More AFW Site ChangesAll Freelance Writing

I’ve been tweaking and re-tweaking things here and at the freelance writing jobs blog lately. Most of the changes, you hopefully won’t notice. However, just to keep you in the loop of what’s been going on, and what will soon be changing (so you can let me know if you run into any glitches with anything), here’s a run-down:

Both blogs were finally updated to the newest version of WordPress (2.6.2). Everything seems to be OK so far, but if there are issues with anything, do let me know.
On this blog, I’ve added a feed of the last five job posting lists from AllFreelanceWritingJobs.com to make them a bit easier to access.
The AFWJ homepage is no longer just the job board, where you had to click through to get to the actual list posts. Now the most recent job list appears on the homepage, with the job board below it (and below individual posts so you can see, and search for, further writing gigs).
I know the category page, archive pages, etc. are AFWJ are also only showing one post per page. I do know there’s a relatively easy fix for that. If I have time to get in there today, I will. If not, that will be fixed at some point this week.
The AFWJ theme should now fully match this one, other than some minor ad and navigational links which should stay different.
I’m not crazy about the adsense placement on this blog in-posts. With the upgrade, I can now insert ads manually in custom spots, and the plan is to go that route shortly. Again, hopefully I’ll be able to this week – if not, I’ll spend some time on it over the following weekend.
You may notice there are fewer categories here. Some of them were overlapping, or they just weren’t terribly effective, so I condensed things and deleted several categories (also changed the name of one or two slightly). All of the old permalinks should automatically be redirecting to the new categories – in other words, you shouldn’t come across broken links if everything went through OK.

I think that covers everything for this update. Let me know if there are any issues with posts returning errors from the changed permalinks, or anything that you may come across that could be upgrade-related.

http://3bm.co/pNIOac

2 Responses to More AFW Site Changes

Avid Writer says:

September 29, 2008 at 9:31 am

I don’t know Jennifer. I was actually admiring how you have your adsense arranged on this page. It looks a lot like it’s part of your home page instead of sticking out.

Jennifer Mattern says:

September 29, 2008 at 9:35 am

Sorry – let me clarify. :)

The adsense on the homepage won’t be changing at all. It’s the adsense on individual post pages that will be changing. Right now it’s really bugging me visually on those post pages, but it’s also not converting with that layout – which I half-expected. The manual ad insertions on single post pages will let me maximize conversions while also optimizing placement in individual posts (for example, sometimes when they’re on the left, they interfere with the bullet points in a list – manually including them means on posts like that I’ll be able to move the location, right-align it, or choose a different ad size that works better for the post length).

I just did the same thing on my business blog, and it’s working well there with the variety of post types. You can see an example of it here – formerly, if I wanted to include something like that, I’d do it in the template where it would have to be in the same position on every page, or I’d have to use a plugin (which unfortunately caused me a lot of problems on a few of my sites when that plugin was no longer supported). The newer version of wordpress allows us to add the code directly finally, so I can control which posts have ads, which don’t, and where they’re placed in individual cases.

Avid Writer says:

September 29, 2008 at 9:31 am

I don’t know Jennifer. I was actually admiring how you have your adsense arranged on this page. It looks a lot like it’s part of your home page instead of sticking out.
Jennifer Mattern says:

September 29, 2008 at 9:35 am

Sorry – let me clarify. :)

The adsense on the homepage won’t be changing at all. It’s the adsense on individual post pages that will be changing. Right now it’s really bugging me visually on those post pages, but it’s also not converting with that layout – which I half-expected. The manual ad insertions on single post pages will let me maximize conversions while also optimizing placement in individual posts (for example, sometimes when they’re on the left, they interfere with the bullet points in a list – manually including them means on posts like that I’ll be able to move the location, right-align it, or choose a different ad size that works better for the post length).

I just did the same thing on my business blog, and it’s working well there with the variety of post types. You can see an example of it here – formerly, if I wanted to include something like that, I’d do it in the template where it would have to be in the same position on every page, or I’d have to use a plugin (which unfortunately caused me a lot of problems on a few of my sites when that plugin was no longer supported). The newer version of wordpress allows us to add the code directly finally, so I can control which posts have ads, which don’t, and where they’re placed in individual cases.