I read a blog today that said some people got their sites hacked because they didn’t upgrade to WordPress version 2.1. I don’t know if it was true or not, but I figure an upgrade is usually a good thing.

It was really easy to do. My advice is to back up everything. You can’t go wrong this way. You can find instructions on how to upgrade here.

I haven’t played around with 2.1 much yet to give you a good review, but so far, I like it.

It’s been a bit since I posted.  I’ve been working on creating a Wordpress theme.  It’s pretty basic, but frustrating to say the least.  I need to learn more CSS and coding.  Things that should be an easy task have turned out being a huge time waster.

Other than working on the Wordpress theme, I do have good news.  My Adsense earnings are finally back to where they were when I gave my site away a while back. 

I’ve found that it takes up too much time for me to submit my sites to directories, so I have resorted to paying other people to do it for me.  The last time I had a directory submission done for me, the site went from a PR of 0 to a PR of 4 at the next page rank update.  The directory submission service submitted my site to 425 directories for $50.  I’m going to have this done for one of my directories.  Hopefully I will have similar results.  Here’s the service that I used last time and that I’m using again:

Directory Submission Service

Here’s another article that I wrote in the past about Directory Submissions.

I sometimes build websites for people just for the fun of it. I really enjoy helping people out especially ministries that are in need of a website, but don’t have the know how to get a website going.

I’ve been working on a particular website for over a year. It hasn’t been because I haven’t had the time to get it done, but I’ve been waiting for the client to give me pics and the info to plug into each page. (This story continues you just to have to hang on for the ride.) Just the other day, I was at a different ministry in down town Grand Rapids and I mentioned to them that I could build a website for them for free. The guy I was talking to quickly asked, “Will we be able to edit the text and the images?” Right then it was like I got a revelation from God. You could almost here the music playing and see a light bulb going on. I started to think, I got to get a hold of a content management system (CMS) for these people. My wheels started to turn. If I could just make the shell of the site for these ministries and have some sort of CMS, that will allow them to add pages, text, images etc. I will make life easier for them and myself. They would get a site that they can edit themselves and I in the long run would save myself time and headaches.

I then started to look for a CMS to use. Everything I tried seemed to be too complex for the end user. I had several people in forums tell me to use Wordpress as a CMS, but I wasn’t for sure how to do it. Then I came across this article:

Using Wordpress as a CMS

Sweet! Finally, some instructions that actually made sense. Wordpress has a very simple admin. Anybody and their brother can use it, even if they are computer illiterate.

Anyways, from the article above I was able to make this CMS thing work with Wordpress. I didn’t do everything that the article recommended because I didn’t need all of the fluff. I got this site done in about 2 hours. The site still needs a logo, some other images, and more content . I’m waiting for the client to get me the logo. The content you see is the content that I copied from the original site that I created for them. They have a lot more info to add.

My wife and I created a template to be given away for free.  You can find it here.  It’s 100% CSS.  I’m not totally done with it yet so I’m not opening it up for download yet.  I’m having issues with it in Firefox.  When you hover your cursor over the links it doesn’t notice the link is there until you put the cursor in a certain spot.  This template look really sweet with a picture behind the news, but it would cost $75 to get the right from istock.com to use it.  Do any of you have any other thoughts of what I can do to make this template better?

This simple script allows you to share Adsense earnings with other people.  This is great for tag team bloggers who want to share their earnings.  You can add more people to share.  You can also adjust percentages, 40/60, 33/33/33, what ever you want.  We used this script on Webpuffs when Jeff and I tag team posted on this blog.
All you have to do is paste this script right after Google Adsense java script tag in place of your Adsense id.  My brother in law created this script and is allowing me to give it away for free.  Chances are if you have questions about it, I will have to ask him to get the answer so bear with me.  I do not have any gurantees with this script.  It’s free.  You are using it at your own risk.  Hopefully, you find it useful.

var google_ad_client1 = “pub-your adense account number here”;
var google_ad_client2 = “pub-your adsense account number here”;
var random_int = Math.round(100*Math.random()); if(random_int <= 50){ rand_google_ad_client = google_ad_client1; } else { rand_google_ad_client = google_ad_client2; }
google_ad_client = rand_google_ad_client;