TechPuddle is a site I purchased last year from an online friend of mine. I have several blogs that I run with paid writers – I don’t have too much time for blogging these days. TechPuddle doesn’t make me a fortune, but it pays the bloggers and buys me a few beers each month

When designing a site there is no need to reinvent the wheel – sometimes it is easier to follow the leader. If you are a reader of tech blogs you will see that TechPuddle is basically emulating what Engadget.com and other popular tech blogs do – and obviously these bigger guys have done a lot of work on ad placement and site design to optimize their income.

The theme I created for TechPuddle is similar to Engadget in that it has variable width (it stretches in width to fit large screen resolutions and shrinks in width on small screen resolutions so that it still shows all the ads in the right hand sidebars- many themes with right hand sidebars lose revenue on low resolution screens as the ads are ‘cut off’ the screen!) Other features that are similar to Engadget are the double sidebar with industry-standard widths (the sidebars are optimized to fit standard size adunits and banners) and inline advertisements after every post or two. In addition, there is a header advertisement (although this doesn’t get much traffic – I’ve been thinking of incorporating a site-relevant headline above it to draw the readers eye).

One tip I picked up from Zac (the previous owner of TechPuddle) was to include a break in most blog posts – this means that the reader has to view two pages to read the entire story and then reload the previous page to continue reading down the news stories. More pageviews = more revenue from advertisements (even if the number of clicks are the same many advertisers such as valueclick pay per pageview). More importantly, contextual advertising such as AdSense becomes more tightly targeted when on a single post page as the content and tags are all related to one topic, rather than the topics of all posts on the index page.

As with most of the things I do, this theme is a work in progress. I’m going to release it as soon as I make it a little more user friendly. Before I do release it I would love some feedback – any views on ad placement, features etc. Save me doing it twice

Please also leave a comment below to be notified as soon as the theme is released. (BTW, I’m going to turn on my dofollow as soon as I get through the comment backlog). Chow fer now…

Editing the post shows that it is actually an iframe.

I’m not sure if this is a problem with the security of my server, or a WordPress problem. My feeling is that it might be a WordPress security problem as nothing more sinister has shown itself yet.

I’m going to leave it there for now so that SEOidiot can have a look (I know he loves this kind of stuff). You might think I’ve gone daft publicly exposing a security flaw on my server… I can tell you I’m not daft enough to have my personal blog on a server with anything that matters too much, and I have backups.

If you have seen this before please leave a comment. I’m just hoping now that it isn’t some kind of secret project that I have forgotten about…

Watchout WordPress users, the BlackHats are coming!!

As you may or may not know I have several friends who are involved in BlackHat SEO and they have been showing particular interest in the progress of Themey, my WordPress theme site. I had a little think about the potential for WP in the blackhat arena, and the things that can be done with it are very worrysome. The potential includes (but is in no way limited to):

• Using your domain, server and IP address to send bulk email.
• Using your server and IP address to spam other bloggers with comment and trackback spam promoting their latest PPC campaign (Pills, Porn and Casino).
• Using your site to pass PageRank (PR) to their PPC site.

If you are interested in the way that spammers could use your site for evil you can find more details (including an example site showing a method of user-agent based PR spam) in my Security Vulnerability post at Themey.

Thanks go to AmCy of DP who won the auction for Hong Kong

I’m having a third (and possibly final) theme sponsorship auction for the awesome ‘Hong Kong‘ theme. See the auction here.

Spurred on by this success I have decided to auction another theme called ‘Flowers‘. You can see Flowers in action on Themey.com until the end of the auction (at least). Again, I would love to hear comments on the theme and the new site.

The auction is here.

Themey is auctioning the Glow WordPress theme over at DP. The starting bid is only $1.

Buying sponsored links on a WordPress theme is a great way to build (potentially) thousands of links. The links are build steadily over time, and you get to specify the anchor text. Check out this article on sponsored theme link building for more on the advantages of building links using this cost-effective method.

AdSense theme is widget ready and has been designed for WP 2.1 (Ella). I’m hoping that the grey background and grey text should lead the readers eyes to the adsense adverts for a good conversion rate. Again, this theme has been designed without the use of images so it is quick and easy to implement on any WordPress blog.

If you do download and use the theme please let me know what you think by commenting on the theme over at Themey.com

Upgrading from 1.2 and 1.5 to 2.1 is of course the first thing I am doing to plug the security holes, and then I am activating Akismet in the hope of combating future spam. The one thing that has always bugged me is the time it takes to delete the existing comment spam, either using ‘mass edit mode’ in the WordPress Dashboard, or by editing the database manually.

The problem with using ‘mass edit mode’ is that it shows 20 comments at a time, and that to me isn’t mass at all! Deleting 20 comments at a time obviously isn’t practical, but a here’s the tip: searching in ‘mass edit mode’ returns all relevant results on the one page. I search for ’1′ (as most IP addresses contain a ’1′), and this gives all the comments on the blog. Check the checkall checkbox, hit delete, and you’re done until next time.

A second tip: when setting up blogs that you don’t intend to maintain, change the default settings for comments & trackbacks. In the WordPress Dashboard go to Options >> Discussion and uncheck ‘Allow link notifications from other Weblogs (pingbacks and trackbacks.)’ and ‘Allow people to post comments on the article’. Then delete the ‘Hello World’ post and comment as pingbacks and trackbacks are enabled on there (stupid). This should cut down on future work