Tim Yang’s Weblog

You know what would be a really cool name for a blog about comment spam? Yup, Iamspeechless.com (or the other four-word variation Thismakesmespeechless.com). I get dozens of these comment spams a week with just those three words and a bunch of irrelevant links.

I’m really happy that Ozh recommended Akismet.com to me. It’s a comment spam catcher for Wordpress. For the past couple months I’ve been getting more and more comment spam every day — the kind that looks like it was sent by a real person and doesn’t use any of the comment blacklisted words.

Akismet caught 26 for me in the last 24 hours. Zero false positives. If you aren’t using Akismet yet, all you need to do is sign up to Wordpress.com.

If you tried the Problogger Clean theme for Wordpress and you had problems with it, please do leave us a comment.

We have had some comments by email about problems with IE. But we’ve had inconsistencies with replicating the problem. The comments have revolved around the sidebar being misplaced in the single post pages.

If you have had this problem, please let us know the browser and platform you are using. A screenshot would be most helpful. Thanks!

This theme is based on my own blog design. But in many ways, this theme release is better (and with neater mark-up too). It has been tested on Firefox, Safari and Windows IE. Seven things are significant and quite unique about it.

1. Monetised

   This is one of the first Wordpress themes that comes with Adsense blocks built in. The adsense blocks have been tested to have optimised positions and optimised colours.

2. Featurised

   Unlike other themes which come sans-features, this one has built-in features using a single functions file that comes with the theme folder. So it does not rely on any plugins.

3. Corporatised

   It is a bit of a serious theme with a very corporate colour scheme, not usually the kind preferred by personal bloggers.

4. Search engine optimised

   Heavy interlinking for search bots to easily find pages. And page titles are automatically customised to the post titles.

5. Promotion optimised

   There are a few features that allow you to promote yourself and allow visitors to the site to share it with others if they find it interesting.

6. Stickitised

   Ok, that’s not a real word, but it simply means particular attention was paid to the internal navigation. Links to other posts are placed prominently and throughout all the blog pages to invite visitors to click on them.

7. Prioritised

   The positions of the sections, colours and font sizes have been prioritised to the immediate communication needs of the first time visitor. The theme is space sensitive and is thus very content focused, keeping much of the important details at the top or near the top of the fold.

And those are also the reasons why the theme is called Problogger Clean. If you choose to use this theme, please do email me or leave a comment about it on the support forum. We’d really like to see how you use it so that we can get more ideas on improving themes.

Proceed to download Problogger Clean or view the documentation.

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Watch this space. On Wednesday, Ozh and I are releasing a new Wordpress theme. But this one is made for bloggers who are interested in having a monetised blog — the theme has Adsense ad positions and colours built into it (I think it’s a historical first, but I could be wrong). It also has numerous functions built into it too. It comes out on Wednesday.

Back in 1998, there was a very popular website called Adcritic.com that tapped into the idea that people actually like seeing TV commercials. They showcased new commercials, mostly from the US. The site became so popular that when it closed down, it became the poster child for Popularity Meltdown. Bandwidth costs money and video takes up a lot of bandwidth. Adcritic later rose again, but in a paid subscription model and never regained its earlier popularity.

The next generation of video content sites like iFilm.com learned from the Adcritic case and created partnerships with bandwidth providers. But video content sites became anathema to venture capitalists. Until this year.

With the increasing popularity of high quality digital video recorders and the rise of the mobile phone video recorders, video blogging started becoming the in-thing. The year of the video bloggers began in 2004 (or arguably somewhat earlier) as people began making their own video content and posting them on their blogs. Then sites like Youtube.com and Video.google.com burst onto the scene earlier this year and things never looked better for video blogging.

Now that I’m in the advertising industry, I wanted to re-look into TV commercial blogs. There were none. Advertising blogs up till now focused on posters and press ads and photos of ambient media — cheap low-bandwidth-sucking images. One of the issues was that there was no reliable video hosting that was cheap enough for the lone enthusiast to afford. But with user-submission sites like Youtube and Google Video, fans of TV commercials now have free and reliable hosting resources to make highlight their favourite commercials.

So I made adblog.wordpress.com, a brand new TV commercial blog. It showcases the commercials that I like, culled from sites like thespecspot.com, viralx.com and adforum.com. The videos are hosted on these sites and I blog links to them. Or else, if I find the video on other sites, I upload them to Youtube. (Nice thing about Youtube and Google Video is that they generate thumbnails of the video from screenshots.)

There is so much TV commercial content floating all over the internet right now that I can post about four commercials a day and still have left over content for the following day. I hope you enjoy the commercials as much as I enjoy blogging about them.

As soon as I emailed Ozh about a plugin that automatically sends your new posts to del.icio.us, than I find someone has just released one. As soon as I finished reading the description, I suddenly realised what a bad idea this is. Del.icio.us will be flooded with posts from Wordpress blogs — blog spam from this plugin’s users.

Mark at weblogtoolscollection.com is asking if there are any Wordpress themes out there that are optimised for Adsense. Well, there’s going to be one soon. Ozh and I have been working on something for a couple weeks. It grew from an Adsense-optimised design to a full-featured theme with built-in utilities (no plug-ins required).

It does not make sense for themes to come without optimised Adsense positions and colours for two reasons. First, making money from blogs is now more prevalent than not. It is no longer a point of differentiation, it is a point of parity (or at least it should be). Second, there are so many blog advertising services for publishers vying for real estate that designs are starting to look like a cross between women’s fashion magazines (more ads than editorial) and Dr Frankenstein’s pet project.

Theme designers need to take ad-space into consideration and take charge of ad-placement before their theme users get their grubby amateur hands on them. Designing themes with ad space built in will stem the trend of poorly-optimised and ugly ad-placement and re-direct it toward more measured and more aesthetic layouts.

The theme we’re working on is taking a bit longer because now there are so many features (we keep getting ideas for more every day). We’ve even got a single admin control panel to simplify the configuration of everything from the feed url to Adsense IDs. No need to open the theme editor any more. Geez, whoever heard of a theme with a config panel? Bizarre! Ozh will probably release the whole thing as a standardised themekit for theme-developers to add the same features to their themes, along with the theme config panel.

Watch this space.

I promise this is the last Wordpress related post I’m going to make for a long time. I finished with my template and this is the last thing I made for it. I wanted a way to allow people to add my posts to their Del.icio.us collection. I tried Arne Brachhold’s del.icio.us plugin but it wasn’t what I wanted. For one thing, it only worked on single.php. I wanted the bookmark link to be available on the index.php too. Not everyone will visit the individual post page. I also wanted it to have a pop-up. I quite liked the way the old del.icio.us pop-up bookmarklet worked. So here’s how you make a better del.icio.us bookmark. Place this code anywhere within the loop. It works for pages, templates, index.php and single.php.

<a href=”http://del.icio.us/post?url=<?php the_permalink(); ?>&title=<?php the_title(”, ”, true); ?>”>add to del.icio.us</a>

And that’s it. But that’s without the pop-up. If you want the pop-up method, first paste this simple javascript pop-up maker in your head tag.

<script type="text/javascript">
function openpopup(popurl){
var
winpops=window.open(popurl,"",
"width=700,height=250,status,resizable")
}
</script>

Then use this link in your loop instead of the earlier one I showed you.

<a href=”javascript:openpopup(’http://del.icio.us/post?url=<?php the_permalink(); ?>&title=<?php the_title(”, ”, true); ?>’)”>add to del.icio.us</a>

I had a tell-a-friend script on my old blog. But Wordpress doesn’t have anything like that, not even in plugin form. So I wrote a quick one. This script is extremely simple. It works but there are no checks, validations or contingencies built into it. So don’t kill me, I’m still on page 28 of PHP for Dummies (”Concantenating is not a Mexican dance”). Caveat emptor, you have been warned.

The script is meant for use with single post pages. It does not have to be in the Loop, so it can be placed in the sidebar of single.php. If you put it on index.php (or any other page), it will simply send the url and page title of the first post you ever made (not good). If I was informing Madame X of this post, the message the script sends out is formated like this (but you can change it where appropriate to suit your taste):

Subject: Have a look at this blog page, Madame X

Message: Hi, Madame X, I found this interesting post on Tim Yang’s Geek Blog called “Howto: Tell-a-friend script for Wordpress” that I thought you would also find interesting. It’s at http://timyang.com/2005/07/howto-tell-a-friend-script-for-wordpress.

Signed, Tim Yang

Here are the instructions.
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