I use the WP125 plugin for WordPress to advertise a few 125×125 banners on my sidebar. This plugin makes it easy for you to configure an advertisement (up to 6 at a time) and set them so they expire on specific dates (30 days, 60 days, or custom expiration date).
This way when an advertiser purchases an ad, or I decide to give one away in a contest, I just plug in the details and know the ad will expire exactly when it is supposed to.
The ad however does not have very good click tracking and I encourage you to disable it on all ads. Instead of using click tracking, I suggest you shrink the URL you want to advertise with Bit.ly and rely on Bit.ly to provide click tracking metrics instead.
The plugin automatically makes the ads "nofollow" by default but I don’t like that the ads open in your primary window when clicked on and take the user off of your blog. So I decided to edit the plugin PHP code manually and make it so ads will open in a new browser tab or window (you do this by adding target="_blank" to the link html).
- Just go into your WordPress Plugin Editor
- Select the WP125 Plugin
- Find this line of code:
1: echo '<div class="wp125ad'.$altclass.'"><a href="'.$linkurl.'" title="'.$adguidearray[$curslot]['name'].'" rel="nofollow"'.ADLINK_EXTRA.'><img src="'.$adguidearray[$curslot]['image_url'].'"
- Then just insert the target="_blank" right before the href so that it looks like this:
1: echo '<div class="wp125ad'.$altclass.'"><a target="_blank" href="'.$linkurl.'" title="'.$adguidearray[$curslot]['name'].'" rel="nofollow"'.ADLINK_EXTRA.'><img src="'.$adguidearray[$curslot]['image_url'].'"
- Click update file
That’s it, now your WP125 ads will open the target ad in a new window or tab instead of replacing your current browser site. The downside is that when the developer updates the plugin you will have to make the change again each time.
I went to contact the developer about the plugin, but they have a message on their site that they won’t provide user requested WP125 plugin support any longer and I didn’t even bother to contact them after reading this.
-Dragon Blogger
I have been obsessed with computers, tech, gadgets and games since the early 1980’s having grown up on the Commodore 64 and Amiga computers.
By day I work in the IT Security Industry and have been in IT for over 20 years. On my spare time I am a Vlogger, Blogger, Streamer, Gadget Reviewer, affiliate marketer, influencer and entertainer. I am also an avid movie fan, TV Show fan, Anime fan, video game fan and fan of trying anything and everything new.