New Banner and Text Ads

A big Thank you goes out to none other than our Wednesday Night Poker Tourney Host, Mookie. He put together a Banner for the top of my blog and he did a great job. I asked him for a banner using the old school Will Wonka and that is what he did. I don't how he does it; but he puts out banner after banner that always look great!! Again. Thanks!!! Let me know what you think of it.

Speaking of Mookie, he posted some of the things going on with Google and their search engines. There have been others that have also weighed in such as Scurvy and Duggle about this topic and I'm sure that there are more that I can't remember at this time.

It just seems a little crazy that they are doing this; but who am I to say. I always think that you should leave it up to the reader to decide what is relevant and not relevant to the search that they are doing. I won't go into much detail here because I am just not that informed on the subject.

One thing I do know is that one of my advertisers requested a single page text ad. In other words, they only wanted the text ad on the main page of my blog. Not when you go to a post specific page or when you are looking at comments. I was stumped on how to do this within blogger; but finally found a way. In case anybody else is looking for this, I will post what I had to do. I found most of what I needed from this link. It basically gave me some code to put into my Blogger template.

I went to the layout of my blog and then clicked on the Edit HTML tab. Right above where the code starts is a box that says "expand Widget Templates". Check this box. Scroll down to the section that includes the code for your Page Element for the section of your blog that has the text links.

There are two lines that I needed to add. See the two lines below that are highlighted red. (FYI.. I had to take the brackets to make the actual code show up on the blog)


b:widget id='HTML2' locked='false' title='WillWonka Partners' type='HTML'
b:includable id='main'
!-- only display title if it's non-empty -->
b:if cond='data:title != ""'
h2 class='title'data:title h2
/b:if
span style="color:#ff0000;">b:if cond='data:blog.url == data:blog.homepageUrl'/span
div class='widget-content'
data:content div
b:include name='quickedit'
span style="color:#ff0000;" /b:if/span
/b:includable
/b:widget
/b:section

That's all there is to it. This will show the ads on the main page but not any of the "site-wide" pages. If this helps the sites, then great. I still think it is pretty silly that Google is doing this. Of course, if you use Yahoo or some other search engines, everything is fine. It will be interesting to see how it all works out.

No poker last night so not much to post about. Holdem Manager has put out their second Plugging Leaks article so I will studying that over the next few days. Good stuff!!

Have a nice day!!!