OpenLinkz

I have using Blogger as my blogging platform for over a year and a half and I had implemented the AddThis bookmarking widget within each post. I recently upgraded to the new drop-down widget. Suddenly, I began to see strange things happen to the layout of certain blog posts.

As it turns out, any post with an apostrophe or single quote within the title causes a problem with the AddThis Javascript. Basically, the title of a post is stored as a Javascript string variable. If there is an apostrophe or single quote in the middle of the variable, it generates an error related to unterminated strings. Unfortunately, it is not so uncommon to want to use apostrophes.

Luckily, it is easy to fix this by adding one line of code to the Javascript supplied by AddThis.

This is the way the code looks when I get it from AddThis (I have added some carriage returns to enhance readability):

First, change the single quotes around '<data:post.title/>' to double quotes as follows:

Then add the following line of code:

This approach removes the apostrophe in the title string.

This is not a perfect solution, but it will prevent your titles from being cut off when bookmarking. And most importantly, it won't cause any problems with your page layout. Just be sure not t0 use any double quotes in your blog titles.

If you have obtained the code for your ad slider here at OpenLinkz using our wizard, then you are aware that the ad panel is essentially a plain rectangle in a single color with an ad in the middle, a text message on the left and the link for closing the panel on the right.

It is quite easy to embellish the ad panel by adding a border or a background image. Here's how it's done.

In the CSS style section, look for the "bottomBanner" id.

You can add either one of the following lines or add them both:

The first line would add a black border at the top of the ad panel that is 2 pixels thick. You can, of course, vary color and border thickness as you desire. One thing to remember, however, is you need to add the thickness of the border to the ad height. For our example, in the script section you would need to modify the following line of code:


The second line would take an image of your choice (myImage, in this example) and repeat it across the ad panel. This would be appropriate if you are adding a colored gradient effect to the ad panel. Omit the "repeat" keyword and the image will, by default, appear once at the left end of the ad panel.

Note: for those of you who are installing the code in a Blogger template, you may find that using the "top" and "repeat" keywords caused the image to not appear at all! Trying removing the keywords and it will fix this problem.

Test, test, test --

Using these techniques, you can soften or embellish the effect of seeing the ad panel sliding into sight. Be sure to try an A/B test to determine if you get more clicks with or without the embellishments. Sometimes subtle changes can have surprising results when trying to make money online.

I have had the OpenLinkz ad slider running on my other blog, Trade Radar, for a few weeks now. I am stunned at how well it is performing. The click through rate is more than twice that of any other ad on the site. I am just running a simple Google AdSense 468 X 60 half-banner but it gets plenty of action.

There are issues involved that web site or blog owners need to address when using sliding ads.

First, decide if you are comfortable displaying a sliding ad. Would you consider it too obtrusive and bothersome to your readers? I worried about this so I opted to only display the ad one time, on the first page viewed by the reader. Subsequent page views will not trigger the appearance of the sliding ad. Also, don't pick an ad that is too big.

Second, you need to carefully pick the appropriate ad to display. It needs to load quickly so the movement of sliding ad panel isn't "herky jerky".

Third, another aspect of picking the best possible ad is related to the payment method. This ad will definitely get clicked so you need to select an ad that has a reasonable Pay-per-Click rate. Since the sliding ad may start stealing clicks from other ads on your page, you need to carefully evaluate the best approach to maximize your earnings.

There are a number of blog posts floating around that say you should minimize the number of AdSense ads on a page in order to get the best PPC rate available for the type of content on that particular page. This is also something you should take into consideration if you choose to run AdSense in your sliding ad.

Try our wizard at OpenLinkz.com to generate the code for your own sliding ad panel but carefully consider how you will use it.