Online Grandma

Archive for the ‘Nuts and Bolts’ Category

Today I was excited to receive my beta invitation for the new ScribeFire QuickAds. ScribeFire is well known as a blog editor. My previous post talks about that. QuickAds is a new service for bloggers which will let you very simply monitize your blog with ads. You wouldn’t have to sign up with different affiliate programs, or AdSense, or any such thing. It all goes through ScribeFire’s program. They serve up the optimal ad from whichever affiliate their system picks out as best. Then you get one check, which combines earnings from all the ads.

The main charm to this is the simplicity of implementation. A serious professional blogger probably likes to have more control over these things. But for a beginner or a hobby blogger, it brings the ability to put some ads in place with only a couple of clicks. Then all they need to do is blog — and (hopefully) take the monthly check to the bank.

Okay. Sounds good. Now the question is, how does it work?

I followed the link from my invitation. It tells me that, if I’m already using ScribeFire, I should download the beta version which contains the new functionality. Did that. And … uh-oh … it’s an .xpi file. What do you do with that? (Yes, I realize that probably the whole world — other than me — have known the answer to that forever. But I’m fairly clueless about these things.)

However, as luck would have it, only last week I had been experimenting with another beta Firefox add-on. The developer of that one kindly included instructions on how to install it. Otherwise I would have been stalled before ever making it out the gate! In case there are any other dummies like me out there, here’s what you do once you download your .xpi file:

1. Open the Firefox browser.
2. From the File menu, choose “Open File”
3. Browse to wherever you saved the download, and select it.
4. The regular box for installing add-ons will appear, and from there, just choose “Install” as usual.

Simple enough to do, but if you didn’t already know how, you’d be left scratching your head.

So, I got it installed. When ScribeFire is opened, there’s a new tab on the left side. The second tab from the top (with a little green dollar-sign) opens the QuickAds page.

In “Step 1″, you’re invited to add a blog to your account. Clicking that opens a box where you can choose from the blogs you already have attached to ScribeFire. First I chose this blog (which is a WordPress blog). After working on it a few seconds, the setup fairy returned with the disheartening news that this blog could not be configured automatically — I’d have to do it manually. It provided a little snippet of code I was supposed to copy and paste into my blog just before the </body> tag. Okay …

I copied the code and went in search of the tag. I opened my blog’s admin section and went to the “Theme Editor” (found beneath the “Design” tab). There I examined every file in the Theme Files … to no avail. I went back to the view of my blog’s site, and used Firefox to view the source (under View menu, “Page Source”). There, sure enough, down towards the bottom, is a </body> tag. But where does it come from? How do I insert anything just above it?

And that brings up another question. I notice that just above that tag, there’s a snippet of code placed there by another program I’m testing (Woopra — I’ll write about that one of these days) which also wants it place immediately above the </body> tag. If I recall correctly, Google Analytics also wants the same position. So, what are you supposed to do about that? And does the Woopra code already occupying that spot have anything to do with why QuickAds couldn’t automatically configure the site?

Well, this is turning out to be something of a cliffhanger. Stay tuned …

So, in the meantime, giving up on this blog I turned my attention to my other one — a Blogger blog. I repeated “Step 1″ with that one. And it worked.

Moving on to “Step 2″, I selected that blog and clicked “Manage Ads”. That opens the selected site, ready for the next step.

In “Step 3″, I chose from the three ad sizes available, then moving my cursor to the blog, indicated where the ad should appear. It took a couple of tries to get the hang of this, but it was pretty intuitive. The problem here was that none of the choices fit very well into the theme used on that blog. I ended up with a skyscraper on the left side which has just a smidge shaved off the edge where it runs into the body text. Also, a white ad block surrounded by a black border sticks out like a sore thumb on the tan background of my site.

But, after all, this is a beta. I’m sure the final version will smooth out a lot of these wrinkles.

As for the ads served, I can’t make much of a conclusion on that. The site where I put this is my personal blog. It’s not really optimized to any subject. Even I’d have a hard time saying what it’s about. So you can sort of see the program struggling to figure out what kind of ads to serve. I can’t say much about earnings either, because there’s virtually no traffic to that site.

For the sake of experimentation, I’ll add this to a couple more sites that I have. (Not that they have any traffic either!) But, that can wait until tomorrow.

Image via Wikipedia

I’ll see if this post will get to my blog. I’m using ScribeFire, which is a Firefox plugin for making blog entries. It has a lot of nice features, but seems a little short on documentation.

It mentioned on the homepage that you can drag and drop formatted text from the web. Nowhere (that I can see) where that is elaborated on. Guess I’ll just try it and see what happens:

Other Features

Additionally ScribeFire allows you to:

• Categorize and tag your blog posts
• Upload images
• Set timestamps
• Save works-in-progress as notes
• Post an entry as a draft
• Share your posts on social websites
• Upload files via FTP

Okay, I just dragged-and-dropped the above bulleted list. That could be useful at times.

I could save this as a draft or publish it. I could also save a “note”. I tried clicking the “Save Note” button. Don’t know if it did anything or not. My question at this point is, if you save a note where does it go? And, more important, how do you get it back?

Aha! I found the answer to that question. In the right section of the ScribeFire window, there are a row of tabs at the top. The second tab, “Entries”, will give you a second row of tabs, “Posts”, “Notes”, and “Pages”. These will show you lists of — you guessed it! — posts, notes, and pages.

That right-hand panel is also where you configure the connection to your blog (or blogs — you can have a number of them). On the first shot of setting up my WordPress blog, it returned an error that XML-RPC services were disabled on the blog. To fix that, you need to log in to the blog’s admin area. Click “settings”, then “writing”. About halfway down the page, find a checkbox labeled “XML-RPC”. That needs to be checked.

Now I’ll try publishing this. I’ll edit in a few more comments … assuming it works … later.

(Next day)

Yes, it published. Now I’m wondering what will happen if a re-open the post in ScribeFire (by finding it in the right panel under “Entries” –> “Posts”), add some more text to it, and publishing again. Now I see two options below the text entry area: “Publish as Edit” and “Publish to Online Grandma”. I suppose that pretty well answers that question … I’m publishing this as an edit.

Here’s my next experiment. What if I do some editing right on my blog? By working in the WordPress editing page, my cool Zemanta plugin (another Firefox addition that I talked about previously) gets activated. Using its suggestions I can easily choose links, tags, pictures, and related articles to beef up my post.

OK. Did that. Now re-opening ScribeFire to see what it thinks of this development.

Far out! That didn’t bother ScribeFire a bit! When I open the entry just like I did before, there it is — complete with all the new additions, links, pictures, related articles and all. To see the categories and tags I added, I have to look in the right pane under the “Categories” tab — and all are present and accounted for. Obviously, this is where I would enter them when doing that from ScribeFire.

This has the makings of a very nice system. Here’s one obstacle I ran into, though. Zemanta didn’t find a link for a fairly crucial term to this article — “ScribeFire”. It would have been pretty easy to just put it in there the old-fashioned way. But, since I’m playing with tools, I used another of my standbys — Linkify. (I’ve written about that in this blog as well.)

Linkify is a little script-thingy that you keep in the bookmark toolbar of your browser. So, it won’t work in ScribeFire; you need to go to the editing screen on your blog. From there, you have to get into the HTML view. Then select the words you want for your link, click on the “linkify” bookmarklet, and a sidebar with search results will open. Choose the result you want and click “create link”. (I’ll admit this is a bit of overkill if you already know the URL, but it’s useful if you don’t.)

There’s another aspect of ScribeFire that sounds very intriguing. They have recently added an ad serving program, which is in closed Beta at the moment. I put my name on the waiting list to give it a look-see. When I find out more, I’ll make a post on that. But, I must say, indications are favorable. They have information on their website.

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