blogsimplified.com

I just added an extra sidebar to blogsimplified to create a three column WordPress theme. The second sidebar is actually to the left of the first sidebar because the sidebars use float: right for placement on the screen.

The sidebars should make it easy to add your own Google Adsense ads simply by dropping the script into a sidebar text widget right from within WordPress without ever touching a line of WordPress theme code.

When you are in WordPress, Go to Design and then Widgets, and select that you want to show Sidebar 2. Add a text widget, and then cut and past your Google Adsense script right into the text widget. It is laid out nicely for three 160×600 skyscraper ads, which you can put one on top of the other in the same text widget.

If you are not using widgets, be sure to change out the sample ads in sidebar.php with your own Adsense script, because the ones in the sidebar.php code are mine and they are just there to show you where to put them if you don’t want to use a widget.

The left sidebar is really intended for skyscraper adsense ads and not for the other widgets, because I took out the bottom border that separates the widgets. I might find a better way to do this later, but for now this is just fine if you want to run adsense ads in the left column rather than other widgets.

Go to the WordPress Themes page of blogsimplified.com to download the new theme files compressed in either zip or tar format.

Since the 0.9 version, I fixed the issue where the sidebar column height couldn’t keep up with the height of the blog area for long blogs. Now you can use as much vertical space for the blog as you want, but if the sidebar goes over 1800px it will start to look messy.

Does anyone knows how to match up two arbitrary length columns using CSS, when either column can be longer than the other, and both have different background colors and borders? I did it using a min-height of 1860px, greater than a reasonable sidebar, and then optimized the overall height based on the blog area, which now can go as high as you want, but there must be a better way.

In the 1.0.1 update. I removed the Google analytics code from the footer so that you can add your own.