I don’t know how many of you took notice of the videos I used to display on the sidebar, the fact that some people did was displayed by the increase in my monthly earnings. You see, I was trialing out Google’s Video Adsense unit which showed a different video every time the page was refreshed. I was just about to do a post on it to let everyone in on the action when I got an email from Google stating that they were pulling the ads as

we’ve found that it hasn’t been performing as well as we had hoped, so we’ve decided to focus our efforts on other opportunities to help publishers monetize their sites

Too bad, because I really liked those units, as they provided some unique content and an extra avenue for earning a bit of cash. The obvious choice to fill the gap was to provide another form of video content and I’ve decided to use The Voxant Newsroom which supplies the latest news around the globe. I selected the feed option as this is continually updated so I only need to place the code in once and then I could forget about it. The added bonus is that it will also contribute to my monthly income, not all that much but it all counts.

You can use the feed provided including US Feed, Local (US oddly enough), World, Business, Politics, Health, Sci-Tech, Entertainment etc. or structure your own feed. I’ve decided on the World Feed for now, but I may change it later.

The first thing I noticed, and wasn’t happy about was that the size of the video was either too big or too small.

That sort of pissed me off and I settled for the smaller version as the big version upset the whole look of the theme as it was completely outside the boundaries.

Then it hit me I’m using the FlexSqueeze theme, I should be able to change some values in the control panel and fix the problem. Two minutes later I was done, and I am now able to display the larger video without throwing things out. Being able to change the size of the sidebars and blogging content is a brilliant addition to any theme.