This post is a work in progress. It’s meant to be a Christmas list for certain categories of people, including bloggers, techies, Volunteer football fans, etc. Right now, I’m just gathering links and information. Organization will come later.
The Treo 650 is going to be a hot Christmas gift this year.
GPS systems would also be nice. Garmin appears to be leading the market.
Just registered for a new domain pointer — www.viewfromrockytop.com — and trying to figure out how it works.
Nothing to see here.
Move along.
Acting on the advice of ProBlogger, I’ve spent a bit of time working ads into the blog. Apparently, ads perform better if they are (1) positioned close to content; and (2) color-coded to match the theme of the blog.
Chitika eMiniMalls (affiliate link) seem to perform better for me, and I wasn’t very happy with the way the Google Adsense script loaded with my site, so I decided to move the Adsense script from my post template to the sidebar and put the Chitika ads in my posts.
I’m using the Chitika eMiniMall WordPress plugin, which allows me to add the script to a post simply by clicking a button when writing posts. Since it’s a button rather than a script you add to a template, you can add it to some posts and not to others. It’s more flexible.
The Adsense looked funky in the sidebar, and it was quite a challenge to modify the colors to more fully integrate it into the theme. First, I tried to locate the HTML color codes from my theme’s style sheet, but eventually figured out that the colors I most wanted to mimic were actually images. (Now that I think about it, duh!)
So that left me trying to figure out how to determine what colors those images are. I had to download a screen grabber, and ended up with a trial version of SnagIt, which works pretty well. I used it to grab a section of my blog showing all of the various colors and saved the grab to an image file.
I then opened up the image file in the Windows’ Paint program, used the Pick Color Tool to choose a color, and clicked on Colors, Edit Colors, and Define Custom Colors. That opened up an Edit Colors box that showed the selected color and the Red, Green, Blue values of that color.
Then, after some searching, I found this HTML Color Code Combination Chooser. I input the RGB values, and it returned the HTML code for that color.
On the Google Adsense page that generates my ad script, I clicked on Manage Color Palettes. That brought up a page where I could modify the colors of the various components of my Adsense ad by inputting the HTML codes I found in the previous step. I saved that palette as a custom palette and returned to the main script-generation page to begin using that palette.
You can see all of this at work right here. Here’s what clicking on the eMiniMall button does:
The color-modified Adsense ad is on the sidebar.
That’s where it’s at now, anyway, because another piece of advice is to move ads periodically so readers don’t become blind to them.
