example, or credit counseling web sites.

Every other ad program I have ever tried has given you some ability to filter out undesirable ads. Project Wonderful and Text Link Ads both give you the option of manually approving each ad before it goes live on your site while Google Adsense’s competitive ad filter lets you get rid of ads for a specific URL at any time.

This sort of filtering mechanism is really important to keep your ads reasonably targeted to your site’s audience, but ZTMC doesn’t have one.

Potential Harm

A quick Google search for ZTMC will turn up a couple discussions like this one, in which people claim that placing their ads will kill your search engine ratings and Google PageRank. Although this is hardly definitive evidence of anything, it’s enough for me to be concerned.

More concerning, however, was their code. In order for them to serve ads to my site, I was to put a PHP include of some kind on my site. Now, it’s pretty common for people to put includes on their site—the Amazon widget, the Project Wonderful ad box, and the Share This button are all driven by includes.

Javascript includes. PHP is much more powerful, and I’m disinclined to execute foreign PHP on my site without ascertaining exactly what it’s supposed to do. But that proved to be very difficult because of…

Unprofessionalism

ZTMC apparently does not require its marketing managers to be able to converse coherently with web developers. The person with whom I was communicating (and who claimed to have visited my site personally), kept insisting that my sites were HTML and that this might be a problem. This is nonsense.

All sites are HTML. Or XHTML. If you go to any web site on the internet and select View Source, you will get HTML. Or XHTML. If you have a problem with HTML, you have a problem with the entire internet.
I think that what she really meant was that the pages on my site are static HTML, except…they’re dynamic. There’s not a single page on this site that isn’t dynamically generated by Wordpress. I explained this to her and she did not understand. And given that she’d claimed to have visited my site personally, you’d think she’d have noticed the complete lack of .html extensions, but apparently not.

The other thing she kept doing was telling me that the code she was providing was an SSI. Except that in the next sentence, she’d say the code was PHP.

I used SSI back in 2000 or so, when PHP and dynamic generation of web pages weren’t standard yet. SSI and PHP have different syntax and PHP is much more powerful. The terms are not interchangeable like that.

And then when I asked her to clarify exactly what the code was, she decided that meant that I didn’t know what SSI was and explained it by plagiarizing from Wikipedia’s page on SSI.

If this is how her business is run, thanks, but no thanks.

Want more on these topics ? Browse the archive of posts filed under Blog Advertising.

Is Blogging Bad for Your Health?

Yvonne — Sun, 06 Apr 2008 21:04:16 +0000

They work long hours, often to exhaustion. Many are paid by the piece — not garments, but blog posts. This is the digital-era sweatshop. You may know it by a different name: home.

A growing work force of home-office laborers and entrepreneurs, armed with computers and smartphones and wired to the hilt, are toiling under great physical and emotional stress created by the around-the-clock Internet economy that demands a constant stream of news and comment.

Wow. Digital-era sweatshop. Thanks, New York Times, for the vote of confidence (last I checked, three health incidents in a population of millions did not an epidemic make)!

But it is true that blogging can be pretty stressful; the internet is littered with blog-icide detritus, people who got one too many spam comments or hecklers and took their toys and went home.

Regular blogging, particularly news blogging, is not all that compatible with a regular job. I have four active blogs right now (including this one), and I struggle to make one post a week on each. After I spend all day writing in front of a computer, going home and…writing in front of a computer…really doesn’t sound all that appealing.

Blogging is not a good path to getting rich quick. It is not even a good path to a steady, livable income. Blogging is more like the publishing industry than anything else. For every J. K. Rowling there are thousands of nameless authors, earning next-to-nothing from their writing, just trying to get their voices heard. But unlike working in an actual sweatshop, you are in control of your own working environment.

The key to a long, healthy blogging life is balance and a love of the medium. Stick to blogging what really matters to you, not just what’s hot at the moment. If you’re going to blog for money, blog for pocket money, not for a salary. I’ve been blogging (mostly) unprofitably for nearly ten years, just because I like it. These days, I’m running with the pack in terms of monthly blog earnings and well…the pack would starve if we had to rely on blogging for money.

And don’t forget to eat well and get exercise. Sitting in front of a computer day in and day out isn’t healthy, no matter what or if you blog.

Want more on these topics ? Browse the archive of posts filed under Life as a Blogger.

Hello, Wordpress 2.5!

Yvonne — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 23:18:41 +0000

I just upgraded to the brand-new Wordpress 2.5. It looks pretty slick! The upgrade seemed to go off without a hitch, but let me know if anything seems broken.

There are already some nice writeups about version 2.5, so I’ll try not to repeat too much of what others have said.

First Glance: Write Post

The first thing I noticed when I sat down to write this post was that the post slug box has been replaced by this new edit permalink function below the post title:

I like this a lot because I’m obsessive about my post slugs, but I always forgot to change the default slug when the box was in the sidebar. Now it’s in a much more accessible location.

The Write sidebar has some nice improvements as well. First is the prominent Preview button. Second, the “Save and Continue Editing” button is toast and now the “Save” button lets you save and continue editing instead of taking you to some other page.

I had a small problem when I went to use the Preview button before I had saved a draft. The preview came through just fine, but the only way to get back to the Write page was to hit my browser’s Back button. And after I did that, I discovered that my post title and permalink had both disappeared.

I went to the Drafts page to see if I could recover the title and the permalink (yes, it would have been faster just to re-type it). I did, but lost the most recently-written paragraph because it hadn’t yet been auto-saved. It seems like a solution to this problem would just be to have Wordpress auto-save the post before it shows you the preview.

Previewing the post after a save and then hitting the back button caused no problems.

The timestamp feature is now more intuitive. All posts publish immediately by default, but you can edit the timestamp if you want…without having to tick a redundant checkbox.

I also like the Related links in the sidebar, though it’s less necessary now that the main Dashboard navigation has been revamped.

What I’m missing most from the new sidebar are the category boxes, which are now located under the main post box and the tags. I think they probably did this for space reasons because now there are tabs to view all categories, or just your most used, making the box too wide for the sidebar.

Plugins Passed with Flying Colors

I had no problems with my plugins. If you have the latest versions of all the following plugins, all should work fine under Wordpress 2.5:

Akismet 2.1.4
Bad Behavior 2.0.13
Better Feed 1.1
Dagon Design Form Mailer 5.4
Exec-PHP 4.5
Feed Statistics 1.3.1
ShareThis 2.1
Similar Posts 2.5b12—now requires the Post Plugin Library and includes the functionality of Similar Posts Feed
WordPress.com Stats 1.2—I did have to re-activate with my API
WP Unformatted 1.1
WWW Redirect 0.3

Want more on these topics ? Browse the archive of posts filed under Wordpress Features, Wordpress Plugins.

Fixing Backgrounds that Don’t Extend to the Bottom: Part II

Yvonne — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 04:01:10 +0000

In part I of this series, I talked about why we get backgrounds that don’t extend to the bottom. In part II, I’ll talk about a fix for this problem.

Revisiting the Problem

A major cause of this sort of background problem is a floating sidebar. The floating sidebar doesn’t take up floor space in the container box, and so the container box shrinks to the height of the main content. If the main content is the same height as, or longer than the sidebar, we don’t notice a problem. But if the main content is shorter, the background stops.

The Problem Code

If your blog layout is doing this, your code is probably set up something like this:

...

Note how this structure corresponds to the skeleton diagram from part I. In the code above, each

pair makes a box.

starts the box and

end the box; everything in between is inside the box.

Revisiting the Fix

To fix the background problem, we need to add another box and force it underneath the floating sidebar. This will cause the container box to expand and fill in the background.

The Code for the Fix

Thus, we need to add another

pair to the code above, after the main content and the sidebar, but still inside the container box. Furthermore, we need to specify that this new box goes under the floating sidebar. We do this by adding style="clear: both;" to the opening

. Thus, our fixed code looks like this:

...

As I said before, you can treat this new box as a footer and add copyright information or navigation links between the

and the

, but you don’t have to. It’ll still work if the box stays empty.

Applying the Fix to Your Blog

To apply this fix to your blog, follow these steps:

Back up your template file before editing it! Just copy all the code into a regular text file and save it to your hard drive.
Identify which

pairs correspond to the container box, the main content box, and the sidebar box. Use the id="" labels and any comments (which will look like this: ) as a guide. The container box is often named “container” or “wrapper”, the main content box is often named “main” or “content”, and the sidebar is usually named “sidebar” but is sometimes called “navlinks” or something like that.

Because of the way Wordpress is set up, it’s probably easiest just to view the source straight from your blog and work from there. Otherwise you’ll be digging through multiple theme files for the code you need to find: header.php, index.php/page.php/single.php/archive.php/search.php, and footer.php.

To avoid losing yourself in code soup, you may find it helpful to actually print out the code and highlight the important bits—for these purposes, you can ignore everything that comes before
Insert right before the

that marks the end of the container box. This will either be at the beginning of footer.php or at the end of the main index template. If the former is true, you will only need to edit footer.php. If the latter is true, you will need to insert the code into index.php, and also page.php, single.php, archive.php, category.php, search.php, and 404.php, if those files exist in your theme.

Want more on these topics ? Browse the archive of posts filed under Troubleshooting.

Fixing Backgrounds that Don’t Extend to the Bottom: Part I

Yvonne — Sun, 23 Mar 2008 19:17:38 +0000

It’s a common problem with blog templates of all stripes: backgrounds that stop abruptly in the middle of the page and don’t extend to the bottom. In this two-part series, I will explain why this can happen and how to fix it in your template.

Web Pages are Made of Boxes and Text

To start explaining why this happens, we need to go back to the basic building blocks of web pages: boxes and text (and boxes of text). Normally, when you mix boxes and text, something like this happens:

In this case the box contains text, but it could also contain an image. The box just sits there and breaks up the flow of the text.

To get a cleaner look, web designers often resize the boxes and float them to one side, like this:

Floating a small box allows the text to flow smoothly around the box.

Using Boxes to Create Page Layouts

You can use the same floating technique to create sidebars for web pages. The below diagram shows the skeleton of a typical web page:

We define boxes for content areas and pack them inside a bigger, container box (shown here in dark red). The container box is filled with a background. To get a sidebar, we just take one of the boxes (or both boxes), make it narrower, and float it to the side, like this:

The other box will flow around the floating box, just like plain text. The only difference is that a box is box-shaped and so it will keep to the side of the floating box, rather than making an L-shape around and under the floating box.

Non-Extending Backgrounds

The problem with non-extending backgrounds shows up when the floating box is longer than the non-floating box. When you float a box, it stops taking up floor space inside the container box. The height of the container box expands and contracts to provide just enough floor space for the boxes inside. So when you float a box for the sidebar, the container box contracts to the height of the non-floating box, taking the background with it:

The Fix

To fix this, we have to put another box inside the container box, and we give this third box a special property. We say that this third box cannot be next to any floating boxes; it must go underneath. This forces the container box to expand to accommodate the new box, and the background expands with it.

This third box can be a footer that contains copyright information or navigation links, or it can just be an empty box.

In part II, I will discuss the code for the fix.

Want more on these topics ? Browse the archive of posts filed under Troubleshooting.

Project Wonderful vs. Google Adsense: 6-Week Review

Yvonne — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 20:37:12 +0000

In the early days of my Project Wonderful trial, a web site owner declared to me that it was far superior to Adsense, which surprised me greatly. For the first few days of my trial, Project Wonderful was breathing down the neck of my Adsense earnings. In the wee hours of the morning on February 5, Project Wonderful took the lead.

And then later that evening, Adsense re-took the lead and proceeded to leave Project Wonderful in the dust. February was an extraordinarily dismal month for my Adsense earnings—I made about half of what I usually make—and it still brought in twice as much money as Project Wonderful, using about the same number of ad units on the exact same web sites.

March has been a better, but still below average, month for Adsense and so far it’s brought in five times as much money as Project Wonderful, again using about the same number of ad units on the exact same web sites.

So what’s the deal here?

As I said in my first-week review of Project Wonderful,

Project Wonderful is a good choice for small sites who want to make a little side money without much effort…

You put the code on your web site and start earning pennies almost immediately, regardless of how much traffic you have. But even at a mere hundred page views a day (which is the range for most of my web sites), you will do much better by optimizing for Adsense.

And I think therein lies the key difference between that other webmaster and me. Whereas I’ve been building web sites professionally and semi-professionally for nearly ten years, know how to optimize for search engines and have partially optimized my sites for Adsense, she mainly got into blogging to support a hobby and decided to throw some ad code on a web page to try to make a little money. She’s not a coder or template designer.

So if you already know a bit about web design and like to get down-and-dirty with your code, do a little research on Adsense optimization and set your site up for Adsense. If you’d rather leave the code alone as much as possible, throw a Project Wonderful block or two or three up on your site and watch the pennies roll in.

Or do both—optimize for Adsense, but re-route the ad money from Project Wonderful into advertising your own site. That just might get you the biggest bang for your buck.

Want more on these topics ? Browse the archive of posts filed under Blog Advertising.

Free Wordpress Theme: Pointy Sticks

Yvonne — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 04:38:51 +0000

Knitblogging is huge on the web and there is a serious shortage of knitting-themed blog templates. So this theme is for the knitters!

Demo/Download: (Updated March 5, 2008)
Terms of Use

2-column version: live demo | .zip file (153K)
3-column version: live demo | .zip file (164K)

To install, extract the .zip archive and upload to your themes directory.

Although this Wordpress theme is free for personal/non-commercial use, if you like it, please consider making a donation in support of the time and effort that went into the design. Thank you!

Changelog:

03/05/2008: Widget/sidebar fix in 2-column version

Technical specifications:

Wordpress 2.3.x
Widget-ready
XHTML 1.0 Strict

Layout:

Fixed-width, best viewed at 1024×768 or higher
2 or 3 columns

Terms of use:

This theme is licensed for personal/non-commercial use only.
Please modify this theme to suit the needs of your web site.
Please do not re-distribute any portion of this theme without permission.
Please do not remove the link to Faces of Yve from the footer.

For more licensing information, read the complete terms of use.

Want more on these topics ? Browse the archive of posts filed under 2-Column, 3-Column, Blue, Crafts, Fixed Width, Grey, Hobbies, Purple, Wordpress Themes.

Updates to A Taste of Spring

Yvonne — Sat, 09 Feb 2008 00:43:55 +0000

I have made some changes to the A Taste of Spring Wordpress theme—I’ve added some comments that should help you find your way around when tweaking and also a print stylesheet. Download the updated .zip files on the theme details page.

I’ve also added a special feed just for new Wordpress themes.

The complete Pointy Sticks theme should go up at the end of the weekend.

Want more on these topics ? Browse the archive of posts filed under Site Updates, Theme Updates.

Project Wonderful: First Week Review

Yvonne — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 03:00:35 +0000

This is the end of my first week as an ad publisher on the Project Wonderful ad network.

It is clearly the ad network for small sites and small publishers. As long as you set a minimum bid of $0.01 for each ad box you put up, it should be pretty easy to to earn at least $0.01 per day per ad box, regardless of the amount of traffic you receive. You can withdraw funds when your account reaches $10, or you can re-route funds from ad publishing into placing ads of your own.

It does take a few days for your ad boxes to become established in the system. Your ad boxes don’t show up in a search until the next day. The average number of page views per day is tracked over the last five days, so if your ad box is less than five days old, you will be averaging in zeroes.

The Good
The main upside to Project Wonderful is that it takes almost no knowledge or effort to start seeing some earnings. Because advertisers pay by the day, instead of by the click, you start making money as soon as the first bid is approved. This is in contrast to Adsense, where small ad publishers can go for months and months without seeing a dime.

There are a lot of options for controlling the ads that appear on your site. You can elect to approve each ad before it appears on your site, to auto-approve previously-approved ads or advertisers, or you can auto-approve everything. In addition, you can cancel advertisers’ bids at any time.

The Bad
There’s a pretty narrow range of advertisers on the network. Webcomics and “make money” blogs are overrepresented. Most of the remaining advertisers are blogs of some kind, with a handful of crafters and small retailers thrown in. A few people aren’t even advertising web sites—they are linking the ads straight to Amazon.com via their affiliate codes. Unless you happen to be a webcomic or a make money blog, you probably will not be able to target your ads to your audience.

The ads themselves also leave much to be desired. Many are poorly-designed and unprofessional-looking.

The ad code is not standards-compliant—it uses tables for the noscript layout. This won’t matter for most bloggers, but standards sticklers like me will be tempted to modify the code.

The main Project Wonderful web site is somewhat slow and unreliable. The ad system was down completely earlier today and now it’s throwing periodic errors while I’m trying to check my stats.

The Verdict
Project Wonderful is a good choice for small sites who want to make a little side money without much effort, and who are not concerned with ad targeting. But my sense is that even a small site can do better with AdSense with a little know-how. More on that at the end of the month.

Want more on these topics ? Browse the archive of posts filed under Blog Advertising.

Wordpress Theme Preview: Pointy Sticks

Yvonne — Sun, 03 Feb 2008 21:13:08 +0000

The earlier incarnation of this knitting-related Wordpress theme was extremely popular and now it’s even better!

This version is a little brighter and there are even more pairs of knitting needles topped with glass beads. There will also be a 3-column version of this theme, and both versions will be widget-ready.

Want more on these topics ? Browse the archive of posts filed under Theme Previews.

Project Wonderful: A Trial

Yvonne — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 23:22:52 +0000

I just learned about Project Wonderful, an advertising marketplace. It works on an “infinite auction” paradigm—basically advertisers bid a price per day for ad slots. As long as that advertiser is the high bidder for that ad slot, its ad is shown every time the ad slot is loaded.

Project Wonderful tracks page views, but ad rates are based on the auction, not on the number of page views. Using Project Wonderful does not appear to conflict with Google Adsense’s terms of use.

You can bid $0.00, so you could potentially get advertising for free.

It took a few days to get my web sites approved for ad slots, and another day for people to start bidding on my first ad slot on a different site. The bids so far have been small and pretty irrelevant to the site’s content, but I’m hoping that will change as the slot becomes more established.

I’ve since added a couple more trial ad slots, including the one you see in the sidebar. I’ll keep you posted on how they perform. In the meantime, you can advertise on Faces of Yve for just pennies a day.

Want more on these topics ? Browse the archive of posts filed under Blog Advertising.

Free Wordpress Theme: A Taste of Spring

Yvonne — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 04:22:53 +0000

We’ve had a couple weeks of sub-freezing temperatures and with this theme I say: Enough! I’m ready for spring. Bright colors, big flowers. Ahhhh…

Demo/Download: (Updated March 5, 2008)
Terms of Use

2-column version: live demo | .zip file (156K)
3-column version: live demo | .zip file (162K)

To install, extract the .zip archive and upload to your themes directory.

Although this Wordpress theme is free for personal/non-commercial use, if you like it, please consider making a donation in support of the time and effort that went into the design. Thank you!

Changelog:

03/05/2008: Widget/sidebar fix in 2-column version
02/08/2008: Added commenting, print stylesheets, and fixed a sidebar bug
02/03/2008: Streamlined code for custom search widget in functions.php

Technical specifications:

Wordpress 2.3.x
Widget-ready
XHTML 1.0 Strict

Layout:

Fixed-width, best viewed at 1024×768 or higher
2 or 3 columns

Terms of use:

This theme is licensed for personal/non-commercial use only.
Please modify this theme to suit the needs of your web site.
Please do not re-distribute any portion of this theme without permission.
Please do not remove the link to Faces of Yve from the footer.

For more licensing information, read the complete terms of use.

Want more on these topics ? Browse the archive of posts filed under 2-Column, 3-Column, Blue, Fixed Width, Flowers, Nature, Orange, Pink, Rounded Corners, Wordpress Themes.

Clean Slate: Introducing the Blog

Yvonne — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 06:04:59 +0000

*dusts hands off*

It’s a little early to be doing spring cleaning, but…what do you think? Ok, so the site basically still looks the same. But all the content is gone!

Let’s be honest. That e-zine thing, while it seemed like a good idea at the time, did not work. In today’s blogdom, no one wants to wait three months for the next hot tip.

So I’m re-christening this as Faces of Yve: The Blog. It almost sounds like a B-movie monster, doesn’t it? Anyways, I’ll be writing shorter posts, which are both easier for me to write and easier for you to process. This means more content for you.

Don’t worry, there will still be free blog templates. In fact, the first one will go up tomorrow. It’s all new, and possibly the best free template I’ve ever made. I love it, and I hope you will too. See you tomorrow!

Want more on these topics ? Browse the archive of posts filed under Site Updates.