by Lon on December 11, 2007
I think it’s been about six-months since I’ve began dabbling in blogging via wordpress. I must say that it’s been frustrating at times figuring out how things work since I’m not as technically savvy as I thought I was.
Overall, thought it’s not all perfect, I think the learning curve has finally leveled out and things should be smooth going forward. As much as I love google products, it sure is better than what blogger.com is offering.
I thought I’d share the bling that’s been powering Solar Crash
Themes (I’m drawn to three column themes, and update every few months)
- Cleaker
- Genki
- Mandingo current theme in use
Ads that help pay for my webhosting
- Google Adsense
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Top Plugins
- Akismet for spam protection
- Articles, which easily generates a list of post titles on a page (see Articles link above)
- Category Cloud widget, as seen on the sidebar
- cforms II, a highly advanced contact form – you can try it on the contact link above
- Del.icio.us widget, See the latest links I’ve been bookmarking on del.icio.us
- Feedburner/Feedsmith, channels my feedlinks to feedburner as the primary SolarCrash RSS
- If you liked that, generates random links to related posts under each post
- Picasa Photos, displays random photos on the sidebar from Picasa Web Albums
- Subscribe to Comments, this one is invaluable to interaction notifying commenters of responses
- Twitter Tools, synchronizes twitter updates
- Wordpress Database backup, automatically emails a backup of the blog daily
There are a few other plugins that I use but I haven’t upgraded them to permanent status yet.
Other Items
Plugoo is something I’ve been testing out recently that allows for instant chatting with readers
Blogrush helps with contextual traffic generation
Shelfari, shows random books from my library
1and1.com my current webhost
That’s all for now. If you know of other tools I should really be using, please let me know.
by Lon on December 5, 2007
Over the last year I’ve been experimenting with making some cash through advertising on this blog.
It hasn’t exactly been mind-blowing, but hopefully enough to cover the expenses of the domain name/web hosting and maybe better date nights with my wife (especially since we’ve both been unemployed the last year).
Google adsense has been fantastic, and I like how their ads are actually somewhat relevant. I just started trying out and it seems to be paying out quicker and easier though. So over the next year I’ll likely transition to primarily and see how that goes.
You can give it a try on your own site by clicking . Plus, I get a nice kickback with the referral as well.
