OpenLinkz

It's come to my attention that some large corporations are configuring their firewalls to block widgets. Right now, I know that widgets from WidgetBox have been blocked.

I suppose it was only a matter of time before widgets were targeted. It is well known that many corporate IT departments are against social networking tools. Sites like Twitter, Plurk, Facebook and Mashable are routinely blocked. Even simple tools like Yahoo! email and Google Docs are blocked. The ostensible reason is that network security teams are working to prevent unauthorized applications from introducing viruses and malware or otherwise compromising internal corporate systems.

Of course, these applications can be big time wasters and it is reasonable for corporate management to want to ensure workers keep their nose to the grindstone.

In the meantime, I believe Google Gadgets are still working on most corporate networks. Does anyone know of any more widget platforms that are being blocked?

For those of you who use Blogger as your blogging platform, you may be wondering how to set up ads after each post.

Blogger allows users to set up AdSense ads after each post. But what if you want to use ads from an affiliate network or ad network of your own choice? And especially, how do you display a different ad after each post when there are multiple posts on the page? Blogger doesn't have a built-in page element that supports that functionality.

This post explains how to do it. If you know a little Javascript, it won't be too hard for you to implement.

First, you need to decide how many posts you want to display on the homepage of your blog. For our example, let's say three posts will be displayed.

We then need to set up a counter that keeps track of which post is being displayed. Blogger will loop through posts until it hits the maximum number that you designated.

Add an HTML/Javascript page element to your blog. Add some script tags to it and implement the code for the counter, initializing it as follows:

Create a function that will display your ads and enter it after the variable initialization described above. Our example does it as follows:


Then add a set of IF statements that utilize the counter to display your ads in sequence:

Note that the code increments the counter each time a post is displayed on the page.

Then, we need to obtain the HTML or script for the three ads that will be displayed. The trick is to take the statements that cause the ad to be displayed and convert those statements to Javascript document.writeln statements. This is not as hard as it seems. Peter Bromberg has written an article at EggheadCafe titled "Convert HTML/Script to Javascript Include Source". The article includes a converter. Paste the code for an ad into the first text box, click the Convert button and retrieve the document.writeln statement from from the second text box. Then take the document.writeln statement and plug into our function. After doing this three times, our function will look like the following:


We now have a function that will display a different ad for each post. We now have to call the function from the appropriate place in the Blogger template. Go to the Layout tab in Blogger and click "Edit HTML". Click the "Expand Widget Templates" checkbox. Scroll down to the section that displays the labels for a post. Look for the following line of code:


Just before the end tag for this <p> section, paste the following:


That's all there is to it!

This post is to announce our newest widget, OpenAdSlider. This is a sliding panel that can contain an advertisement, banner ad, text links or any other message or image. The panel slides up from the bottom of the browser window and stops as soon as it is fully displayed. This means it does not float across the entire page getting in the way of your content.

This ad panel will not be blocked by pop-up blockers. It is a DIV within the page and, as such, it can house Google AdSense ads that are contextually in synch with your page content.

We have provided a free web-based wizard on the OpenLinkz homepage so you can generate the style sheet, HTML and Javascript necessary to implement the sliding ad panel. You can customize the height of the panel, the background color and the font color. You can plug in any ad code, HTML, Javascript or image code you wish by pasting it into a text box.

If you are worried about overdoing it with sliding ads, you can choose whether you want the ad to display on every page view or only on the first page view of the user's session. Indeed, that is how we have it configured on this blog. In either case, the user can easily close the panel and it will slide out of sight.

We have decided to provide this wizard free of charge. Most other sites require you to pay for a downloaded code generator. Costs range from around $20 all the way up to $125.

We think this sliding ad panel helps you get your advertising message displayed above the fold without being too obtrusive. The sliding action immediately draws the user's eye to the ad content. Try it on the OpenLinkz homepage and see what you think!