Make Money from Blogs » Template

Making a child theme to preserve the changes you have made in the WordPress theme

ashish — Sun, 19 Sep 2010 08:37:12 +0000

Rare is the case when people do not make a change to the WordPress themes that they have installed. They may fiddle around with the .css files, changing font sizes / font colors, etc to customize it as per their own preference. So, you have a theme that looks somewhat good, but then you realize that it needs some work; you fire up your text editor, open up the css files and the functions file and make some changes. Or you could add some new php code to your functions file and use it within your themes to add some functionality that was missing. You could even go further and add new template files, over-ride some of the templates that are being used in the theme, and so on.
And then, you know how important it is to upgrade your plugins and themes in order to ensure that the security levels of your blog remains high. So, you see a theme upgrade, and go ahead for the upgrade. What you did not really think through was that the theme upgrade replaced the files in your theme, including the changes that you had made so lovingly, and some parts of your blog get affected. That is bad, but there is really nothing you can do about it. But, there is something you can do, although it requires some effort. WordPress gives a functionality called ‘Child Themes’, that allows you to make changes, and these changes are preserved even when you upgrade your themes. Here are some tutorials that allow you to learn the scope of what you can do through Child Themes, and the process of doing so.
Child Themes on WordPress Codex (link)
Introducing Thirty Ten, my guide to creating a Twenty Ten Child Theme (link)
How to make a child theme for WordPress: A pictorial introduction for beginners (link)
Ten Good Reasons to use WordPress Child Themes and Template Parts (link)

New free Blogger templates

ashish — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 18:38:11 +0000

There are a whole host of people who prefer to write their blogs using Google’s Blogger service. It gives a free hosting capability, allows you to place your own content on the site, gives a number of different widgets, and has numerous other blog-friendly features. The one major problem with using Blogger as a platform for your blogs is that the default list of templates is (for want of a better word), downright boring. When you first create a new account and select a template, you get a very small list. Once you have created the blog and to to modify your template, you get a few more customizations possible on the available theme, but none of them are likely to make your very enthusiastic.
However, Blogger does allow you to add your own theme, and if you want to change your template, then there is nothing simpler than finding some great template resources on the web. There are plenty of such resources, and here is a listing of some of them. Given that preferences can vary, I will not try to pre-select any. One word of warning, there is always the temptation to look at more templates, however, if you find a template that you like and supports what you want to do, then you should go with that and stop looking.

http://bloggertemplates.itmag.org/,
http://www.eblogtemplates.com/,
http://mashable.com/2008/05/17/70-plus-new-and-beautiful-blogger-templates/,
http://freshbloggertemplates.blogspot.com/,
http://www.finalsense.com/services/blog_templates/,
http://www.blogspottemplate.com/,
http://www.blogcrowds.com/resources/blogger_template.php,
http://freetemplates.blogspot.com/,
http://blogspottemplates.blogspot.com/,
http://mashable.com/2007/09/13/blogger-templates/,
http://btemplates.com/,
http://blogger-templates.blogspot.com/

14 free Adsense templates – widget-ready

ashish — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 18:17:44 +0000

People are always on the lookout for great free WordPress themes, and it is not easy to cut through the clutter and find some good themes. There are sites that offer hundreds of themes of all types (fluid, fixed, 3 column, 2 column, and so on), and from personal experience, I know how hard it can be to finalize a theme. What people (at least me and a few of my friends) look for is the ability to find distinctive themes that are not so common, seem to present the content to the viewer with great readability, and yet tries to meet the goals of the site creator in terms of good placement of Ads, Images, Surveys, Links, and so on.
So without much further discussion, let me give the link to this site that offers 14 new templates (NOTEPAD CMS THEME, PAPER THEME, CITY LIGHTS THEME, COUNTRYSIDE THEME, DOZEN ROSES THEME, FLOWER FIELDS THEME, MY WORLD THEME, PERFECT SUNSET THEME, SOCIAL THEME, SPORTS THEME, FINANCE THEME, FREEDOM THEME, HEALTHCARE THEME, PERSONAL THEME, POLITICAL BLUE THEME, and POLITICAL ORANGE THEME)
All these themes (including demos and screenshots) are available at this link
The site also offers to let you purchase some other premium themes.

Posting Adsense code below post title in Blogger

ashish — Sun, 08 Jun 2008 06:26:04 +0000

I had 2 previous posts where referenced articles showed how to place adsense code in different positions between blogger posts, such as below the title; to the right of a post; between posts, and so on. This was done by modifying the HTML characters of the adsense code (escaping them) and placing the code between specific positions of the template.
This was one way of doing this. Another way is to do what woork has done (link to article), and place the actual adsense code in a specific position in the template. The difference being that he has modified the code of the template to make this change (this seems to be a cleaner method). One benefit of this method appears to be that it seems possible to add a conditional statement that will allow showing the ad only in the single post view, and not in the main page. Here is an excerpt from the article:

So, I have changed AdSense code position above this line, adding an if statement (on bold) to show sponsored links only into the single post, not when an user visits my home page, or browse categories (over 96% of my actual clicks cames from internal pages).
In this way, AdSense is more visible and in just two day I have improved the number of clicks and my CTR for the most visited pages. If you use Blogger platform for your blog, I suggest to try it.

This seems like a very neat and useful way to optimize the placement of the Adsense code.

How to parse Adsense code to add within the Blogger template

ashish — Wed, 28 May 2008 03:09:01 +0000

You want to add Adsense code to your Blogger template at certain locations such as just below the title, after all, the research you have done shows that this is a good place where people are more likely to click your ads. However, the template in the new Blogger does not easily allow this. Fear not, many people have done the research on the structure of the new template and come up with a solution for this. You will find many articles on how to do this, with some of them working and others not easily understandable.
I was hunting for articles on how to do this, and came up with some articles where this is detailed. In the last post, I referred an article that detailed how to do this, and here is another article on the same issue; the difference being that this article tries to explain the changes in the adsense code in greater clarity, explaining the need of why this change needs to be done. Read this article (link) for more details:

If you try to insert any Google AdSense, AdBrite, AdEngage and any other JavaScript based ad code, or client-side components such as counter, tracker, form, snippet, effect, date and time, etc which is JavaScript based, an error message may be returned (an XML message).
The problem is caused by incorrect dynamic interpretation of Blogger XML template when it generates the HTML webpage for the blog page that is requested, probably due to the fact that the AdSense ad code or other code is not a valid XML, coupled with the fact that some ASCII characters have special meaning and reserved functions, confusing Blogger blogging engine. The resolution to the JavaScript based coding does not work in Blogger HTML template error can be solved by replacing special characters or symbols in the script to HTML code.

The article explains how to escape the characters so that the ads from different ad networks such as Adsense, Adbrite, Adengage, in fact, most ad networks that rely on JavaScript based code for serving ads will work. Once you go through the article, you can easily escape the special characters and make the code work.