As you may know, I am a big fan of Skimlinks. If you aren’t already using it then I suggest you go and sign up right now. It’s free, earns you money and it’s easy to implement.
Skimlinks works well when there is user entered content involved. When someone edits in some good content into your wiki they may link to a store and this link could potentially be monitised.
Now I know not everyone likes to see money making links on sites, but the beauty of this scheme is that they are links that would exist anyway and they are created by users for the benefit of other users.
If, like me, you have some hefty hosting bills to pay each month then I would definitely join. Sign up to Skimlinks now!
How to Add Skimlinks code to MediaWiki
The process is very straight forward, just follow these simple steps and you’ll soon be earning some extra cash:
- Log in to your SkimLinks account and locate the small code snippet you need. You’ll find it under Installation -> Implement Skimlinks
- Copy the code under Javascript Implementation, you’ll need to paste it into your MediaWiki template in a minute
- Locate your MediaWiki files, most likely you use FTP to connect to a remote host, but whatever your setup you’ll need access to the site code
- In your wiki folder, navigate to the Skins folder. It might be something like public_html/mediawiki/skins
- Locate the template file, this is likely to be vector.php for recent installs, or monobook.php for those running older versions
- You now need to add the code into the template. Locate the </body> tag and paste the code in just before this
- Save and upload the file to your host
And that’s it. Very straight forward really. The only further decision to make is whether you want to run SkimLinks and/or SkimWords on your Wiki. You can find out more about these options on their site.
Have you got it running on your Wiki? How’s it working out?
