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I was browsing for Themes last week and found one called the Talian AdSense Targeted + SEO theme by Google AdSense Templates. This was an SEO optimized WordPress template that auto constructed the META description and META keywords html code in all posts and pages without the need for a plug-in. This theme also had a large number of built in AdSense blocks and all you had to do was input your own AdSense ID.
Now I couldn’t use this code vanilla and had to modify the files around a bit, the first thing I did was remove some of the side bar items that were of no use to me. I then removed all of the build in AdSense code blocks for the theme and put manual ones in instead. This is because to do paid opps from SocialSpark you need to make sure there is no “AdSense” block in the sponsored post or they will reject your submission. I use the All in One Adsense and YPN plug-in for wordpress because it lets you customize your AdSense block inside a WordPress post but also allows you to disable the AdSense ads for specific posts.
The problem is that this displays on the homepage just fine, but most of the individual posts don’t display an AdSense block at all with the plug-in and this theme for some reason. This is maddening and is frustrating me to heck, I can’t seem to resolve it and I am hoping the theme developer can either help me figure out how to get this plug-in to work with his theme, or add a custom field which can disable the AdSense block inside individual posts.
I also had to customize the single and index.php files to put in my custom social submit buttons and widgets which took some time to tweak the sizes and spacing to make it all fit the way I wanted it to.
Last but not least, comments weren’t displaying at all on my posts, and I disabled all 23 plug-ins I was using to no avail. I wound up copying the comments.php from the default wordpress theme and all my comments started showing up again. I suspect this has something to do with the way the new theme handled threaded comments (it had a read me about overwriting a default wordpress file for WordPress 2.8.5 but didn’t want to do this with WordPress 2.9.2).
Overall the theme loads pretty fast and I really like the look and feel compared to my old theme.
My last and only outstanding item at this time is getting the AdSense 300×250 block that you see on the homepage inside all posts except selectively disabling for some posts. I am really hoping to get some help from the developer here.
How do my readers like my new blog theme, let me know what you think.
-Justin Germino
WPX Support
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