Just Josh'n

I have been using Mango blog now for about 3 months on this site and I have been using it on a internal company site for a little over a year.  Mango blog is continuing to blossom into a great coldfusion blog engine that is extremely easy to skin, Laura at AsFusion is doing a great job! 

Recently I wanted to add ads to my blog to try and monitize it a little bit (aka extra cash).  I originally thought about adding a plugin to Mango blog’s admin section, but realized one I don’t have a great understanding of the framework and two I wanted a quick way to add Google AdSense and Amazon ads to my site. 

The second option relates directly to you know what, faster time to market – exactly!  So once I implemented both ad options using the standard copy/paste procedure and adding more junk in my mango skin I decided that I wanted to make it more reusable and clean it up a little.  You never know, the code could indeed become handy in the near future and honestly I like to keep things nice a neat.

So instead of going the plugin route I decided on a easier approach, I created four custom tags each one handles a piece of the ads on this blog:

• AdSense.cfm
• AdSearch.cfm
• AmazonDeals.cfm (In-Work)
• AmazonOmakase.cfm
  
  

The first two tags handle the Google side of my ads, AdSense handles all my text based ads, while AdSearch adds the Google Search capabilit to my site while additionally helping me monitize from my Blog.  The second two tags are for Amazon.  AmazonDeals is currently in work, it’s a flash based widget and I am still working on generalizing the code so its more tag friendly (stay tuned for an update).  The AmazonOmakase tag shows two products in a horizontal fashion.These tags are not very difficult to use and can be adapted to suite your own ad requirment once you get the google code, amazon ad code or any other ad code for that matter.  Below is a couple things you want to do before implementing the tags on your mango powered blog site:

1.     In the root of your mango blog, under the tag folder create a new folder called custom

2.     Drop the custom tags in this custom folder

3.     Now on any of your mango skin templates add the following snipet of code at the top of the page:

          <cfimport prefix="custom" taglib="../../tags/custom">

4.     In order to use the tags simply add the following code to the appropriate place in your skin template page:

<!--- ads by google adsense custom tag (large banner version)--->       
<custom:AdSense adclient="pub-yourclientID" adslot="yourslotID" adheight="60" adwidth="468"/> 

<!--- ads by google adsense custom tag (small text version)--->       
<custom:AdSense
adclient="pub-yourclientID"
adslot="yourslodID
adheight="100"
adwidth="135"/> 

<!---Amazon Deals Custom Tag (not yet finished
– wont be in the download below)--->
<custom:AmazonDeals /> 

<!--- search by google custom tag --->
<custom:AdSearch
adclient="pub-yourclientID"
addomain="yourdomain.com" /> 

<!---Amazon Omakase Custom Tag --->
<custom:AmazonOmakase  amazon_ad_tag="youramazonAdTag"
amazon_ad_width="468"
amazon_ad_height="60"
amazon_color_link="E7A21B" />

5.     You will need to apply for your own AdSense account, as well as a Amazon Associate (affiliate program) account before you can begin, you can also create your own type of adds using there tools and just copy and paste in the code over the script code in the tags and make the appropriate coldfusion attribute changes.

Good luck and I hope you find this useful!

Download tags