A while back I wrote a brief article, AdSense and WordPress 404s, which showed how to keep AdSense off your 404 error pages using WordPress' built in conditional tags.

Another concern which many users might want to address surrounds the issue of AdSense ads being served to your "Write Post" and "Write Page" sections of the WordPress back end. If you look at the pages provided to you for writing posts and pages in WordPress you'll note that a sample of the page is rendered in the "Post Preview" section at the bottom.

What's unfortunate here, is that the "post preview" pulls code right off the 'single.php' template. That means if there is any AdSense code on that template page something that can be misconstrued as a false impression can occur. While the Google AdSense ToS isn't clear on this - I'd rather be safe then sorry. You?

Anyway, here's what we do. For maximum safety we'll build off the code established in the previous post, AdSense and WordPress 404s. Please check out that post if you need more clarification, for now we're working with the following code as a starting base. Read the Rest of this post

I played around for a few days trying to figure out WordPress plugins. While in the end it's a pretty easy process, I wanted to do a really basic tutorial for folks who were just getting started. While the WordPress Codex has some links that are great for figuring out some of the more complex tasks, the real basic stuff can be daunting when your getting started with WordPress and especially PHP (basically a requirement of plugins).

To get started I recommend having or getting a basic knowledge of PHP. It's really, REALLY not that hard to come across. I recommend getting started with a book like Sam's Learn PHP in 24 Hours. It's one of the first PHP books I bought and after reading it I was ready to do most of the basic stuff that will be covered in this first tutorial.

This first plugin is going to be very simple. To keep a theme page from getting over cluttered, we're going to add a small plugin just to add a Google Ad quickly. Instead of several lines of code on our index.php file we'll have only one to call the whole Ad. Read the Rest of this post

If you're using AdSense in your sidebar or header (two relatively popular spots in WordPress templates) you need to be aware that Google prohibits the placement of AdSense blocks on Error pages. If you're using a custom 404 page this can pose a problem. The trick here, of course, is that you want to make sure you keep your ads on every other page - but you don't want them appearing on your 404 pages.

Luckily WordPress has a series of "Conditional Tags" that can help you overcome this dilemma. Read the Rest of this post