I finally found some spare time to get some ’spring cleaning’ done around the GrandmasterB house today. I wanted to get to adding on the new plugins and features earlier in the week, but life catches up with us sometimes and needs to be addressed. Most of the new features that I have added are quite apparent by looking at the sidebar.

Advertising on GrandmasterB.com

I hinted earlier in the week (Week in Review 4/14 - 4/20 ) that I felt it was time this teenager of a blog got off it’s hind quarters and made some cash to pay rent, so I’ve added 125×125 banner ads on the sidebar. I’ve set pricing at $15/month for the time being. I’ve been trying to figure out what would be a fair rate for a newer blog to ask for advertising. I hope it sounds fair to potential advertisers.

CommentLuv & CommentRelish

I decided it would be a worthwhile upgrade to add CommentLuv and Comment Relish to the site. CommentLuv as most of you know allows commenter’s to check a box to enable wordpress to pull the recent post from their website. This will allow my readers to see what others are posting on their blogs. CommentRelish will send a ‘thank you’ message to a commenter on his/her first submission to the site. I’m hoping that it will help me out with posting thank you messages on the blog right away.

Clean Archives Reloaded

I felt that the ‘ol sidebar was going to be getting rather cluttered up in the future, so I opted to install Clean Archives Reloaded to assist with that issue. Basically, I’ve relocated the archives from the sidebar to their own page which can be reached via the navigation bar. It’s really rather snazzy and I think it improves the functionality of the site quite a bit.

What’s Next?

I have a few other tricks up my sleeve for the future. I’m still planning on adding a box along the sidebar for Twitter Tweets, and that should come along this weekend. In the not too distant future I am going to be adding a tabbed section on the homepage just above the main content bar. It will be similar to the one on JohnCow.com with a featured advertiser, popular posts, etc. I’m going to do a little Web 2.0 magic with it to give it a fresh GrandmasterB look…it’s going to be ‘pimp’.

I’ve got another project to get rolling on in the next week, and then I’m thinking about doing an original GrandmasterB theme. I haven’t decided whether or not I will make it available to all or as part of a contest prize…hmm sounds interesting. When I have the details I will post them of course…I’m thinking I’ll probably have more information before mid-May. Check back soon or subscribe to my RSS Feed to keep informed on upcoming posts and events.

~ GrandmasterB