Chris K Designs

In the age of Professional Blogging, there are many ways to make money with your words. The most common is through advertisements. Some of the easiest way to make money are through targeted ad networks such as Google’s AdSense and Adbrite. You can guess, with the advent of advertising, came WordPress advertising plugins. I’ve got a winning combination of plugins and networks that you can use to help fund your blogging habits.
Continue reading “Pro Blogging Tip: Advertising with WordPress” »

Ever wonder why the ads that Google AdSense decides to show for your blog post or site content doesn’t quite match up with what you were aiming for? Well it’s not surprise that the answer is simple, the ads are selected by a computer. Yeah, no duh right? The problem with computers doing all the work is, they don’t have the ability to distinguish context, importance, or even content as a whole. They can only look at the words you type and compare with a database that it has waiting with hundreds of possible ads. What does this mean for you? I’m glad you asked.

Analogies are like your history professor…

…They can get long winded and boring. Getting relevant ads from any automated ad provider service starts with your writing style. Do you sculpt your posts or pages with heavy analogies? If you do, you might be your own worst enemy. The analogy, while very useful in getting a human to understand your context, is essentially a site crawler’s nightmare. It has no clue that your post is about your actual topic and instead notices a large amount of time spent on the topic that is your analogy. If you are going to try and use analogies to get your point across, do it quickly and concisely.
Continue reading “AdSense, WordPress, and You” »

I have a confession to make, I’m a Google Chrome addict. *Phew* Ok, that wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be. Ever since Google Chrome moved out of beta for the Mac, I’ve given it a fair shot as my primary browser. The change from Firefox to Chrome wasn’t easy to start, but I slowly found Chrome to be must faster and more stable. The one thing I was missing…were my Extensions. Well, now that Chrome is out of beta, Google has enabled extensions for the Mac version. If you are a blogger there are plenty of great plugins to help your writing and moderating, but here are a few that I’m finding helpful.

Continue reading “3 Chrome Extensions for WordPress Blogging” »

I’m a recent adapter to the world of the Blackberry with my BlackBerry Curve 8330 (or Crackberry as they are so honestly referred to). While friends and family have had them for a while, I was dead set on getting an iPhone. Well, without going into details, the network I choose was not AT&T, so I obviously didn’t get an iPhone.

I’ve found the Blackberry to be quite a unique tool. I’m using just standard Blackberry Internet Service (BIS) which seems to pretty much be push email with my Gmail account. I’m a Mac user and am left to use Boot Camp to do updates to the OS, but I do have a sync option in PocketMac. While this is great, it still means I have to connect my Curve to my Mac whenever I want to update my calendar. Then I remember, I have Gmail, which gives me Google Calendar. By simply adding the Google Sync app to my Blackberry, I now have, for all practical purposes, push email and a calendar that syncs with a server.

Before we get technical, I know, my contacts don’t sync, and I don’t have folder sync. I do, however, have an environment that resembles an Exchange environment, including sharing calendars since you can subscribe to another users calendar with Google.

Want to get on this boat? It’s simple, setup your Blackberry to use your Gmail account, then in your browser on the device, visit http://m.google.com/sync. That’s it, now enjoy your new environment, never having to connect your device to your computer unless it’s to do an OS update.