Alright, Back again to finish writing about my experiences with WordPress. I have already talked about installation, customization, RSS feeds and Search Engine Friendly URLs. So far so good and in no time, we will know what was it like with AdSense and Tagging.
I am sure everyone know about Google AdSense but I will mention about it here anyway. Google Adsense, is a way to easily earn money by displaying Google Advertisements on your websites/blogs. Someone interested, needs to contact google to get an account and if the request is approved, you will get the HTML code which needs to be inserted into your web pages and Google will take care of displaying the relevant ads according to the contents on the website. Sounds simple, yes it is. So if have good contents and you can attract visitors to your website, you can count on Google to make decent amount of money for you.
I had the HTML code with me (Friend gave it to me) and I knew that if I just insert this piece of code in the relevant template files, I would be through with this task as well but I thought to look for a better solution so I googled, something everyone is good at, and what I found was truely amazing. There it was, a plugin called AdSense Deluxe. I read about it and realize that this is exactly what I was looking for. This plugin allows you to define and manage all styles and formats (There are different html codes for displaying Google Ads in different formats and styles for example a big rectangle, side banner etc) in the administrative panel. There were options to control the places where the ads will be displayed and after defining the adds and its style and format, one just need to use the syntax mentioned in the instruction page to display the ads. For example by adding in the middle of the post will display the Google Ads in the middle of the post.
Installing this plugin was as easy as it could be. After downloading and unzipping the folder, I uploaded the adsense-deluxe.php file under /wp-content/plugin directory. Logged into the administrative account, went to plugin page and activated the AdSense Plugin. I had to do little more tweaking since I wanted the ads to be displayed in the side bar and at the starting of the blog page. So I edited the relevant template files. All I had to do in order to display the ads was to write ‘‘ . That’s it. It worked great and I ticked off another task.
Now comes the last task and I was anticipating problems here since I didn’t know anything about tagging. Questions like what is it?, what is it used for?, advantages? seemed tough.. But I began my search to find the information to get started and I found this article. There are quite a few articles on tagging if you want to read about it. From this post and other posts here, I kind of figured out that tagging is one more way of organizing your contents and properly organized contents can make visitor’s life little more easier for sure. I also figured out that there are more concepts around tagging like track backs, ping backs, various tags related sites etc which I will probably cover in a separate post (I too need to refine my concepts a bit more). Coming back to the issue of providing a mechanism of tagging the blog posts which once again wasn’t difficult to answer because Christine Davis has written a plugin called Ultimate Tag Warrior for this very purpose. I went ahead and installed the plugin by simply uploading the Ultimate Tag Warrior in the /wp-content/plugins folder as instructed and also as I knew from my last experience.
Once again I logged into the administrative panel and activated this plugin. I kind of felt excited to see and realize the power of this plugin. I went to Admin Panel -> Options -> Tags as instructed and found a list of configurable options with detailed comments on their functioning. After doing the necessary settings I went to write a post (Test post of course). There was a text box where I could enter the tags I wanted to associate with this post. I entered the tags and published the posts. The tags were shown below my posts as promised by by the Ultimate Tag Warrior. Next time when I went to write a post, I saw a list of existing tags or already used tags (Tags which I had entered in the previous test post). To select the existing tags from the list, all I need to do was to to click on it. Easy stuff and I happily crossed the last item it the task list.
Well, my assignment actually was finished here but my friend requested me to see the possibilities of automating the complete or part of steps involved since his team which is complete non-techie might find it a bit difficult in executing all the steps involved and and in setting the right options to make everything work (SEF, AdSense, Tagging, general options). So I created the exact folder structure on a my laptop and put all the necessary files (plugin’s files, modified theme’s files). By uploading this one folder, uploading of all files is taken care of. Next step was to select the modified them and activate the two plugins, one for adsense and other one for tagging. OK, Next was the most complicated part where in I needed to set the options automatically for which I decided to create a php script. I named it as customize.php. In customize.php, I copied little bit of code from the file ‘install.php’, a script which installs the WordPress. Copied code took care of accessing and manipulating the database. Now I needed to know the names of the options which required to be modified/added automatically. Figuring out this was a time consuming job but me, determine to complete the script, finally finished it after few hours of effort. In the script, I deleted the default post, renamed the default category, deleted the default links, renamed the default links category, updated the general options, added/modified the options related to adsense and tag warrior plugins.
Now my friend or someone from his team was required to install the WordPress (using Fantastico), upload the files (one drag drop is enough), select the modified themes and activate the plugins from the administrative panel and then run the customize.php. Yep, that will do. No need to train everyone, how to set the tagging options, no need to distribute the adsense scripts and a standard blogging environment is in place.
Got lengthy, isn’t it? Well, I don’t think I need to conclude it anymore, do I?.
Post Tags:
Well done and good information on how much of this works. I’d like to clear up one thing. Tags have nothing to do with trackbacks and pings or pingbacks.
A “tag” is a method of categorizing your posts, as well as a “keyword” used by tagging search engines and directories like Technorati to categorize your posts on their services. WordPress uses categories as “tags”. So there is some confusion about tags and categories. I clear up most of those in Tags and Tagging in Wordpress.
The best way to think about all of this is a two part thought process of categorizing your posts. Treating categories (which are tags) as the “table of contents” of your site to group like content together, and then treat “tags”, as you will find with the Ultimate Tag Warrior WordPress Plugin, as mini-categorizers - making them like a book’s index, an addition to your table of contents. Does that help?
As for trackbacks and pingbacks or pings, trackbacks and pingbacks are “notes” in the form of comments that tell you that another blogger has written about one of your articles. You send them when you include a link to a blog’s post in your own post. WordPress automatically sends them a “note” saying “Hey, I’ve said something about this post!”
You can also send them manually by pasting a link in the Write Post panel where trackbacks are requested. But most people do nothing and WordPress does all the work for you automatically.
Pings are signals sent to search engines and directories to tell them “something new has happened on this site - come visit”, and search engines send out their web crawlers to take a look at what you’ve done that’s new.
Again, with WordPress, there is nothing to “do”. The work is done for you automatically.
Neither of these things have anything to do with tags.
However, I don’t see anything about feeds, and that is one of the most important aspects of blogging today - helping the user find alternatives ways to access your blog beyond physically visiting it. Using your feeds is another way of “subscribing” to your blog, or monitoring it so readers can keep up with what is new.
All WordPress blogs and Themes come with built-in feeds, but there is a lot more you need to know about them to make full usage of these neat features.
Does this help? Good luck and keep up the great work!
Comment by Lorelle — November 18, 2006 @ 8:24 am