So this is the final post to complete my gallery.  If you read the documentation carefully you’ll notice that the gallery doesn’t work until you have at least 2 posts in your gallery.  After adding 2 posts with the “Featured Content” category, and the articleimg custom field pointing to the exact location of my image I got a working featured content gallery slider on my site.  Check it out on the home page: Bloggers Project.

The image size I used on this article is 500×375.  Take a look at the Featured articles section and you’ll see that there is black space on the right and left side.  For optimal image size use the same size you specify in your gallery.  The other two articles I used are 557×333 which is the exact same size as my featured content gallery.

If you have any questions on the featured content gallery plugin then let me know.  I am by far from an expert, but I was able to get mine up and running.

This is part II and if you’ve read the documentation then you’ll know you need at least 2 posts to get this bad boy working.  My next post will be part 3 to complete the content slider.

There are so many plugins available through WordPress that I can’t imagine using another Content Management Software (CMS) package for any of my projects.  Joomla has come across my plate several times and I’ll work with Joomla, but WordPress is definitely my CMS of choice.

I was recently asked if we could add an rotating image gallery to a site a created about a year ago.  I was pretty sure there would be a plugin available and I’ve also built Flash files that rotate through a sequence of images.  After doing a little research I found the Featured Content Gallery plugin.  The plugin does exactly what I hoped it would do.  It’s very simple to use.  Just take a look at the Featured Content Gallery plugin on the home page of this blog.

Featured Content Slider

So what’s the step by step for this plugin?  Pretty simple.

1. I’m not going to review how to install a plugin, but just download this guy from here: Featured Content Gallery plugin and install like normal.
2. Here’s a screen shot of the options you can use on your blog:

1. I used the category “Featured Content” for all of my gallery posts.
2. It’s recommend you crop your images to equal the same size you create your gallery.  I used 557×333
3. I’m rotating the most recent 3 posts from the “Featured Content” category, but you have other options as you can see in the Featured Content Gallery Options menu

Things didn’t go quite as planned during the month of June.  I didn’t get nearly as many posts up on my sites and to add insult to injury I didn’t completely finish the development/design of the two websites I was working on.  Anways, enough excuses lets get on to the stats and goals for next month.

Income – June 2009

AdSense – $123.40

Amazon Associates – $12.35

Total – $135.75

My AdSense totals were going strong through the middle of the month and I was looking like I was on pace for my goal of $150.  However, the end of the month my revenue and pageviews began to sputter possibly due to the low number of posts.  I’m going to stick with the same goal for June and shoot for $150.

Subscribers

May 31 – 1094

June 30

• Blog 1- 1240
• Blog 2 – 4
• Blog 3 – 1

The final total for my three blogs is 1245.  I exceeded my goal of 150 for the month with a whopping 151 new subscribers.  I could definitely have done much better had I produced more articles and done more marketing.  Lets go a little more aggressive this month and shoot for 200 subscribers.

Traffic

Site Usage

Visits = 19,827 -1,306
Page Views = 34,826 -1,374
Pages/Visit = 1.76

Traffic Sources

Search Engines = 15,496 (78.16%)
Referring Sites = 3,666 (18.49%)
Direct Traffic = 663 (3.34%)
Other = 2 (.01%)

I know my numbers are down, but I can attribute that to two things.  First, I haven’t worked on my sites as much as I want to.  I had one post on one site, two posts on another, and 8 posts on the third with no marketing efforts.  This month I’m going to set a goal of 1 article every weekday of the month per blog.  That amounts to the magical number of 69 total post for the month of July that’s versus only 11 total posts during the month of June.  I’m hoping that will bump the numbers to a higher level.  Also, we had a little issue last month when upgrading to WordPress 2.8 and our Google Analytics plugin.  Needless to say the plugin failed and brought down the admin panel on my WordPress blog.  Google Analytics was down for about 1 days and we saw a drop in stats.  Minus the Google Analytics snafu we were probably up slightly from May’s totals.  Probably something like 22K Visits and 36K Page views.

Lets stick with last months goal 25,000 visitors and 45,000 page views.

Here is my month-by-month comparison chart:

So overall the number’s are down for a second consecutive month. I have no one to blame, but myself. Rather than focusing on the numbers I plan on making a concentrated effort on producing more content and put some emphasis (vs none last month) on my online marketing efforts.