I’ve recently discovered the power of the Themes Function page in your Wordpress theme. It lets you achieve the same thing as if you’d hacked a core file (which would get overridden with every update - pain in the neck). For example, I had a site where I wanted to use The Excerpt Reloaded and Thumbnail for Excerpts on the front page. Unfortunately, they wouldn’t work together. All I really needed from The … READ MORE

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If you want to integrate CJ or Linkshare HTML links into your blog posts, you’ve probably noticed that “hidden” pixel doesn’t stay so hidden - it turns into a white space. Or, even more annoying, if you have pretty CSS borders and spacing to make your post images look nice, suddenly you have this stupid honking framed pixel with lots of blank space all around it.

I don’t have a solution for the 1 pixel white … READ MORE

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I’ve never been great with graphics. My usual banner consists of an image I’ve bought from someone else and some neat-o text I’ve applied. I can do drop-shadows, too, woohoo! My logos were always rectangular and separated from the site. Never any flow.

Yesterday I sat down to make a new template for one of my sites, forced myself to learn GIMP, and was pleasantly surprised with the results. I just refused to stop until I … READ MORE

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One of my sites looks perfect in every browser, but Firefox was plonking a horizontal scroll bar down at the bottom. There was nothing for it to scroll over to, so this was a real head-scratcher. (In fact, I hunted for the solution several times over several months.) Now I found it.

It’s a very simple piece of code:

overflow-x:hidden;

But where to put it in your CSS? That depends which class or ID is causing the trouble. … READ MORE

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I’ve decided to build a monster.

Sorry - monster site. A huge sprawling domain full of subfolders full of subtopics relating to the main topic, with lots of content for people to read or subscribe to - and lots of sales pages. My theory is that if I drown the sales pages in content pages, it won’t hurt the domain.

Of course, anything you try in this crazy business of ours can end up tanking your domain. … READ MORE

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I spent some time today consolidating categories on several sites, including this one. As you blog, you find you’re no longer writing about some of the topics you once wrote about and there’s just no point in having a category for them when those posts can go under some other category.

I did think twice before I consolidated the Wordpress category into the Blogging category on this site. But in the end, I doubted anyone’s finding … READ MORE

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Is anybody else seeing some old domains suddenly getting traffic boosts, as BJ suggests here? Because I sure am. Since the latest Google update, I’ve seen:

A jump in traffic to some old thin affiliate sites I haven’t really touched (yes, now that I’m checking, the traffic increase started before I cloaked links last week)
Pages of dupe content coming out of the supplemental index for no reason I can figure out
A boost in traffic to … READ MORE

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I had an epiphany over the weekend: I’ve not been coming at online earning from a position of power.

I’ve been trying stuff. I’ve been seeing what I can do. I’ve been cautious. These are all approaches that assume a degree of failure. Now I want to start thinking of myself as someone who builds and launches sites. Some for money, some for passion. I want to stop thinking of this as a hobby and think … READ MORE

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Last night, one of my sites got suspended. It was the only one on a particular reseller account, so I freaked (I couldn’t unsuspend it, either). The reason in Cpanel was “spam violations”, which really freaked me out since I don’t spam, and that had to mean someone had somehow accessed the domain to send spam. So I wrote the host (NitroZone).

This was around 11:3o pm, Pacific time. They responded by 11:40 and explained … READ MORE

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I found a very nice free font resource today for PC or Mac. It’s got lots of fonts to choose from, plus it’s an easy site to use: you can sort and search files in several different ways (by category, name, etc.) and it has mouseovers that let you see the whole alphabet just by passing your cursor over the box for that font. And it’s got no pop-ups, pop-unders, or redirects - … READ MORE

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