Author Archives: Stephen Cronin

About Stephen Cronin

Stephen Cronin has worked in the software industry in Australia, UK and USA for 13 years. He has held senior positions including General Manager, Business Manager, International Product Manager and has also worked as web developer, project manager, trainer and support technician.

Don’t Let Your CommentLuv Be Stolen Away!

| Created: February 5th, 2008
Search Engine Optimisation 269 Comments

Many WordPress blogs are adopting the CommentLuv plugin, because it gives readers extra incentive to make a comment – it automatically adds a link to the commentator’s latest post at the end of their comment.

This is great for the commentator, for several reasons outlined below. However, some people are not taking full advantage of the benefits. Continue reading

WordPress Plugin IFrameWidgets 1.0 Released

| Created: January 30th, 2008
WordPress Plugin News 16 Comments

I’m pleased to release IFrameWidgets v1.0, a WordPress plugin that can stop slow loading JavaScript widgets from breaking your page.

Widgets remain hidden until completely loaded, then appear in whole. If they don’t load, they won’t take up any space on your sidebar. If they load slowly, or hang, they won’t stop the rest of your page from loading. Continue reading

Finally – The Google Slap…

| Created: January 29th, 2008
General 45 Comments

More Than Scratch The Surface has finally been penalised by Google. I noticed today that my toolbar PageRank has dropped from PR4 to PR0. It appears to only be a toolbar PR penalty – I am still in the same place in the SERPs. Continue reading

Shylock Adsense Plugin – Hack To Avoid Smart Pricing

| Created: January 24th, 2008
Adsense Smart Pricing 43 Comments

In my last post, I talked about Adsense Smart Pricing and how blogs can avoid it by only showing ads to search engine visitors.

One option for WordPress is the Who Sees Ads plugin, which has the ability to do this. I prefer the Shylock Adsense plugin for the reasons given in my last post: automatic placement of ads; no need to enter placeholder in each post; easy to move ads from, say, top right to top left, etc.

The problem with Shylock Adsense is that although it can show ads on old posts only (mostly search engine traffic), there is no option to show ads only to search engine traffic. I really wanted this functionality, so I added a few lines of code to the plugin to enable it. In this post I explain how to do it. Continue reading

How To Avoid Adsense Smart Pricing On Blogs

| Created: January 15th, 2008
Adsense Smart Pricing 86 Comments

In my last post, I mentioned the danger Adsense Smart Pricing poses to blogs. Blogs are particularly vulnerable because most blogs don’t work well with Adsense. In this post, I examine the issue further and look at a couple of potential solutions for WordPress users – but there’s a twist in the tale. Continue reading

The Adsense Dilemma (Or How To Make Money)

| Created: January 9th, 2008
Make Money Online 69 Comments

Adsense – some love it, some hate it. It doesn’t work for all sites, but there’s no denying that on the right site, it can make a lot of money.

Most beginners don’t understand what type of site it works well on. They slap Adsense on their blog and expect the cash to come rolling in. Of course, it doesn’t. Why? Because Adsense doesn’t work well on their type of site.

In this article, I explain the underlying principle of Adsense and look at the attributes of sites that are successful with Adsense. Continue reading

WordPress Plugin – DualFeeds v1.11 Released

| Created: December 28th, 2007
WordPress Plugin News 5 Comments

I’ve just released version 1.11 of the DualFeeds plugin for WordPress. Continue reading

PHP Performance Profiling With APD On Windows

| Created: December 27th, 2007
Web Page Optimisation 26 Comments

When writing code, its important to keep system performance in mind. No matter how useful your software is, if it places too much stress on the server, it won’t be used. How can you tell if your code is efficient? Well, experience helps, but it also pays to have good tools. Continue reading

Make Money Online – Don’t Forget Your Existing Skills

| Created: December 6th, 2007
Make Money Online 142 Comments

A lot of my favourite blogs discuss making money online. I’ve been plotting how I can get in on the action – but I recently had a revelation. While reading about the many different strategies, I’d lost sight of what’s most likely to make me decent money online: leveraging my existing skill set. Continue reading

FeedEntryHeader In Action (On A Splog)

| Created: December 5th, 2007
WordPress Plugin News 11 Comments

As a followup to my announcement of the new FeedEntryHeader plugin, I thought I’d share a screenshot of it in action. Predictably, the announcement post was scraped within minutes of me publishing it. Here is what the output looks like on the splog. Continue reading