miamittom

It’s ok to delete this post now. It WAS a conversation, now the conversation is ended and being past tense there is no point in keeping since the problem has resolved itself.

You’re absolutely right! I haven’t paid a dime to WordPress or anyone connected with the project!

Howwever, I have promoted your product far and wide by using it on several sites.

I’m the one telling people to ignore the warts your program (or anyone elses program) has, and help them to learn and use YOUR work. I’m the one who tells them that something stupid in your program will probably be worked out in a future release and help YOU keep your product out there.

Getting your name in lights is the real reason most people code for open source projects, and I’m sure some actually code for the love of the game, honing your skills, but your primary motivation is not The Money – which you typically make somewhere else.

When an open source app gains critical mass to the extent that it has developer mind share, and demand from users for the product is high, you all enjoy your moment in the sun, while those of us out in the real world implement your work.

When support at an individual level is impossible because of the popularity of the product, we have to dig and search for real contact information and weave thru several walls and levels of obfuscation to get to the real people behind the walls. Dealing with arrogant “Read the FAQ” or “RTFM”, and “You Can’t Complain Lest You’ve Paid” (Monty Python) attitudes when those of us who promote your work is additionally frustrating.

I keep absolutes to a minimum, and I was truly seeing a problem – and if you or anyone else had seen it on my browser the way I did, then it wouldn’t be so easy to be so dismissive.

When Google’s cache or some cache related issue with their servers or my browser or whatever is the issue, is finally resolved, then things work. This delay in feedback makes determining the problem even more difficult because we want to fix things, fix them quickly and we expect a “hmm maybe” vs “you’re crazy” when illuminating an issue.

When an issue is dismissed out of hand without a “maybe” and when others who think they are helping become equally dismissive, it pushes your product into an unsupportable situation, making me want to find one that does what I need.

Thanks to all those who did try to help.

Every PHP app I have used that uses CSS & and some kind of template – the guy who wrote the template has usually defined way too many variables and classes, with duplication and extra classes that aren’t even being used because parent classes are over-riding them.

KISS – Keep It Simple Stupid.

OK … so now that I have had a few people hitting the site from several new locations, the ads are coming up relevant now.

Plus there is a conspiracy at Google against me to make me look foolish.

Go figure. I know what I saw though.

No it doesn’t take 4 weeks.

You get immediate feedback from Google when you adjust the keywords.

In fact, anyone wanting to know how their site stacks up with SEO should use Adsense – it immediately shows any deficiencies in how you SEO your pages because if you do your keywprds and content correctly, you get the right ads, rightaway, not in 4 weeks.

Oh – and if you

_X_ used the editor to center the image,

_X_ and then hit the carriage return a few times,

_X_ when you go into HTML mode in the editor

_X_ you will see instead of p or carriage returns, the idiots code in a bunch of div center statements

Delete all the excess div center statements and voilah the thing will work properly.

Check your CSS. The wheels fall off of CSS way too easily, and CSS is not the panacea the CSS gods want everyone to believe.

If your posts are too wide, then CSS dumps the sidebar to the bottom.

Never had this problem with “archaic” TABLES, but we’re all supposed to bow down to CSS now.

I had to make all my photos fit a certain size, or the thing falls apart.

Broomy – I HAVE THIS SAME PROBLEM – See the post – WordPress is killing Adsense.

I’m getting stupid non-relevant ads on the first page of the blog that are totally irrelevant to the site.

Subsequent posts seem to be ok – and this is on several sites, not just one of them.

See
https://www.miamiandthebeaches.com/wordpress/ and
https://innercycling.com/blogs

*sometimes* once in a while the ads are relevant on the home page of the blog but most of the time they are not.

OK … so someone at Google is reading my posts and fixing it before you guys get there.

I’m tellin ya, the first page is interpreted differently than subsequent pages, and this will only be fixed when someone who writes WordPress code has it happen to them.

Sitting in a cubicle writing code where the WordPress coder’s job is not dependent upon ad revenue will ensure that this is never fixed.

The fact remains that the first page is interpeted differently and they are killing my keywords.

Look at https://innercycling.com/blogs/

The ad is for Ringtones. Nothing to do with the site. Subsequent ads are correct.

No, look at the first page of the blog – the ad is totally irrelevant.

I’ve tried this with the smaller Google text ads – same result.

Pick any other post and you’ll get relevant ads. One that seems to be recurring is about Florida condos. The first page shows something about Deer Creek Lodge and not about Miami or The Beaches.

Well, as much as you may think using keywords is “old” or passe, Adsense depends upon them to provide relevant ads on a site.

And again, I say, Google Adsense is definitley using keywords – haven’t you people even looked at Adsense?

And you are wrong about SEO and keywords. Search engines are definitely using keywords, because I can see how it affects my stats, so you’re wrong there.

Search engines are not doing much with images, because I have stuff showing up from over a year ago in image searches that hasn’t been on my sites for months.

What happened is common. When you use CSS to build a template, the wheels fall off if you make the tiniest changes.

This is why the arrogance of CSS annoys me.

What is happening is that the browser is wrapping based upon the fact that the column wont fit the width defined by your CSS file for the sidebar area. So the whole column gets wrapped to the next place it can be deposited, the bottom of your content area.

Narrow the width of the content area, and the sidebar areas of the CSS file. If the sidebar is too wide, it pops out of the area defined by CSS – so CSS is weak in this regard. May need to clean up the shitty WordPress theme and fix it with position absolute statements in the CSS file.

Also, if WordPress stuffs a shitload of div center commands at the bottom of a post, you’ll get this problem also. Go into the posts and clean out the excess div center commands that WordPress uses for carriage returns. Or too many p commands also. The wordpress programmers can’t even think of using something as simple as a BR.

The highly inefficient use of a “div center” command is proven when you can just use the old CENTER or LEFT, RIGHT HTML commands – less page code, less crap to reinterpret in the browser.

I cannot believe how sloppy the code is in WordPress.