I spent three solid hours today Googling for a plugin that would let me display an RSS feed from another site in a Wordpress page, not in a sidebar widget (I don’t want to use the widget because the names of my RSS feeds are too long, they spill over the header image for the widget and I don’t want to alter those). I found so many potential tools that either didn’t work when I installed them or had a huge list of tasks associated with getting them to work…

I was really getting frustrated but I just found FirstRSS, loaded it up and (lo and behold) it works. No tweaking, no coding, very, very sweet. Exactly what I was looking for.

I’ve been using Adsense on my blog for awhile now (with little result) and am now in the process of changing that practice. For one thing, I don’t like the limited number of advertisers I have to choose from in the industries I’m interested in. And second, I just don’t like seeing all those obvious Google-based ads.

I’m trying an affiliate program that has (1) a big selection of good companies and (2) not a lot of self-promoting jargon surrounding the ads. And my policy will be that I only host ads for companies and products that I’ve actually used and would feel comfortable recommending to any reader. I’m not interested in hosting mystery ads anymore, so this is how it’s going to be for awhile.  I’ll mix up text and image ads, not have too many running at a time because I’m not interested in being a billboard.

I’ve been an Amazon affiliate for awhile but hadn’t actually been using it. When I migrated this blog over to Wordpress last week, I went back to the affiliates site and build a few product links to show some of my favorite web/SEO/CSS books. That’s when I saw the Amazon aStores link and I had to check it out.

Wow - this is a really cool idea. You can create your own store using Amazon’s products (anything you want) and customize it to look the way you want, and then you get a referral fee based on the number or type of items purchased. I put about 30 books in my store and had the whole thing up and running on the blog within a half hour.

I don’t know if it might make any money for me, but it’s a great way for me to share all my favorite books in my web design library in any event. This is a really cool thing.

Have you other bloggers put an aStore on your site? Has it done anything for you if so?