Features of Thesis 1.8

When an email from Do-It-Yourself Themes arrived in my inbox, I opened it up and saw how they defined this new version of thesis. As they said, Thesis has: rock-solid SEO, outstanding typography, point and click design controls that give you a full range of customization opportunities, free support forums with more than 30,000 members, and a detailed user-guide.

Here’s a quick look at what’s new with Thesis version 1.8:

Header Image Uploader

I disliked thesis because it missed a very common option of uploading a custom header image. I had to get my hands dirty (I don’t have any problem with that though, ’cause I like coding) with codes to do so. But why would I do coding when it said thesis would let me ‘do more and code less’? I disliked thesis.

However, 1.8 comes with built-in header image uploader. You definitely don’t have to mess with a lot of extra codes to have your company or blog logo at the header area of your blog. In my opinion, this is a true step forward for Thesis.

Character Counter

This is no major thing, but is worth telling. As a blogger, you may have already come to know that Search Engines don’t digest the total text of your blog. Be it the homepage or a single post, search spiders come to your blog, look for meta description and take a ‘limited number’ of characters from those inputs. If you’re using All in one SEO Pack plugin, then you already know what it is.

The good news is, Thesis 1.8 introduces this handy thing that is really a necessity that Chris Pearson did not thought of earlier.

Google Fonts

Well, this does excite me pretty much. I’m always a fond of web typography. I love cool fonts because they change the entire look and feel of your blog, website, letter or whatever.  I’m a Google fan, but that’s not what letting me praise Google one more time. It’s because Google has built something called Google Font directory from where you can embed fonts to your blog or website.

And guess what, although this might look a little technically messy, Thesis 1.8 comes with a default option to choose a font for your site from the directory of Google Fonts, which has 28 cool fonts to choose from. Since the service is built-in, giving your blog an outstanding feel with custom web fonts is now easier than ever before with Thesis.

WordPress Nav Menu

I remember I contacted Kristi Hines for the codes of navigation menu on my Thesis-powered WordPress blog (when it existed). Though Kristi made it a lot easier for me to set up that navigation bar right below the website title, I didn’t feel comfortable because then I was not familiar with CSS. I wished if there was a built-in support for that.

If you are a WordPress geek, you should have already known about WordPress custom menu. It’s a navigation bar that you can create, arrange and place without getting your hands dirty with codes. And luckily, Thesis 1.8 supports it. Heads up yo!

That’s not all, obviously. There are other things that are new with Thesis version 1.8. When you upgrade, or buy Thesis 1.8, you won’t need to search around for common help with your framework. Just go to the Thesis Theme User’s Guide and you are most likely to have your problem solved.

My take on Thesis

Of course, a part of the web jumped off Thesis because of a controversial and unpleasant argument between the creator of Thesis and the creator and founder of Automattic, the company behind WordPress. This sparked many questions and anger. As a result, CopyBlogger founder moved off thesis and entered Genesis. So did Chris Brogan.

But they all had professional issues. If you are familiar with Thesis, and if you are interested in playing game with your blog and give it a unique look from your very own imagination, Thesis should fit you. I’m not using Thesis on this blog because I really don’t have that much time to put for development efforts at this moment. When I’m free from study (for a while, at least), I will definitely try out Thesis.

And you, if are serious and determined with blogging or creating some sort of websites that you want to catch readers’ and visitors’ attention, go ahead with Thesis.

One thing to note, Thesis for personal use still costs $87 while the developer’s version costs $164. There is a strong rumor that the price will go up exceeding $200, so don’t be late to buy your copy of Thesis right now.

Click here to see purchase Thesis. It comes with an affordable price suited with your needs.

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• How to Match Your Adsense Unit Color with your Theme by ColorZilla

As of today, there are over 250,000 bloggers using a little tool called WordPress to power their online presence. These numbers come from the folks at WordPress (http://wordpress.org) themselves. So with that many bloggers using the same software, how do you make your blog really stand out? Of course, you could rely on themes and widgets to make your blog unique. But think about it, there has to be a few in the crowd of a quarter million that think, “that is perfect!” when their eyes land on the same theme you are drooling over.

To really make your WordPress blog truly your own, we are going to cover some hacks that you can employ. While this may be a bit intimidating to novice blog administrators, those who step up to the challenge will find that hacking WordPress becomes easier each time you do it.

None of these hacks will simply tell you to install a plugin. Instead, we are going to keep the reliance on plugins to a minimum, reducing the need to consistently update them. Also, plugins require quite a bit more code than these hacks. While it may seem insignificant, reducing code bloat helps your blog’s performance. So instead of clicking the install button, you will need to get your hands dirty with the code.

Display recent comments first

One thing that I don’t like about WordPress is that it lists the first comment to a posting at the top. To read what the latest reader has to say, you have to scroll down to the bottom of the comments. Well, not anymore. This little trick requires you to make a few changes to the comment-template.php in the wp-includes folder. Once you are done, the most recent comment will now be the first one that appears after the posting.

You can show recent comments first.

1. Using an FTP program, or the file management tool available from your web hosting provider, navigate to the /wp-includes folder.
2. Once there, open the comment-template.php file for editing.
3. Around line 846, you will see the following lines of code:

/** @todo Use API instead of SELECTs. */
	if ( $user_ID) {
		$comments = $wpdb->get_results($wpdb->prepare("SELECT * FROM $wpdb->comments WHERE comment_post_ID = %d AND (comment_approved = '1' OR ( user_id = %d AND comment_approved = '0' ) )  ORDER BY comment_date_gmt", $post->ID, $user_ID));
	} else if ( empty($comment_author) ) {
		$comments = get_comments( array('post_id' => $post->ID, 'status' => 'approve', 'order' => 'ASC') );
	} else {
		$comments = $wpdb->get_results($wpdb->prepare("SELECT * FROM $wpdb->comments WHERE comment_post_ID = %d AND ( comment_approved = '1' OR ( comment_author = %s AND comment_author_email = %s AND comment_approved = '0' ) ) ORDER BY comment_date_gmt", $post->ID, wp_specialchars_decode($comment_author,ENT_QUOTES), $comment_author_email));
	}

4. Where the two lines read, ORDER BY comment_date_gmt (this may change as per your time zone), you will need to add the word DESC. Then, change the ASC in the line that reads $comments = get_comments( array(‘post_id’ => $post->ID, ‘status’ => ‘approve’, ‘order’ => ‘ASC’) ); to DESC. When you are finished, the block of code should look like this:

/** @todo Use API instead of SELECTs. */
	if ( $user_ID) {
		$comments = $wpdb->get_results($wpdb->prepare("SELECT * FROM $wpdb->comments WHERE comment_post_ID = %d AND (comment_approved = '1' OR ( user_id = %d AND comment_approved = '0' ) )  ORDER BY comment_date_gmt DESC", $post->ID, $user_ID));
	} else if ( empty($comment_author) ) {
		$comments = get_comments( array('post_id' => $post->ID, 'status' => 'approve', 'order' => 'DESC') );
	} else {
		$comments = $wpdb->get_results($wpdb->prepare("SELECT * FROM $wpdb->comments WHERE comment_post_ID = %d AND ( comment_approved = '1' OR ( comment_author = %s AND comment_author_email = %s AND comment_approved = '0' ) ) ORDER BY comment_date_gmt DESC", $post->ID, wp_specialchars_decode($comment_author,ENT_QUOTES), $comment_author_email));
	}

5. Save your changes.

Once you have made your changes, you should start seeing the most recent comments appear directly under the original post.

Give your post an extra 1000 words

Everyone has heard that a picture is worth a thousand words, so why not give each of your posts an extra grand by adding a thumbnail right next to your carefully crafted words. This nifty little hack will let you do just that without having to create a custom field.

Before you begin, you need to have an image to insert into your post. Since this is a thumbnail, you want to work with something relatively small. The example used here is 250px by 188px. Try to keep your image around the same size. Also, make sure that you change these dimensions in the code if your graphic has a different size. Once you have your image ready to go upload it to the images folder for your current theme and the, follow along:

1. Using an FTP program, or the file management tool available from your web hosting provider, navigate to the folder where your theme is located. This will be in the /wp-content/themes/ folder.
2. Once there, open the index.php file for editing.
3. Edit the following code changing the height and width of the picture to match yours, and changing the name of the image file:

ID, 'post-img', true);
if ($postimageurl) {
?>
<a rel="bookmark" href="&lt;?php the_permalink(); ?&gt;"><img src="&lt;?php echo $postimageurl; ?&gt;" alt="&lt;?php the_title(); ?&gt;" width="250" height="188" /></a>
 
<a rel="bookmark" href="&lt;?php the_permalink(); ?&gt;"><img src="&lt;?php bloginfo('template_url'); ?&gt;/images/sample.png" alt="&lt;?php the_title(); ?&gt;" width="250" height="188" /></a>

4. Now, insert the edited code where you want the thumbnail to appear in your posting.
5. Save the changes to the index.php file.

The image also serves as a url to the complete post along with all of the comments.

Highlight authors comments

When I am reading a post, I like to see how the author responds to some of the comments other readers have submitted, especially if it is a question on how to do something. This hack allows you to identify author’s comments by styling them differently than the others.

Highlighting author comment is important.

In this hack, we only need to add a couple of lines to our style.css file. That’s all, and once we are done, we will have made all of the author’s comments a nice shade of green with italicized text.

1. Using an FTP program, or the file management tool available from your web hosting provider, navigate to the folder where your theme is located. This will be in the /wp-content/themes/ folder.
2. Once there, open the style.css file for editing.
3. At the bottom of the css file, add the following lines:

li.bypostauthor {
	background-color: #66FF66;
        font-style: italic;
 
}

4. Save your file.

This hack used to require a bit more code to make it work, however since the addition of thefunction in 2.8, whenever a comment is posted by the author WordPress adds the bypostauthor class to the tag.

These modifications should help keep the need for plugins to a minimum. Check back later for more ways you can make your blog more unique, and functional, with easy to apply hacks.

About the writer Jeff Orloff is a content writer for Online Schools and Online MBA who gives advice on the pursuit of education and living a healthy life. In his free time he enjoys reading, coaching his son’s sports teams, and web security research.

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• 2 Updates: Why I stopped Disqus and Added CommentLuv

Why I stopped Disqus

Now, this is kind of weird because (i) WordPress doesn’t send notification for spam comments and (ii)I have Akismet plugin active so it’s not possible for every other spam to be approved.

When this thing turned into being a serious headache, I figured out that it was caused by ‘modern comment system’, Disqus. Disqus’ spam prevention system was never this weak before. These days I have noticed that almost all kind of spam comments were getting approved. Even if I mark them as spam, those spam comments, I can’t stop receiving notification for spam comments. If I wanted to stop notification, I had to stop all kind of notification which I didn’t want.

Here’s how my inbox was flooded like:

When my sufferings with my inbox and these bloody notifications began to know no bound, I contacted Disqus support and here’s their response:

After this, I waited for pretty long time but there was no improvement. Spam comments kept getting approved and even if they were caught, I would still suffer with their notification sent by Disqus. At the end of my patience, now I have decided to deactivate Disqus and end up my relationship with this modernized comment system.

As you can see below, Disqus is no more on my blog. And I’m pretty happy with it.

I’ve gone CommentLuv!

Because I believe I should care my readers and commentators a little bit more and open a door to their blogs each time they leave a comment. As you can see below in the comment section, my blog is now CommentLuv enabled!

So, don’t hesitate to post your thoughts each time you read a post. This has two benefits. 1. You are joining the discussion and showing others that you ARE there and you have a blog and an active voice to talk. 2. Each time you post a comment, you’re automatically opening a door to the last-published post of your blog at the time of commenting. Just make sure the CommentLuv button is checked (which is set by default) and don’t forget to type http:// before your blog URL so that CommentLuv system fetches your last post.

Subscribe now!

I believe my blog has always been a blog worth subscribing to. But with these 2 updates, I believe it’s become a must for you all to subscribe and stay updated with all posts and guest posts on my blog. You can subscribe via RSS reader (preferably Google Reader) to my blog’s Feed, http://feeds.feedburner.com/aisajib. You can also subscribe via Email to receive full posts in your inbox.

Share your story

Do you still have Disqus enabled on your blog? Do you have any bad experience with this? Do you believe activating CommentLuv on my blog encourages you to leave a comment each time you read a post? Just shoot your thoughts using my blog’s very own comment form, which you have never seen before!

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Mark notes that PHP 5.2 is the configuration that vast majority of WordPress users are using and it offers substantial improvements over earlier PHP 5 releases. He also reveals that PHP 5.2 will also be the minimum server requirement for the next version of Drupal and Joomla, a pair of other popular Content Management Systems. Mark writes that around 11% of current WordPress installations are running less than PHP 5.2 server configuration. To add more features and make WordPress capable of running them, they need to reevaluate it, a Mark says.

About MySQL database, Mark writes:

In less exciting news, we are also going to be dropping support for MySQL 4 after WordPress 3.1. Fewer than 6 percent of WordPress users are running MySQL 4. The new required MySQL version for WordPress 3.2 will be 5.0.15.

Therefore, all current WordPress users/administrators are urged to upgrade their server compatibility to PHP 5.2 and MySQL 5.0.15. If you are not sure which version of PHP and MySQL your server supports, you can install and activate this handy plugin called “Health Check” to determine it and take action if necessary.

What is your health?

Which version of PHP and MySQL is your server running? Are you rushing to upgrade or still waiting until the WordPress 3.2 is released? For your information, you cannot upgrade to WordPress 3.2 (once it is released) unless your server runs PHP 5.2 and MySQL 5.0.15. So, take actions quickly if you run lower server configuration.

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• 2 Updates: Why I stopped Disqus and Added CommentLuv
• How to change the logo URL in WordPress login page

As I told in the first post, you need FTP access to do this. If you have access, then simply follow the steps below (just like the first one).

Step by Step tutorial

Step 1: Log in to your site’s FTP and open up the wp-login.php file from the WordPress root folder. If you don’t have any FTP client installed on your desktop, you may try Net2FTP – the best web based FTP client I’ve come across so far.

Step 2: Look for

<div id="login">

You’ll see this exists twice in the file. One right below another. You need to edit the first one.

Step 3: Under the first login div, you’ll see the link of WordPress (http://wordpress.org/). All you need to do is replace this link with your domain name. On the same line, you’ll see the default title “Powered by WordPress” which you can replace with your site’s title, too.

Step 4: Save the file.

Things to know

As I told earlier (in the previous post), these settings will go away as soon as you upgrade your WordPress version or reinstall the current version. It is recommended that you keep a backup of this file so that you can upload it and restore the settings after your WordPress version is upgraded.

Why not plugin?

It’s true that there are lots of plugins to handle this. But I personally don’t prefer to use too many plugins. You’ll see that I used to place adsense manually and do all other stuffs which are possibly for me to do without any plugins. Too many plugins slow down the post and sometimes heavies your database with too many tables. So, it is recommended that you avoid using plugins for simple stuffs such as changing the login page logo and URL.

Your turn

So, did you mess anything up while doing this easy task? No? That’s wonderful. You may want to show us how you’ve made your WordPress login page’s logo. Share the link in the comment area including your own opinion on how much my posts helped you to get this done.

If you liked this post (including the previous one), don’t forget to share it on Facebook, tweet it on Twitter, and bookmark on other social bookmarking services.

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WordPress is one of the most widely used and powerful Content Management Softwares on the Internet today. Lean, efficient and infinitely extensible, WordPress can be used as the backbone for anything from a small-scale blog to a full-fledged e-commerce website. WordPress is so easy to develop with; thanks to the massive collection of plugins available.

Recently, Google announced that they are putting higher priority to those websites/blogs which loads faster. Priority of what? Definitely, priority for showing up in Search Engine Result Page. After this announcement was made, webmasters and bloggers are impatient to make sure that their blogs load faster than others so that Google doesn’t punish it by putting it back. You too should rush for this. Here are 8 useful WordPress plugins to speed up your WordPress blog and keep pace with the search monster, Google.

W3 Total Cache

Caching on every level of the computing hierarchy speeds up performance and results. W3 Total Cache allows for quicker loading and page delivery through browser caching, HTTP compression of all the HTML, CSS and Javascript feeds on your site as well as many other techniques to significantly improve overall website performance and speed. As a catch-all plugin for almost all front-end code rendering, Total Cache is a smart choice.

WP Super Cache

In some ways the grand-daddy of WordPress speed optimization plugins, Super Cache provides a number of features compiled by a wide range of speed and security experts and professionals. Essentially, it creates static HTML files of all the content on your sites individual pages for faster serving to clients requesting information. WP Super Cache should be the first plugin you enable on your site for maximum speed.

WP Optimize

Database optimization is fairly important in the smooth operation of a high traffic site. Query caching, proper database maintenance and organization takes some of the pressure of off HTTP servers, saving money and shaving precious milliseconds off of load times. WP Optimize gives administrators the ability to delete post revisions and spam comments in a few simple steps, trimming the fat from database tables.

Parallelize

Web browsers are capable of handling quite a few HTTP requests per second, but only a handful from any given host server. Parallelize spreads all those requests out amongst a number of different host names for quicker image and attachment loading for quicker page retrieval and loading on the client browser. Alongside database caching plugins, Parallelize is a key component in speeding up complex, database driven websites.

WP CSS

Minifying CSS stylesheets as well as Javascript files by removing through gzip compression improves load times far more than one would expect. This handy plugin squashes file size to the bare minimum for ultrafast response times. By compressing CSS files with WP CSS, you can remove whitespace and streamline the stylesheet files of your site to cut down on space and reduce bandwidth.

CDN Tools

It’s not uncommon for most sites to use a Javascript library such as Prototype or MooTools to speed up development time, responsiveness and User Interface interaction. Content Delivery Networks serve up services like Google’s Jquery API, amongst others. CDN Tools is a plugin that combines and manages many different CDN resources at the same time automatically without any manual configuration required.

DB Cache Reloaded

As you may have guessed from the general theme of this lineup, caching is a huge part of website optimization. A lot of that happens on the back end of a site, within the database. DB Cache Reloaded caches every query to the database within a given time frame for quicker HTML caching while at the same time requiring less hard drive space.

WP Smush.it

Images, CSS Sprites, Icons and photos can take up a lot of space if you’re not careful. The best way to cut down on bandwidth and load times is to use lossless compression techniques to achieve a finely tuned balance between picture quality and data size. WP Smush.it handles this compression and image optimization automatically for you, and even converts GIF files to PNG.

Conclusion

This short list of handy add-ons barely scratches the surface of the deep pool of software plugins that can be used to make any WordPress installation fast and dependable. The right combination of plugins depends on your own specific needs. For more information, the Yahoo Developer Network has plenty of great resources concerning website speed and optimization to help you get the most out of WordPress or any other CMS.

About the writer: Melissa Tamura ranked the top engineering colleges for Zen College Life, a directory of online degree programs.

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• How to change the logo URL in WordPress login page

Please remember that you can only change the WordPress logo from your login page only if:

1. Your blog is hosted on a self-hosted server. For example, you cannot get rid of WordPress.com logo if your blog is hosted on WordPress.com free server.
2. You have access to the FTP server of your blog.

Step by Step Tutorial

Step 1: First, Prepare your desired logo you want to see in your login page. It is recommended that you use a logo similar to your blog’s banner. But make sure the file’s width and height is not more than 310pixels and 70pixels respectively. Also your logo should be in *.gif format. PNG and JPG may also work, but in that case you will have to edit a few codes which is not recommended for newbies.

Step 2: Rename your new logo as “logo-login.gif”. Please note that once you save your logo as *.gif format, you don’t have to write that .gif part in the file name. Just write logo-login and that will do

Step 3: Now, you need to log in to your FTP server using an FTP client. If you don’t have any FTP client installed on your desktop, you might want to use web-based FTP client, Net2FTP.

Step 4: After you log in to your FTP server,  go to your WordPress directory. You’ll see a couple of sub-directories named as “wp-admin”, “wp-content” etc. Go to the sub-directory “wp-admin” and then enter the sub-directory “images”.

Now, a list of images will be shown up in the screen.

Step 5: At this point, you will need to back up the logo you see while logging in to your dashboard. Find out the file named “logo-login.gif”. Click on it and it will be downloaded to your computer. Save it in any folder you like. And then delete this from the server.

To delete, simply check the “logo-login.gif” file and click “delete” from the upper right corner of the page.

Step 6: Now upload your new logo using the upload button at the upper left corner of the page.

Once upload is completed, the system may take a few minutes to change the logo. Refresh your login page a few times and you’ll see the default WordPress logo is gone replacing your new one.

See an example below:

My banner at the login page.

Restore

In case you see that you don’t like your new logo, just remove it from the server and upload the old “logo-login.gif” from your computer. Please note that your logo will be gone each time you upgrade your wordpress to a new version. But don’t worry; the process is just as simple as deleting and uploading a file.

Change the Login URL/Link

Performing the task following the steps above will replace the default wordpress logo with your own one. However, the title “Powered by WordPress” and a link to wordpress.org will still remain there. It’s not that difficult to change those links and allow JPG or PNG format files as your logo. You will need to edit an important file of your wordpress, which is risky unless you’re familiar with PHP.

However, a tutorial describing the process making it easier to get them done has been published. Click the link below to read it.

How to change the logo URL in WordPress.

It’s strongly recommended that you Subscribe to RSS feed to stay updated with the latest posts for such short tips that helps you do simple tweaks. You can also subscribe to receive all new posts right on your inbox, just enter your email address (no spam, guaranteed!) into the sidebar’s “Subscribe the way you like” box.

Share Your Thoughts

Share what you think about this. Are you happy with your wordpress default logo on your login page or you really want to change it to make your login page look more personal? Do you think it is necessary to change the logo you see while logging in? I think it is a must if you have multiple authors on your blog. I don’t have multiple authors here, still I would like to see my login page more personalized and that’s why I did this.

Don’t hesitate to tell me if you face any difficulties while performing the tasks above.

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• How to change the logo URL in WordPress login page
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Google Buzz also comes with Google’s RSS reading service, Google Reader. Here you won’t see anything called Buzz, but you will be following those Google Reader users who you follow on Buzz. It’s like sharing a link to a post or an article with all to your followers. Not to mention you can make updates private, too.

As Google Buzz is another growing social media tool, developers have created plugins to let wordpress bloggers put a ‘buzz this’ button after all wordpress posts so that readers can share the content they like with their buzz followers.

I think I don’t need to say that I’ve recently integrated “Buzz This” button to all of my posts on this blog. You must have been seeing the button live now.

Adding Buzz This button to your wordpress blog is as simple as installing and activating a plugin. There are a few plugins out there but there’s only one that I found user-friendliest and easiest to use. Here’s my recommendation:

WordPress G_Buzz_Button

Download WordPress G_Buzz_Button from the wordpress plugin directory or install it directly to your wordpress via built-in plugin installer. Use the search term “G_Buzz_Button” and you will be able to install and activate it immediately.

After you activate, there will be an option named Google Buzz visible under your settings menu. Clicking that will lead you to the plugin settings page, which looks like the following.

From the settings page, you can turn buzz counter on or off, set the alignment of the button, and edit Custom CSS for both the style of the button and the text. I’ve come through many other plugins that adds buzz this button but none of them looked offering all of these facilities. That’s why I choose this plugin as the best for placing buzz this button anywhere on your wordpress posts.

Share your view with us about Google Buzz. Do you think sharing your post to Google Buzz is worth it?

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• 8 Must Have plugins to speed up WordPress Blog
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• Thesis 1.8 hits the market: See what’s new and buy now!
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• 2 Updates: Why I stopped Disqus and Added CommentLuv
• How to change the logo URL in WordPress login page

Under certain conditions, WordPress.com (the free hosted blog) now lets its bloggers place adsense in their wordpress.com blogs. Recently, while exploring through the WordPress support page, I’ve found the update which was not announced in public. This is a short post to let my readers know about it.

WordPress.com is the best free blogging platform the earth has ever seen. Anyone wanting to blog can start blogging in less than a minute. It takes hassles off, makes blogging faster, easier, and unworried. Yes, you don’t have to worry about the data of your blog. WordPress.com has a strong backup of your data in more than one datacenter making sure that if one falls into the sea, others remain stable.

You are allowed to buy a few upgrades, but you aren’t allowed to run your own ads on the WordPress.com network. If you’re willing to pay a high amount, then you can. But for personal bloggers, no one will buy WordPress.com hosting. Self-hosted takes less money.

For years, wordpress.com authority has been saying that it is thinking about enabling end-bloggers to put their adsense ads so that they can earn a few money from their blogs. At last, wordpress.com has come up with a beta testing feature that calls ‘certain bloggers’ to put up their adsense ads.

The feature has been named “Ad Control”, under which a blog having over 50,000 25,000 pageviews per month can put their adsense unit under the condition of sharing the revenue with wordpress.com. To put simply, the total amount of revenue will split 50/50, which means half goes to the blogger and other half to wordpress.com.

The conditions are simple,

1. Your blog has to get over 50 25 thousands pageviews per month. It will make you eligible to apply.
3. If your application is accepted, you will serve adsense ads to your wordpress.com blog. Half of the total amount you earn from that wordpress.com blog will go to wordpress.com and the other half will remain at your account.

If you meet those conditions, you can apply for Ad Control feature on your blog. Simply email to ad-control@wordpress.com.

I suppose that many bloggers don’t have a wordpress.com account which receives 50k pageviews per month. This is because premium bloggers don’t start at wordpress.com. But those bloggers who already have this amount of page impressions per month did not start blogging with a view of making money online. But today, wordpress.com gives them a chance.

What about you, reader? Do you own such a busy blog in wordpress.com? Or you are going to create one right now with a target of getting over 25 thousands pageviews each day?

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Colors have limits!

Let me show you the easiest way how you can match your adsense unit color with that being used in your theme, or wherever you are about to insert adsense.

First, you need to be using Firefox as your browser, because I’m about to tell you about a Firefox plugin that lets you find out the color code of any color visible in the page. The little plugin will tell you the exact color code which later you can use as the color of any part for your adsense unit.

Installation

To install colorzilla in your Firefox browser, click here and click the “Add to Firefox” button. The browser will then start downloading and installing the plugin. You need to wait a moment until the installation completes and the add-on box pops up with a notification. Now, you need to restart your Firefox to activate ColorZilla. You can restart immediately or anytime later at your convenience. Whenever the brower is restarted, the plugin will begin to work.

Find Color Reading

To simply find out the color reading or color code of any pixel of the page opened, click on the ColorZilla’s eyedropper icon at the lower left of your browser (very left of your status bar).

Once clicked, your cursor will be activated as colorpicker and will change its face. Now, move anywhere on your page and click on your desired area to get color reading of. By default, you will be seeing a preview of the color at the colorzilla icon and color reading at the statusbar as you move your cursor. Once you click somewhere, it will remember it and then you will get additional options to copy color code or make any change in settings, such as copying color code with or without # at the beginning.

See the following images.

Match with Adsense

Now, you can simply find out the color code of any area of your blog or website. For example, find out the linked text color and get the reading using colorzilla. Then simply go to adsense and put color of Adsense ads’ title text exactly what color code your theme is using for linked texts.

In the same way, you can also find out the background color of your blog and use it as adsense background color to match them both perfectly.

Need Help Inserting Adsense?

If you’re a novice user or don’t want to get puzzled with codes for inserting adsense in your post, I recommend using All in one Adsense and YPN plugin for adsense that makes inserting adsense ads in wordpress posts a childplay. Click here to read out a review about it and give it a try. I’m sure it’s worth using on your blog for simplifying the process.

However, if you want to try out yourself without help of any plugin, here’s how you can do so.

If you want to put adsense as a widget in the sidebar, then you can do it by yourself. Just copy the javascript code generated by Google Adsense, place a text widget on the expected position, paste the code and save. That’s all.

Still in need of Help?

I will be happy to help you in any way I can. Just shoot your question, comment, or problem in the comment box and I will dive into researching for a solution for you.

Also, share your experience with color choice of adsense unit in your blog or website. Don’t you think the plugin ColorZilla is extremely useful especially for Adsense?

You may have missed:

• Thesis 1.8 hits the market: See what’s new and buy now!
• 3 easy WordPress hacks to make your blog stand out
• 2 Updates: Why I stopped Disqus and Added CommentLuv
• WordPress precaution: PHP 5.2 will be the minimum requirement
• How to change the logo URL in WordPress login page
• 8 Must Have plugins to speed up WordPress Blog