My http://www.successfulsoftware.net blog is hosted on wordpress.com and uses the free ‘twenty twelve’ theme. It gets a fair amount of traffic. I want to automatically put an ad on the bottom of every post to promote my various projects. Is there an easy way to do that? Access to plugins is very limited on wordpress.com. I don’t mind paying for a new theme or an upgrade. But I would rather not change the theme radically.
I use WP-Engine and am pretty happy with it. Lets you do anything you want plugin wise, but also watches for bugs, auto upgrades, etc. Might be something you want to think about moving to.
I am pretty happy with wordpress.com. It is all fully managed and it costs me around $30 per year (no ads + own domain upgrades) for unlimited traffic. I’m not sure I can justify $29/mo or $99/mo for the little bit of customization I want to do. I am also a bit of a tightwad. ;0)
I believe there is a wordpress.com upgrade where you can tweak your template. But I don’t much more about it than that.
I am using http://hosting.io who are a managed based WordPress hosting.
Give them a try and let me know if you need a discount, I have some on my account waiting for use 
Hey Andy - Totally understand not wanting to pay $30/mo for wordpress hosting, but you can also get a pretty standard shared host for $5-10/month that can do wordpress and more.
If you end up getting your own hosting, let me know. As creator of AmpedSense (an AdSense split testing wordpress plugin) I’d be happy to give you a free copy.
Good luck!
In WordPress lingo what you’re asking for could easily pass for just the inclusion of the author bio at the bottom of a post. I believe the Twenty Twelve theme supports author bios, but:
- You have to configure your bio under the user.
- You have to have at least two users who post (it won’t display them if you only have one because it’s silly and tries to be too smart for its own good)
To configure first:
- There is an “About” field when you add/edit a user
To address the second item:
- Create a second user and post one thing from them. The theme should start displaying bios at that point.
As an aside, but WordPress.com has notable advertising limitations. It sounds like you’ll be okay for your purposes, but I mention it because it surprises some people:
Refs:
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@shanelabs
I’ve already got shared hosting that I could move the blog to. But I don’t want the hassle of keeping wordpress up to date. Thanks for the plugin offer.
I added a bio. It seem to allow anything other than plain text (no images or hyperlinks) but its better than nothing. Thanks!
I think it’ll permit hrefs:
This is a test. This is a <a href="http://google.com">link test</a>.
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It seems to permit bold and href tags, but not much else. You can get around this by altering the php:
A good business attribute - that could be a topic all of its own.
Those subscriptions soon add up!